Klubbat för:

1450000 SEK

Utropspris

1 000 000-1 200 000 SEK

Beskrivning

JEAN FAUTRIER
France 1898-1964
Raies sur un carré
Signed and dated JF 60. Oil on canvas, 46 x 55 cm.
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PROVENANCE
Art Dealer Michel Couturier, Paris
IngaBritt and Arne Lundberg, Gothenburg
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EXHIBITED
XXX. Biennale Internazionale d'Arte di Venezia, 1960
Jean Fautrier, Musée d'Art Moderne de la ville de Paris, April-May 1964, catalogue No 66
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The painting is registered at the Archives Galerie Michel Couturier, under the number FP107, photo #33334
Stockholms Auktionsverk is grateful to Monsieur Eric Couturier in Paris for his valuable assistance concerning this work.
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Jean Fautrier was above all the artist of the authors and poets. Few artists have ever enjoyed such strong literary support. He forged significant ties of friendship with the intellectual elite in France, people such as André Malraux, Paul Éluard, Jean-Paul Sartre, Francis Ponge and Jean Paulhan. These poets and authors found a rich vein of inspiration in his pictures, and they were keen to have him illustrate their writings. However, he also made many enemies on account of his wild and violent temper. Fautrier is considered to be one of the leading exponents of L´Art Informel in Paris in the period immediately following the Second World War. These artists were seeking out new paths in the world of art, looking to achieve the unexpected and unanticipated.In his art, Fautrier is a constant seeker, anxiously continuing his experiments to define new forms of artistic expression.
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He was born in Paris in 1898. After completing early periods of study in England at the Royal Academy of Art and Slade School of Art, he returned to France and enlisted in the army when the First World War broke out in 1914. He returned to Paris three years later to convalesce, having been wounded and gassed.
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In the 1920s, Fautrier painted in a figurative style, where his dark, expressionist manner inevitably engendered associations with Maurice de Vlaminck and Chaim Soutine. Towards the end of the 1920s he switched to a freer, non-figurative style, and his first paintings from this period depicted landscapes and forest motifs from the island of Port-Cros off the coast of the Riviera. He blurred his shapes, thus launching a revolt against traditional painting as a whole. He gave up on oil paints, canvas and easel, preferring to work on a table. This transformation made him one of the leading pioneers down the path to informalism, a style of art that began to develop in France following the Second World War as a subgenre of abstract expressionism.
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In 1927, Fautrier was awarded a contract by the art dealer Paul Guillaume, and subsequently received another one with the Galerie Jeanne Castel in Paris. However, he gave up painting during the financial crisis in 1929, left Paris and moved to the French Alps, working in Tignes and Val d´Isère as a ski instructor and nightclub owner. He took up painting again in 1939 when he returned to Paris. His painting often feature a single central shape, built up in the pâteux style - i.e. as a thick paste - on paper. He then glued the paper to a canvas, applying layer after layer of the paste with a spatula before starting to chip and scratch it. To this thick shape in paste, he subsequently applies thin shades of colour or colourings such as pigment or pastel. A combination of brutality and violence in the depths, with a seductive beauty on the top layer.
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The distinguishing trait of Fautrier´s personality was impatience, which resulted in his having to work swiftly to thrive. The technique of drawing and painting on a hardened base of ´dough´ required him to work rapidly, which suited his temperament. His friend, the author André Malraux, described these quickly created works as follows: "They appear to be lyrical improvisations, but are actually spontaneous fruits of a slow maturing process - in the same way as modern poetry."
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In his composition entitled A chacun sa réalité (To each his own reality), Fautrier wrote: "Reality should survive in the artwork, after all, that is its original material [...] Whatever distances us from every trace of reality simply offers us material variations like marbled paper or stucco - weak and devoid of all imagination ... The unreal in an informal work has nothing to give. No form of art can give anyone a sensory experience unless it incorporates a little piece of reality. No matter how simple and how insignificant this may be, it becomes the key to the entire work. It makes the artwork legible, elucidates its meaning and opens up its insight and its significance for the sensibility that is the same as true intelligence."
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Fautrier exhibited separately at the Venice Biennial in 1960, and was awarded one of the two main prizes: the grand prize for painting. The following year, he was awarded the corresponding prize at the Tokyo Biennial. In 1962-63, he exhibited his works at Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden. In 1969, he held an exhibition at the Swedish-French art gallery in Stockholm, as part of the exhibition devoted to Masterpieces of French Art.
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The year Fautrier died at his home in Châtenay-Malabry, just outside Paris, the Musée d´Art Moderne in Paris commissioned a major retrospective exhibition.
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Raies sur un carré (Stripes on a square) is an excellent example of Fautrier´s distinctive pâteux technique that involves an intimate partnership between the artist and the colour. The thick underlay, where the only function of the canvas is to provide support, is covered with thick layers of plaster which were then painted with colour powder, gouache, ink or oil.

Auktionsnummer:

14

Datum:

2016-11-15