Jean Fautrier: 1898-1964

The work of French painter Jean Fautrier (1898–1964) is little known outside of Europe, but this exhibition will do much to bring him to light. Organized in cooperation with the Haggerty Museum of Art at Marquette University and the Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University, it is the artist’s first American retrospective. Included are paintings, sculptures, illustrated books, and “original multiples,” hybrid works that combined painting and printmaking to subvert the art market and its cult of originality.

Fautrier’s career spanned four decades and many approaches, from the dark and moody still lifes of the 1920s, not unlike those of Chaim Soutine, to the detached quasi-abstractions of the 1950s, with pastel colors and repetitive formats heralding Andy Warhol. In between came the defining episode of Fautrier’s career. After overhearing a Nazi massacre from his wartime hideout near Paris, Fautrier produced his most famous work, the Otages (Hostages) series, in which tortured heads and bodies are indicated by crusty blobs and delicate lines of paint.

Fautrier constantly tested the borders between abstraction and representation, high art and kitsch, reason and sensuality. His work, which inspired such writers as Francis Ponge and André Malraux, remains among the most serious and cryptic efforts to deal with suffering in the history of art.

Organized at the Fogg Art Museum by Harry Cooper, curator of modern art. Support for the exhibition provided by Emily Rauh Pulitzer and the Fifth Floor Foundation.