Lot Essay
To be included in the forthcoming Fautrier Catalogue Raisonné being prepared by Marie-José Lefort, Galerie Jeanne Castel, Paris.
Executed in 1957, Tête de Partisan was Fautrier's anguished response to the bloody suppression of the Hungarian uprising by the Red Army. Part of a series known as the Partisans, this was the artist's first overt political statement since his acclaimed Otages pictures produced thirteen years before.
In the autumn of 1956, the Hungarian nation united in an effort to overthrow the Russian occupation. It was a people's revolt, the like of which had not occurred since the October Revolution of 1917. Retaliation was swift and merciless. The sheer number of civilian casualties stunned the world, as did the sight of a brutish oppressor coldly extinguishing a populace's hope for freedom.
Just as Picasso found in the tragedy of Guernica a vehicle to express universal suffering, so Fautrier commemorated Budapest with a series of heads whose timeless message outlived its specific historical circumstances. Twinned in horror and outrage to the Otages series, the impasto in an image such as Tête de Partisan does not so much represent a single victim, but a crowd squashed and stifled under the wheels of a tank. A blue track-mark is smeared across the fleshy mass.
Fautrier's pastel colours and delicate technique evoke a bitter-sweet sadness, whose pathos is reinforced by a quote from Paul Eluard's famous poem Liberté, scrawled like graffiti on the picture surface: "Sur l'espoir sans souvenir j'écris ton nom liberté"
(Upon hope, without memory, I write your name, Freedom). Only, and all, the Partisan heads would be inscribed with such a legend. The sentiment of the poem nevertheless could be used to articulate much of the artist's oeuvre.
Executed in 1957, Tête de Partisan was Fautrier's anguished response to the bloody suppression of the Hungarian uprising by the Red Army. Part of a series known as the Partisans, this was the artist's first overt political statement since his acclaimed Otages pictures produced thirteen years before.
In the autumn of 1956, the Hungarian nation united in an effort to overthrow the Russian occupation. It was a people's revolt, the like of which had not occurred since the October Revolution of 1917. Retaliation was swift and merciless. The sheer number of civilian casualties stunned the world, as did the sight of a brutish oppressor coldly extinguishing a populace's hope for freedom.
Just as Picasso found in the tragedy of Guernica a vehicle to express universal suffering, so Fautrier commemorated Budapest with a series of heads whose timeless message outlived its specific historical circumstances. Twinned in horror and outrage to the Otages series, the impasto in an image such as Tête de Partisan does not so much represent a single victim, but a crowd squashed and stifled under the wheels of a tank. A blue track-mark is smeared across the fleshy mass.
Fautrier's pastel colours and delicate technique evoke a bitter-sweet sadness, whose pathos is reinforced by a quote from Paul Eluard's famous poem Liberté, scrawled like graffiti on the picture surface: "Sur l'espoir sans souvenir j'écris ton nom liberté"
(Upon hope, without memory, I write your name, Freedom). Only, and all, the Partisan heads would be inscribed with such a legend. The sentiment of the poem nevertheless could be used to articulate much of the artist's oeuvre.