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Lot Essay
In late October 1956 the Hungarian police opened fire on a crowd demonstrating outside a radio station in Budapest. This traumatic action sparked a widespread popular uprising against the ruling powers that quickly swept the nation. Retaliation was swift and merciless and within a month all Hungarian resistance to Soviet rule had been brutually extinguished by the tanks of the Red Army.
Executed in late 1956, Tte de Partisan, Budapest is Fautrier's response to the horror of witnessing a people once again crushed by a totalitarian oppressor. Recalling his Otages series which commemorated victims of Nazi oppression during the Second World War (see Lot 71), Tte de Partisan, Budapest depicts a single head whose features are obliterated by two dramatic grey-blue lines - tank tracks - that are smeared over the delicate fleshy paste of the head. The anonymity of this head and its overt symbolism instantly establish it as a representation of a whole people whose individuality and freedom has been forcefully wiped out.
The extraordinary pathos of this work is reinforced at the bottom of the painting with a line from the surrealist poet Paul Eluard's famous poem Libert: "Bien au dessus du silence j'cris ton mon libert" ("Louder than silence, I write your name, Freedom").
Executed in late 1956, Tte de Partisan, Budapest is Fautrier's response to the horror of witnessing a people once again crushed by a totalitarian oppressor. Recalling his Otages series which commemorated victims of Nazi oppression during the Second World War (see Lot 71), Tte de Partisan, Budapest depicts a single head whose features are obliterated by two dramatic grey-blue lines - tank tracks - that are smeared over the delicate fleshy paste of the head. The anonymity of this head and its overt symbolism instantly establish it as a representation of a whole people whose individuality and freedom has been forcefully wiped out.
The extraordinary pathos of this work is reinforced at the bottom of the painting with a line from the surrealist poet Paul Eluard's famous poem Libert: "Bien au dessus du silence j'cris ton mon libert" ("Louder than silence, I write your name, Freedom").