Lot Essay
To be included in the forthcoming Jean Fautrier Catalogue Raisonné being prepared by Marie-José Lefort, Galerie Jeanne Castel, Paris.
Executed in 1956, Baby Mine is one of a remarkable series of heads to which Fautrier gave the titles of American Jazz songs. Other examples from this series include Baby, Sweet Baby, Wise Harry, She's a Bitch and Texas Bill. All these works are executed in a technique unique to Fautrier, whereby the paint is moulded and plastered onto a paper background to produce a textured relief of surprising delicacy.
The artist seeks in these works to create not so much a recognisable image, but rather an evocative expression of the spirit of the human being. As the critic Edouard Roditi has pointed out, Fautrier "paints qualities or substances rather than objects, achieving a new kind of sensual abstraction which is far more appropriate, in the art of painting, than the puritanical denial of sensual delights that one can detect in the merely geometrical abstractions of Mondrian." (In: Ex. Cat. London, Hanover Gallery, Jean Fautrier: Paintings, Gouaches, Drawings, May-June 1959).
Baby Mine owes its form and scale to Fautrier's famous Otage, or Hostage, series of 1945. However, in terms of the chronology of Fautrier's work, it is in fact much closer to the Partisan series, produced later in 1956 as a direct response to the repression by Soviet Russia of the Hungarian uprising in Budapest. Essentially images of a fragile humanity, the motif of the crossed brush marks, which is used in Baby Mine to roughly outline the features of the figures, was later enlarged in the Partisan series into a wider and heavier mark. This was more like a tank track that obliterated the face and individuality of the figure and thus poignantly suggested a humanity crushed by a dark and anonymous power.
Unlike the Partisan heads, Baby Mine is not a dark or tragic work but one whose flighty lightness matches its musical title. This is even more surprising when one considers the "heavy-duty" materials that he chose to use. Like many other artists associated with Art Informel, he claimed that his ability to manipulate his medium comes from an essentially emotional and intuitive response to the material itself. "One does no more than reinvent what already exists," he has said, "one restores, with hints of emotion, the reality that is embodied in material, in form, in colour." (In: Ex. Cat. Paris, Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Fautrier 1898-1989, p. 13.)
Executed in 1956, Baby Mine is one of a remarkable series of heads to which Fautrier gave the titles of American Jazz songs. Other examples from this series include Baby, Sweet Baby, Wise Harry, She's a Bitch and Texas Bill. All these works are executed in a technique unique to Fautrier, whereby the paint is moulded and plastered onto a paper background to produce a textured relief of surprising delicacy.
The artist seeks in these works to create not so much a recognisable image, but rather an evocative expression of the spirit of the human being. As the critic Edouard Roditi has pointed out, Fautrier "paints qualities or substances rather than objects, achieving a new kind of sensual abstraction which is far more appropriate, in the art of painting, than the puritanical denial of sensual delights that one can detect in the merely geometrical abstractions of Mondrian." (In: Ex. Cat. London, Hanover Gallery, Jean Fautrier: Paintings, Gouaches, Drawings, May-June 1959).
Baby Mine owes its form and scale to Fautrier's famous Otage, or Hostage, series of 1945. However, in terms of the chronology of Fautrier's work, it is in fact much closer to the Partisan series, produced later in 1956 as a direct response to the repression by Soviet Russia of the Hungarian uprising in Budapest. Essentially images of a fragile humanity, the motif of the crossed brush marks, which is used in Baby Mine to roughly outline the features of the figures, was later enlarged in the Partisan series into a wider and heavier mark. This was more like a tank track that obliterated the face and individuality of the figure and thus poignantly suggested a humanity crushed by a dark and anonymous power.
Unlike the Partisan heads, Baby Mine is not a dark or tragic work but one whose flighty lightness matches its musical title. This is even more surprising when one considers the "heavy-duty" materials that he chose to use. Like many other artists associated with Art Informel, he claimed that his ability to manipulate his medium comes from an essentially emotional and intuitive response to the material itself. "One does no more than reinvent what already exists," he has said, "one restores, with hints of emotion, the reality that is embodied in material, in form, in colour." (In: Ex. Cat. Paris, Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Fautrier 1898-1989, p. 13.)