Lot Essay
To be included in the forthcoming Fautrier Catalogue Raisonné being prepared by Marie-José Lefort, Galerie Jeanne Castel, Paris.
Dated 1945, Les Seins Nus belongs to a series of decapitated heads and dismembered body parts known collectively as Les Otages, which Fautrier produced in response to the German Occupation of France and on whose notoriety much of his fame still rests.
Jean Fautrier had already made quite a name for himself as a radical painter by the time the German tanks rolled into Paris in 1940. His early "black period" - dark, brooding paintings of skinned rabbits, sullen nudes and disembowelled boars - had made him the darling of the major Parisian dealers and critics during the late 1920s. Come the Depression, however, and he was forced to virtually give up painting, working instead as a ski instructor in the Alps.
Out of pocket, Fautrier returned to Paris in 1940, where he was briefly arrested by the Gestapo for his resistance activities. As a result he took refuge in the leafy suburb of Châtenay-Malabry, hiding under false pretences in a hospital for stressed-out intellectuals. From his make-shift studio he could hear the German trucks as they transported hostages to their place of execution in the nearby woods; and he could hear the sound of bullets reverberating through the trees.
Such close proximity with death spurred Fautrier to brandish his brush once more. Between 1942 and 1945 he created his Otages, which he only dared to sign and date after the Liberation for fear of Nazi reprisals. Using as a medium his own recipe of white paste, layered like porridge on paper and heightened with inks and powdered colour, he replicated the texture of decomposing flesh, crushed under foot and shattered by shrapnel. Each mutilated form was only barely distinguishable from another, and when hung publicly together in 1945, they seemed to express the production line anonymity of mass murder where man becomes just another number in the eyes of his torturers.
As with the best Otages pictures, Les Seins Nus evokes both the intense tragedy and exquisite sensuality of a Byzantine icon. "Calvaries to convulses, disfigured, soiled, trampled man,' wrote Michel Ragon of the series. But this is woman, reduced to a gigantic pair of severed breasts, like a morbid souvenir discarded by Jack the Ripper. Despite the horror of her dismemberment, she radiates with a pink and fleshy eroticism. It is as though her sexuality has been condensed into one vital statistic.
Together with two other major paintings from the Otages series (Le Nu aux Mains and Tête d'Otage no. 16), Les Seins Nus belonged originally to the critic André Malraux, author of the first study on the Otages series, who later became France's most influential Cultural Minister. Whereas he hailed the genius of Fautrier's vision, others were slightly sceptical about the inherent prettiness of his work, believing that it was wrong to convey the monstrous by so tender a means. But it is precisely the contrast between the fragile beauty of Les Seins Nus and the obscene brutality of its subject which helps to magnify the grotesqueness of the whole. This is not a portrait of a woman long dead, but living matter pummelled into pulp, the spirit of her femininity still intact.
Dated 1945, Les Seins Nus belongs to a series of decapitated heads and dismembered body parts known collectively as Les Otages, which Fautrier produced in response to the German Occupation of France and on whose notoriety much of his fame still rests.
Jean Fautrier had already made quite a name for himself as a radical painter by the time the German tanks rolled into Paris in 1940. His early "black period" - dark, brooding paintings of skinned rabbits, sullen nudes and disembowelled boars - had made him the darling of the major Parisian dealers and critics during the late 1920s. Come the Depression, however, and he was forced to virtually give up painting, working instead as a ski instructor in the Alps.
Out of pocket, Fautrier returned to Paris in 1940, where he was briefly arrested by the Gestapo for his resistance activities. As a result he took refuge in the leafy suburb of Châtenay-Malabry, hiding under false pretences in a hospital for stressed-out intellectuals. From his make-shift studio he could hear the German trucks as they transported hostages to their place of execution in the nearby woods; and he could hear the sound of bullets reverberating through the trees.
Such close proximity with death spurred Fautrier to brandish his brush once more. Between 1942 and 1945 he created his Otages, which he only dared to sign and date after the Liberation for fear of Nazi reprisals. Using as a medium his own recipe of white paste, layered like porridge on paper and heightened with inks and powdered colour, he replicated the texture of decomposing flesh, crushed under foot and shattered by shrapnel. Each mutilated form was only barely distinguishable from another, and when hung publicly together in 1945, they seemed to express the production line anonymity of mass murder where man becomes just another number in the eyes of his torturers.
As with the best Otages pictures, Les Seins Nus evokes both the intense tragedy and exquisite sensuality of a Byzantine icon. "Calvaries to convulses, disfigured, soiled, trampled man,' wrote Michel Ragon of the series. But this is woman, reduced to a gigantic pair of severed breasts, like a morbid souvenir discarded by Jack the Ripper. Despite the horror of her dismemberment, she radiates with a pink and fleshy eroticism. It is as though her sexuality has been condensed into one vital statistic.
Together with two other major paintings from the Otages series (Le Nu aux Mains and Tête d'Otage no. 16), Les Seins Nus belonged originally to the critic André Malraux, author of the first study on the Otages series, who later became France's most influential Cultural Minister. Whereas he hailed the genius of Fautrier's vision, others were slightly sceptical about the inherent prettiness of his work, believing that it was wrong to convey the monstrous by so tender a means. But it is precisely the contrast between the fragile beauty of Les Seins Nus and the obscene brutality of its subject which helps to magnify the grotesqueness of the whole. This is not a portrait of a woman long dead, but living matter pummelled into pulp, the spirit of her femininity still intact.