Lot Essay
To be included in the forthcoming Jean Fautrier Catalogue Raisonné being prepared by Marie-José Lefort, Galerie Jeanne Castel, Paris
Dated 1944, "Tranches d'Orange" was painted at the same time as Fautrier was working on his series which became known collectively as "Les Otages" and this composition bears some resemblance to the paintings of this group. Fautrier's "Otages" were his response to the German occupation of France, and it is upon their notoreity his fame now rests.
Fautrier had already become known as a radical painter by the time the German tanks arrived in Paris in 1940. His early "Black" period - dark, brooding paintings of skinned sheep, hung rabbits, sullen nudes and disembowelled boars - had won him recognition from Parisian art dealers and critics in the 1920's. When he returned to Paris in 1940 he was arrested by the Gestapo for his activities in the French Resistance, and upon his release took refuge in the leafy suburb of Chatenay-Malabry, in a private hospital. It was at this point he again took up painting.
In work from this period he moved closer to abstraction; he created barely distinguishable mutilated human forms using the most inventive of media in the "Otages". Michael Ragon's comments on these works are illuminating, and can be applied to "Tranches d'Orange" also : "Fautrier had always been previously drawn to the horrible, to giant fruits, to hanged and blinded rabbits, boars losing their entrails. There is therefore nothing surprising in the fact that his art should have ripened in a time when horror was officialised, when horror was produced on a mass basis, when the corpses of the tortured, of the victims of the firing squad... constituted a permanent clandestine imagery and a daily reality... Every painting was painted in the same manner, on a water-green background a splash of thick white was spread...And in addition there was white in the relief, as though all the paint was piled up in bulk, in the middle of the painting." (Michael Ragon, Fautrier, Paris 1958. pp.26-30)
The simple formal construction of the painting combined with Fautrier's inventive technique creates a most striking effect. Fautrier piled thick, white plaster mixed with glue onto paper, and then heightened it with powdered paints and inks to create a powerful solitary image. The black pastel made of true carbon black mixed with kaolin, darkens the composition and adds to its glutinous veneer. Innumerable critics have since commented on how Fautrier could create such stark images whilst often using delicate, restricted colours such as greens and yellows, and the piece "Tranches d'Orange" illustrates this achievement.
Dated 1944, "Tranches d'Orange" was painted at the same time as Fautrier was working on his series which became known collectively as "Les Otages" and this composition bears some resemblance to the paintings of this group. Fautrier's "Otages" were his response to the German occupation of France, and it is upon their notoreity his fame now rests.
Fautrier had already become known as a radical painter by the time the German tanks arrived in Paris in 1940. His early "Black" period - dark, brooding paintings of skinned sheep, hung rabbits, sullen nudes and disembowelled boars - had won him recognition from Parisian art dealers and critics in the 1920's. When he returned to Paris in 1940 he was arrested by the Gestapo for his activities in the French Resistance, and upon his release took refuge in the leafy suburb of Chatenay-Malabry, in a private hospital. It was at this point he again took up painting.
In work from this period he moved closer to abstraction; he created barely distinguishable mutilated human forms using the most inventive of media in the "Otages". Michael Ragon's comments on these works are illuminating, and can be applied to "Tranches d'Orange" also : "Fautrier had always been previously drawn to the horrible, to giant fruits, to hanged and blinded rabbits, boars losing their entrails. There is therefore nothing surprising in the fact that his art should have ripened in a time when horror was officialised, when horror was produced on a mass basis, when the corpses of the tortured, of the victims of the firing squad... constituted a permanent clandestine imagery and a daily reality... Every painting was painted in the same manner, on a water-green background a splash of thick white was spread...And in addition there was white in the relief, as though all the paint was piled up in bulk, in the middle of the painting." (Michael Ragon, Fautrier, Paris 1958. pp.26-30)
The simple formal construction of the painting combined with Fautrier's inventive technique creates a most striking effect. Fautrier piled thick, white plaster mixed with glue onto paper, and then heightened it with powdered paints and inks to create a powerful solitary image. The black pastel made of true carbon black mixed with kaolin, darkens the composition and adds to its glutinous veneer. Innumerable critics have since commented on how Fautrier could create such stark images whilst often using delicate, restricted colours such as greens and yellows, and the piece "Tranches d'Orange" illustrates this achievement.