Biography

Born in 1898, Jean Léon Fautrier was a French painter, engraver and sculptor who died in 1964. Considered with Jean Dubuffet to be one of the painters most representative of informal art, Jean Fautrier was also a pioneer of the technique of haute pâte (matter painting). In the early 1910s, Fautrier moved to London, entering the Royal Academy in 1912. In 1917 he was called up in the French army and experienced the horror of the trenches. After World War I, he settled in Paris, where he began his career as a painter. In 1927 he made a series of figurative paintings dominated by sombre tones. Marked by the German occupation and arrested briefly by the Gestapo, the Hostages project saw the light in 1943, recalling the horrors and barbarity of war. These paintings were shown in 1945, when an admiring public discovered Fautrier’s impasto for the first time. In 1956, in reaction to the Russian invasion of Budapest, Jean Fautrier picked up the motif of the Hostages again for the sequel, Partisan Heads. Lastly, until his death in 1964, Fautrier created paintings of a more structured nature in which streaks, coloured lines and multifaceted grids overlapped.