Jean Fautrier *
(Paris 1898–1964 Chatenay)
Nu, 1928, signed Fautrier, on the reverse inscribed Déodat, oil on canvas, 100 x 65 cm, framed
Provenance:
Galerie Jeanne Castel and Paul Guillaume, Paris
Jeanne Castel Paris/Domenica Walter-Guillaume, Paris (inscribed on the reverse)
Galerie Jeanne Castel, Paris
Collection Jean Yankel, Paris (1976)
Collection Jacques Weiss, Paris
Galerie Neuendorf, Berlin
Galerie Daniel Varenne, Geneva
Private Collection, Northern Germany
Exhibited:
Galerie Jeanne Castel, Jean Fautrier. En hommage à Jeanne Castel, April – June 1971, Paris
Literature:
Giorgio Galansino, Jean Fautrier: A Chronology of his Early Paintings (1921–1942), Thesis, University of Chicago, 1973, no. 76
Marcel André Stalter, Recherche sur l’oeuvre de Jean Fautrier de son commencement à 1940. Essai de catalogue méthodique et d’interprétation, Thesis, Sorbonne University, 1982, no. 237
Marie-José Lefort, Fautrier. Catalogue Raisonné de l’oeuvre peint, Paris 2023, no. 370, p. 248 with col. ill.
From the outset, Fautrier's paintings were shaped by two fundamental questions. One was the technique of painting itself. The other question concerned the series, the creation of images with a common format and motif, in which the figures are reduced to a small number of visual signs. He began with this idea of series as early as the 1920s. His figurative painting was dedicated to traditional genres: still lifes, landscapes, and nudes, leading from a raw realism to a representation consisting of dark light with almost abstract forms. Fautrier's black visions challenge the sharpness of colour. Driven into Goya’s dark phantasms in the 19th century, rediscovered by Manet and Malevich, black was recognised in its deepest essence at the beginning of the 20th century, at times transcending mourning and melancholy to become the uplifting and subtle architecture of the two-dimensional canvas: “Le noir est une couleur!” (Matisse). At the end of this period referred to as the 'black period,' Nu stands on the diffuse, enigmatic border between vision and dream, where his body is immersed in seemingly weightless darkness, his silhouette merging with the grey-black background, oscillating between form and content, life and death, eroticisation and decomposition.
“There is nothing clear that does not include a dark part. It would be little; it is nothing clear which is not such according to the obscure part which it contains. I imagine, however, a painting which takes, to begin with, this party of the indefinable and the black spot”
(Jean Paulhan, Catalogo della mostra di Jean Fautrier, Galleria Apollinaire, Milan 1958, p. 175)
Bid on this lot
(Paris 1898–1964 Chatenay)
Nu, 1928, signed Fautrier, on the reverse inscribed Déodat, oil on canvas, 100 x 65 cm, framed
Provenance:
Galerie Jeanne Castel and Paul Guillaume, Paris
Jeanne Castel Paris/Domenica Walter-Guillaume, Paris (inscribed on the reverse)
Galerie Jeanne Castel, Paris
Collection Jean Yankel, Paris (1976)
Collection Jacques Weiss, Paris
Galerie Neuendorf, Berlin
Galerie Daniel Varenne, Geneva
Private Collection, Northern Germany
Exhibited:
Galerie Jeanne Castel, Jean Fautrier. En hommage à Jeanne Castel, April – June 1971, Paris
Literature:
Giorgio Galansino, Jean Fautrier: A Chronology of his Early Paintings (1921–1942), Thesis, University of Chicago, 1973, no. 76
Marcel André Stalter, Recherche sur l’oeuvre de Jean Fautrier de son commencement à 1940. Essai de catalogue méthodique et d’interprétation, Thesis, Sorbonne University, 1982, no. 237
Marie-José Lefort, Fautrier. Catalogue Raisonné de l’oeuvre peint, Paris 2023, no. 370, p. 248 with col. ill.
From the outset, Fautrier's paintings were shaped by two fundamental questions. One was the technique of painting itself. The other question concerned the series, the creation of images with a common format and motif, in which the figures are reduced to a small number of visual signs. He began with this idea of series as early as the 1920s. His figurative painting was dedicated to traditional genres: still lifes, landscapes, and nudes, leading from a raw realism to a representation consisting of dark light with almost abstract forms. Fautrier's black visions challenge the sharpness of colour. Driven into Goya’s dark phantasms in the 19th century, rediscovered by Manet and Malevich, black was recognised in its deepest essence at the beginning of the 20th century, at times transcending mourning and melancholy to become the uplifting and subtle architecture of the two-dimensional canvas: “Le noir est une couleur!” (Matisse). At the end of this period referred to as the 'black period,' Nu stands on the diffuse, enigmatic border between vision and dream, where his body is immersed in seemingly weightless darkness, his silhouette merging with the grey-black background, oscillating between form and content, life and death, eroticisation and decomposition.
“There is nothing clear that does not include a dark part. It would be little; it is nothing clear which is not such according to the obscure part which it contains. I imagine, however, a painting which takes, to begin with, this party of the indefinable and the black spot”
(Jean Paulhan, Catalogo della mostra di Jean Fautrier, Galleria Apollinaire, Milan 1958, p. 175)
