Lot 70 D

“The precision with which Fautrier presents the problem of pictorial representation is breathtaking and revolutionary. The world of his pictures – a parade of changing, dissolving, disintegrating objects – is in keeping with his radical critique of painting and our attitude towards the familiar objects and order of ‘normal’ life. The question of the essence of objects is presented within a kind of ‘black Platonism’” (Sigfried Gohr, Das Glas von Chardin, weitergegeben an Fautrier, in: exh. cat. Jean Fautrier. Gemälde, Skulpturen und Zeichnungen. Josef-Haubrich-Kunsthalle Köln 1980, pp. 34 f).
Around 1926 Jean Fautrier began working on his black pictures, in which nudes and still lifes emerge out of the black ground through contours scratched into the paint and sparing use of cool tones. Our delicate still life with a brilliantly blue bouquet of flowers is part of this series of nocturnal works featuring a magically glowing atmosphere.
Fautrier’s manner of painting and the painting medium he used play a special role in the intense effect of his dark still lifes. The specific materiality of these works not only instils them with an immediate presence but also allows them to maintain their connection with the world: “In his ‘période noire’ Fautrier was already reworking the layer of paint by scratching the contours of objects into it so that the lines settled in around the painted flowers and fruits and stood in contrast to the black ground. […] Here the drawing is not an end in itself: on the one hand, as its final definition, it establishes the connection to the object on which the picture is based and, on the other hand, it is the complement to the material, the open and still-undefined ground of the image” (Dieter Schwarz, Fragen zu Fautrier, in: Jean Fautrier, exh. cat. Kunstmuseum Winterthur 2017, p. 27).