Jean Fautrier Matière et Lumière @ Musée d'art moderne de la ville de Paris

Jean Fautrier, Johanna, 1957

-->

It’s a rare occasion that we are treated to a comprehensive overview of an artist’s entire oeuvre. The Jean Fautrier retrospective at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris is a one such treat and offers a number of revelations thanks to its extensive look at the work. What’s unique about this lovely exhibition is the slow unfolding of the artist’s ideas and obsessions over time. It is as though everything he is thinking from the earliest works on is always moving towards the final works before his death. Or put differently, we see the rare occurrence of every avenue explored over forty years converges in the last paintings.

Jean Fautrier, Lac Bleu I, 1926

The early works are rough as he grapples with the human form and visitors will want to skip the early rooms. But he soon settles down around 1930 to start producing the works for which he has become renowned. That said, the early years are not without interest. In his so called black period, Fautrier begins his lifelong preoccupation with the re-animation of still lives. Here we see dead animals, flowers without water to sustain them, and in the dense material thickness of the paint everything is brought back to life. The figure in the middle of these images —in compositions that will remain constant throughout his career—is like a beacon of light radiating its energy against a black background. In the black works we find another hallmark of his work in the form of multi-colored backgrounds that are worked over again and again in order to create a nuanced and dynamic field of possibility for the emerging figure. The fastidious painting and repainting of the background begins early in Fautrier’s oeuvre. Similarly, this background is always agitated, in motion, and overstated, despite the fact that the object in the foreground is always the focus.

-->

Jean Fautrier, Forêt (Les Maronniers), 1943

The sculptural quality of the painted image is another concern that he begins in his earliest paintings. The unique materiality of Les Otages, the series in which he painted the heads of the prisoners of the Gestapo in 1944 are exemplary of Fautrier’s dense use of paint. In these he also begins to use the palette knife to spread plaster onto paper and then push it around into a shape over which he carefully paints the arabesque forms that we saw him develop in the delicate drawings from the 1930s onwards. As I say, tracing these constants and developments throughout the works on display is the joy of this exhibition.

Jean Fautrier, L'encrier, 1948 

I have always thought of Fautrier as an artist with a limited, muted palette, but this is not so. In fact, the more bleak his vision of everyday life, the more open, clear and bright is his palette. The soft blue, that is the background for all the object still lifes after World War II  might deceive us into thinking that he is painting blue skies and sunny days. And yet, while the colours make the works radiate, they are not without sadness and a sense of skepticism towards the world he depicts. The thick plaster surface pulls us up close, but it is not luscious in the way that oil paint can be when it is massaged around a canvas. On the contrary, the thick surfaces are so filled with frantic lines and cracks that we see the roughness, the doubt and depression in the agitated backgrounds.

 

Jean Fautrier, Tête d'Otage, 1945

It’s also interesting to note that his depictions are never fully abstract. This is another of the Fautrier constants that can only be perceived when studying the oeuvre in its entirety. Without the early figurative works and their gradual formal development we could be forgiven for seeing the later images as abstract. In the earlier works he struggles with the human form to such a degree that when he finally paints a work such as Johanna there is no mistaking the misshapen, doubled over woman’s body in the curves of the plaster. Likewise,  in Paysages, 1957 we recognize the mountain range and lush water filled valley from thirty years earlier – always in the same colours, always in the horizontal form of a landscape. And in keeping with the resistance to full abstraction, there is utter tragedy in the arabesque lines of paint over the dense plaster forms. And in some works, these same lines are infused with life and hope on the dead plaster.

 

Jean Fautrier, Tête d'Otage, 1945

Layer upon layer upon layer of plaster, paint and colour give the works a sense of time and of memory – there is a memory in the paint itself as well as in the objects painted. Also, the choice to work on paper and then attach paper to canvas creates a layering of materials and time, if only that taken to dry because of the thickness. Thus, the works are a history and a melancholy that accrues in the layers, each one seeping into the crevices of that underneath. There are also times when Fautrier’s works remind us of a Lucio Fontana ceramic, with the shine of the oil on the crustations of paint that have been left behind as the knife moved across the paper.  And so, all in all, there is a lot going on in these sculptural paintings, and their richness of material, texture and meaning is given their full dues by this extensive exhibition.

-->

Cézanne @ National Portrait Gallery London

Paul Cezanne, Self Portrait with Bowler Hat, 1885-86

I was surprised to see that the Cezanne exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery was hailed as the exhibition of the decade. It was a small, somewhat conventional exhibition of fascinating paintings, but I didn’t notice anything particularly outstanding   

Paul Cezanne, Artist's Father Reading L'Evénement, 1866

Cezanne’s portraits, in many ways, resemble his better known still lives: the concerns are similar, the composition is the same strange awkward presentation, the figure looking as though he or she is sliding forward, on the verge of falling out of the frame, or ill-at-ease popping its head into the side of the frame. In the same way that the still lives are unforgettable for the dimensionality and the life that Cezanne gives the dead objects, these portraits resonate well beyond the frame and the moment of viewing.

Paul Cezanne, Madame Cezanne in a Yellow Chair, 1888-90

I wondered as I walked around whether Cezanne had some kind of social anxiety disorder. The initial temptation is to compare the paintings to those of Manet in particular – and side by side with Manet’s famous street people— see how Cezanne’s portraits have nothing to do with the world outside of the relationship between the painter and the sitter. There is absolutely no hint of, let alone comment on the same social world that is the context and meaning of all Manet’s portraits, Neither is there any sense of who the sitter is, that is, the portrait as a window to the soul of the sitter. Alternatively, If we think of the portrait as a comment on the person’s social standing through their dress, posture, the objects in their midst, then Cezanne’s portraits give us nothing of this either. Thus, not only does Cezanne do away with the psychological identity of the sitter, but in his very best portraits even the physical characteristics become irrelevant. The figure may be present in the painting, but the body does not seem to carry much meaning. As a result, the newspaper that his father reads, the books surrounding Gustave Geffroy, the room in which his wife sits, and the bodies themselves tell nothing of the personality of the figure or the world in which they are living.

Paul Cezanne, Portrait de Monsieur Ambroise Vollard, 1899

In perhaps the most beautiful of the works on display at the National Portrsit Gallery, the image of Ambroise Vollard shows a man deep in thought, perhaps unable to escape his depressive state. The deep blue of Vollard’s clothes as they merge together with the bench on which he sits evoke the weight of his emotions, and by extension, the weight of the human condition. The beauty of the image comes from the soft light on the side of Vollard’s face allowing the other side of his body to melt into the background while still retaining the distinction between the figure and the seat. All the emotion of the painting is held in the fusion of the two. And all this together with the fact that Vollard the art dealer is usually depicted by artists (such as in Picasso’s cubist portrait) as the wealthy capitalist who exploited the market for his own gains. Why does Cezanne give an inner life to the one man who history tells us was lacking emotional depth?

If Cezanne were to paint Vollard on a different day, he may indeed look like a completely different person. So often the portraits are not about the sitter as we see in the multiple images of his wife. Even when he paints her on the same seat, apparently within days of the last portrait, Cezanne’s wife appears as a completely different woman. With a lesser artist, the variability of the image would be attributed to the authority of the painter. However, it’s unlikely that this is the case with Cezanne. Because what he captures is more like a transient moment as it passes between the artist and the sitter on this one day in time. And thus, even as the figures can appear lifeless, they are always animated by the transience of the painting, and the ethereal traces of a relationship between artist and subject.

 

Paul Cezanne, Uncle Dominique, 1865-67

Next to the portrait of Vollard, my favorites were those early portraits of Cezanne’s uncle. Indeed, Cezanne’s most risky (and today, most fascinating) paintings are created in the intimacy of his relationship with the sitters. Which means that none of the surprises, the moments of radicality seem present in those of people he doesn’t know. And yet, Cezanne uses this intimacy to do something wholly unseen before his time: he abstracts the face, thus erases the subjectivity of the subject. The apparent deformity of the face is so clearly demonstrating Cezanne’s willingness to forego likeness in the interests of exploring skin. The abstraction of the uncle’s skin as it pushes into his features is another of those ineffable moments that captures the radicality of what Cezanne brings to art in the 20^th century. The dissolution of the subject and the belief in realism as it was being applauded in the late 19^th century is Cezanne’s vehicle for his venture toward painted abstraction. This, I believe, makes Cezanne a great painter, and the National Gallery can be applauded for its exhibition of greatness in an age when blockbusters and commercially viable art has taken over London’s museum culture. Perhaps this was what the reviews were celebrating?