“I liked the idea of mixing, […] of being able to take some ink, some oil paint, some watercolour, anything, even dust if it so happened.”¹ This is how Jean Fautrier, when talking to Jean Lescure in 1959, explained the origins of the experiment he had carried out in the 1940s, returning to painting after a lengthy suspension and definitively abandoning the technique of oil on canvas. “Oil painting disgusted me”,² he confided to André Verdet, who was the first owner of the painting now in the Cerruti Collection. He went on to use canvas-backed paper prepared with a layer of enduit, a thick ground of Spanish white. He then added other layers of paste during the first coat, modelled irregularly with touches of the spatula, spreading pigments over them and thin layers of inks and oil paints. Lastly, he used a stick to mark narrow grooves in the material, overlapping with areas of brushwork. A photographic series by Robert Descharnes, produced in 1955 for an article by Michel Tapié on the “autre” quality of Fautrier’s work,³ documents the series of interventions by the painter on the horizontal support. Palma Bucarelli republished these images in her book Jean Fautrier. Pittura e materia, the pioneering catalogue raisonné of the artist’s work published in 1960, the year he was awarded the international painting prize at the Venice Biennale along with Hans Hartung, not without some controversy. 

Starting with the series of Hostages (1943-45), the new course followed by Fautrier triggered an immediate echo in the writings of his friends the scholars and poets Jean Paulhan, André Malraux and Francis Ponge, followed by contributions from art critics and historians in the early 1950s. The question of the relationship between matter and figure, between the silent expressiveness of the formless and the elusive emergence of a possible image was - and remains⁴ - central to both series of texts. 

The painting that belonged to Francesco Federico Cerruti is a landscape, which the cataloguing proposed by Bucarelli dates to 1957, supported by close study of the correspondence between the artist and his entourage.⁵ “Fautrier”, wrote Michel Ragon in the same year, “deliberately entitles certain paintings of his Trees, or Landscapes, or Forests”,⁶ implying that those titles are simply pretexts, thematic concessions rather than indications of specific subjects. However, the reference to the landscape theme offers the possibility to use a twofold filter - both mineral and atmospheric - to read the density of the coloured paste and the lightness of the coloured dust deposited there, in this case featuring a striking contrast of blue and mauve tones seen frequently in Fautrier’s paintings from 1954 onwards. 

A label headed “Galerie Rive Droite” (the Parisian gallery where the Objets [Objects], Nus [Nudes] and Partisans series were exhibited between 1955 and 1957) on the frame of the work indicates that it was owned by the painter and poet André Verdet. The painting subsequently formed part - until the mid-1970s - of the Cavellini Collection, probably entering it between 1958 and 1959. It did not feature among the works exhibited in 1957 in the Pittori moderni dalla collezione Cavellini exhibition that Palma Bucarelli organised at the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome, nor was Fautrier’s name mentioned in Arte astratta. Poesia e vita difficile di una tendenza artistica, the book published by Achille Cavellini the following year for Milan-based Edizioni della Conchiglia. Instead, the work is listed as being in the Cavellini Collection in the catalogue raisonné published by Bucarelli in June 1960. The collector from Brescia described the acquisition of many of his pieces in great detail in his diaries, but with regard to Fautrier he simply mentions a meeting in Venice and his visit to the artist’s home at Châtenay-Malabry in January 1961.⁷ This would certainly have been preceded, as regards his knowledge of the work, by the exhibition at the Galleria Apollinaire in Milan, when Guido Le Noci presented the artist’s entire career path in Italy for the first time in 1958. The exhibition catalogue underscored his role as a precursor to Art Informel, starting in the late 1920s.⁸ 

Maria Teresa Roberto

¹ Lescure 1959, p. 15.

² Verdet 1958, p. 5, my translation.

³ Tapié 1955, pp. 30-34, 63.

⁴ See Winterthur 2017 and Paris 2018.

⁵ Bucarelli 1960.

⁶ Ragon 1958, p. 42, my translation.

⁷ Cavellini 1977, passim; Cavellini 1989, p. 21.

⁸ Milan 1958; see Nicoletti 2014, pp. 171-173.