Word: fautrier
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...European artists. The first was to rebuild, to assert continuity with the past. The second was to embrace the ruins in an imagery of loss, primitivism and seeming inarticulateness, as with Jean Dubuffet's graffiti and turnip men, or the inchoate-looking lumps and scratches of French abstractionist Jean Fautrier. The older artists tended to take the first road, the younger the second...
...subway cars and buildings. It wasn't bound up with the seizure and degradation of public space. It was, so to speak, more muted and pastoral: harmless scratches, small obscenities, chalk on Roman distemper. To adopt graffiti to the painted canvas was to pay homage to European art informel -- Fautrier, Wols and especially Jean Dubuffet. Their influence plays on Twombly's earliest paintings of the 1950s, with their lumpish glandular forms, the movement of the paint slowed up by mixing it with earth but then accelerated by a nervous, hairy scratching around the edges...
...impeccable Resistance records. Others, like Paul Leautaud -- a brilliant aphorist -- decidedly did not. So when Dubuffet put a portrait of Leautaud, wrinkled like a tortoise or (as his title had it) "a red-skinned sorcerer," into the same portrait show as Paulhan or his friend the painter Jean Fautrier, what was he up to? Ironizing, certainly, on the idea of the portrait as effigy of virtue. But also -- despite his often repeated claim to reject tradition absolutely -- paying complete homage to an earlier French artist: Honore Daumier, whose tiny clay effigies of politico-literary notables known as Les Celebrites...