Jean Fautrier's resistance: Painting, *policies and the French avant-garde, 1930--1955

This dissertation investigates the interplay between art and politics in the work of the artist Jean Fautrier. Between 1942 and 1945, Fautrier painted a series of works called Les Otages (The Hostages ), a group of approximately fifty works evoking anonymous French citizens who were rounded up and executed by the Nazis in retaliation for suspected resistance activity. The series was exhibited in Paris immediately after the war during the heyday of the epuration, a time when culture was closely examined for signs of either culpability or "appropriate" political engagement. A series of experimental essays written by three prominent literary figures, Jean Paulhan, Andre Malraux and Francis Ponge accompanied the exhibition. Responding to the political correctness of the epuration, these essays challenged the accepted standards of committed aesthetic practice and made Fautrier's work central to debates about the nature of art and politics in postwar France.;The first chapter examines the nature of Fautrier's engagement with cubism, a relationship that radically changed the nature of Fautrier's pictorial production and lead to his comprehension of representation as a separate semiotic practice. The second chapter addresses his reception of surrealist strategies that challenge the production of stable identity, bringing him to reject a nineteenth-century model of unified subjectivity and artistic authenticity. The third chapter examines the Otage series, arguing that Fautrier's play with the materials of painting produces a radical strategy of subjective destabilization. Reading the Otage series through the work of the contemporary writer Georges Bataille indicates that Fautrier's aesthetic technique came to be seen by an important group of postwar writers as an alternative form of committed painting. The fourth chapter focuses on a group of essays on the Otage series written by Fautrier's avant-garde literary supporters, Malraux, Paulhan and Ponge, arguing that their discussions of the work of the artist cannot be separated from contemporary interests in the phenomenological nature of language. The fifth chapter examines Fautrier's postwar production, works made between 1945 and 1955, contending that it addresses the altered economic and social conditions of postwar France.