“No form of art can depict feelings if a piece of reality is not included in it”
—Jean FautrierA strikingly powerful example of Jean Fautrier’s early figurative painting, Trois Lapins dans un plat speaks to the young artist’s ability to render intense and sometimes brutal realities through carefully arranged compositions and dramatic, dark colour palettes. Fautrier’s confidence and vision are well represented here, the artist employing sophisticated chiaroscuro effects to illuminate his subject against the darker ground. Modelled through brighter accents of white and blue tones, our eye is drawn to the porcelain plate at its centre, its smooth, curved line contrasted with the irregular compositional rhythms introduced by the angular treatment of the rabbits’ limbs.
During the interwar years, Fautrier produced his iconic période noire. Among nudes, flowers and landscapes typified by an enigmatic darkness, his paintings were dominated by the kind of solemn, yet fascinatingly beautiful imagery seen here. Drawing on a long pictorial tradition of still life painting, Fautrier creates an unsettling but undeniably powerful domestic scene here. Symbolically charged, flesh and bone are masterfully sculpted from pink, red, and cream tones, confronting the viewer with a stark vision of the transience of life and our own materiality. The unflinching, Expressionistic focus on emotive colour and fleshy tones bears the influence of Fautrier’s contemporary Chaïm Soutine. Like Soutine, Fautrier here is also engaging with the traditions of Dutch Golden Age still life painting where hunted game, cut flowers and overripe fruit were decorously arranged as memento mori, poignant reminders of the inescapable cycles of life and death. In the contexts of the horrors of industrialised conflict unleashed with the First World War, Trois Lapins dans un plat also highlights how Fautrier, that ‘master of the pathos of ordinary things’, harnessed the existential angst of the period, engaging with this pictorial tradition to reflect the realities of the mechanical age.i
