'One does no more than reinvent what already exists. One restores, with hints of emotion, the reality that is embodied in material, in form, in colour' —Jean Fautrier 

Executed in a soft palette of pinks, creams, and blues, I’m Falling in Love belongs to an important group of paintings by Jean Fautrier that effortlessly fuse erotic lyricism with technical virtuosity. Very closely related to a series of pink nudes similarly executed on a light blue ground that preoccupied Fautrier during the mid-1950s, the present work marries the artist’s interest in the female form with his love of American Jazz, belonging as it does to the series of works titled after famous jazz tracks of the era. A paradigmatic example of the French artist’s significant contribution to post-war abstraction and Art Informel, I’m falling in Love is also a joyous exploration of the compositional possibilities presented by jazz, and a tribute to the artist’s great passion for this experimental approach to music. 

Coming to auction from a distinguished private collection, I’m Falling in Love has an exceptional exhibition history, included in Fautrier’s major 1989 retrospective at the Musée d’art modern de Paris and included in the landmark 1996 L’informe: mode d’emploi exhibition at the Centre nationale d’art et de culture Georges Pompidou. The present work was also among the selection chosen to represent Fautrier at the XXX Biennale Internazionale d'Arte di Venezia, in 1960, where he was awarded the grand prize. 

 

Haute pâte and l’informe 

 

Signalling a radical break with painterly convention in the wake of the World War II, Fautrier began experimenting with innovative, highly tactile approaches to painting, inventing a new technique that replaced traditional application of oil with haute pâte constructions. 
'This is what you want to know: the canvas is now merely a support for the paper. The thick paper is covered with sometimes thick layers of plaster – the picture is painted on this moist plaster – this plaster makes the paint adhere to the paper perfectly – it has the virtue of fixing the colours in powder, crushed pastels, gouache, ink, and also oil paint – it is above all thanks to these coats of plaster that the mixture can be produced so well and the quality of the matter is achieved.' —Jean Fautrier

Utterly revolutionary, this approach involved a total reimagining of the nature of the painting itself, with the surface of the canvas transformed into the support for the thick paste constructions built up upon it.

 

Corresponding to the shocking immediacy and visceral nature of this method, described by New York Times critic Michael Brenson  as ‘patches and clots of matter […] that almost seem to have been shot at the canvas’, Fautrier first developed his haute pâte method in a troubling series of abstract portraits of victims of Nazi atrocities.ⁱ Produced while hiding from the Gestapo in a psychiatric asylum outside Paris, the works register a brutality in their method and treatment of form that seems to correspond to their subject. When first presented in 1945 at the artist’s Otages exhibition, the restlessly inventive Jean Dubuffet immediately recognised a kindred spirit who shared in his ‘veritable passion for the materiality of the painted surface and a taste for experimentation with materials alien to painterly tradition’.ⁱⁱ So affected at the purity of his contemporary’s expression and the manner of its execution, he began to adopt a similar approach to materials, mixing in non-traditional elements such as sand, glass, and mud into paint to create a thick paste that he applied directly to the canvas with painting knives and spatulas in what would prove to be a breakthrough development for the artist, and for L’art Informel more broadly. Together the two artists demonstrated a shared commitment to the pursuit of a new pictorial language rooted in materiality, with these thick impasto pastes emerging as the determining element for both during these years. 

 

Given a thorough academic treatment in the 1996 Musée d’Arte Moderne Centre Georges Pompidou exhibition L’Informe: mode d’emploi, where the present work was exhibited, Arte Informel borrows from French philosopher Georges Bataille’s notion of l’informe, that which not only describes formlessness, but creates it: 'A dictionary begins when it no longer gives the meaning of words, but their tasks. Thus l'informe is not only an adjective having a given meaning, but a term that serves to bring things down in the world, generally requiring that each thing have its form […] Affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider, or spit.' 
—Georges Bataille
While this description resonates especially with the Otages depictions of human brutality, Bataille also expands his discussion to include the free-forms of improvisational jazz and music-hall performances. In this sense, l’informe is not simple the destruction of form, but the action involved in taking it apart, as is wonderfully evoked in I’m Falling in Love. 

 

Fautrier and Jazz

 

In dramatic contrast to the difficult subject matter and corresponding heaviness of the Otages portraits, I’m Falling in Love is suffused with soft light and a miraculous lightness of touch given its thickly textured surface. Demonstrating incredible flexibility and versatility in his approach, Fautrier is able to transform his method to communicate the sombre heaviness and violence used to such effect in the Otages, to the remarkable sensuality and lightness that we find in Falling in Love.

 

Working with the unpredictable nature of his paste technique and perfectly in tune with the shifting textures that it generated, Fautrier applied his thick paste onto the paper, roughly shaping it with a palette knife. Over the cracked and uneven surface, he applied powdery blue and pink pigments, drawing out the forms that emerged with a brush to create the sensual curves and suggestively shapely aspect adopted by his nudes. This responsive, intuitive dimension to Fautrier’s practice compares directly to the improvisational and collaborative elements of jazz composition, as one instrument develops a theme picked up developed by another. 

An avid collector of Jazz records, Fautrier had spent the years in the lead up to the World War II in Savoy, working as a ski instructor by day and running a jazz club by night. Honing his haute pâte method, Fautrier developed a medium to explore form, rhythm, and texture in a way that interacts directly with his deep understanding of the (structures) syncopated patterns of jazz. As well as generating a certain synaesthesia in its blend of colour, touch, and rhythm, I’m Falling In Love replicates the sensations of jazz as the passages of think impasto read like sudden shifts in syncopation, the looping central pink ribbon like the swirling eddy of a saxophone holding the composition together. 

With English titles that reference specific songs by the likes of Sonny Rollins, Miles Davies, and Coleman Hawkins and featuring ‘bodies suspended in the imminence of their disappearance’, these works form an important series in Fautrier’s oeuvre, a joyful antidote to the horrors explored in the Otages and striking a note of optimism for things to come.ⁱⁱⁱ 

 

ⁱ Michael Brenson, ‘Jean Fautrier, France’s Caustic Outsider, New York Times, 22 August 1989, online 
ⁱⁱ Marianne Jakobi, ‘Exhibiting Matterist Paintings in the Immediate Post-War Period: Jean Fautrier and Jean Dubuffet in their Historical’, Jean Fautrier: Matière et lumièr (exh. cat.), Musée d’Art modern de la Ville de Paris, 2018, p. 145. 
ⁱⁱⁱ Fabrice Hergott, Preface, Jean Fautrier : Matière et lumièr (exh. cat.), Musée d’Art modern de la Ville de Paris, 2018, p. 7.