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sculpture of a man ' s head with a baseball glove on a wooden basean image of a sculpture of a glove on a wooden basea bronze statue of a man with a hat on his head
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3 - Jean Fautrier (1898–1964)
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Estimate €60,000 - €80,000
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Description
Jean Fautrier (1898–1964) Large Tragic Head, 1942 Bronze, cast by Valsuani, signed on the left-hand side, edition 3/9 34 x 17 cm Provenance: Presumed to have been purchased from the Galerie Daniel Varenne, Geneva, in 1982 Nancy Varenne-Brunot Collection Bibliography: Jean Fautrier: Genie und Rebell (Genius and Rebel), Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König; another example from the same series is reproduced on pp. 308 and 309. Jean Fautrier, *Matière et Lumière*, edited by Dieer Schwart / Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris / Paris Musée; another example from the same series on p. 215. Fautrier 1898–1964, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris / 25 May – 24 September 1989; another copy from the same series is reproduced on p. 165. Chapter entitled ‘Grande testa tragica’, published in the exhibition catalogue *Il volto del’900 – da Matisse a Bacon*, Palazzo Reale, Milan, 25 September 2013 to 9 February 2014, Skira/Centre Pompidou, edited by Jean-Michel Bouhours, 2013, p. 97 and pp. 141–142. Chapter entitled ‘Jean Fautrier: Grande tête tragique 1942’, published in the exhibition catalogue *Portraits – Collections of the Centre Pompidou, Martigny, Pierre Gianadda Foundation, 2 March to 24 June 2012, published by the P. Gianadda Foundation, with a foreword by Jean Clair, pp. 64 and 65. Chapter entitled ‘Gran cabeza trágica’, published in the exhibition catalogue *La Colección – Obras maestras del Centre Pompidou en Málaga*, 28 March 2015 to 29 October 2017, Centre Pompidou Publications/TF Editores, bilingual Spanish–English, 2015, pp. 102–103. Chapter entitled ‘Grand Tragic Head / 大悲劇頭’, published in the catalogue for the temporary exhibition *Mirrors of the Portrait. Highlights of the Centre Pompidou collection*. Third semi-permanent exhibition, Centre Pompidou x West Bund Museum Project 2019–2024, Shanghai, China, 21 July 2023 to 5 November 2024, Centre Pompidou/West Bund Museum Publications, edited by Frédéric Paul, July 2023, pp. 148–149, p. 312.   Further information: Jean Fautrier practised sculpture between 1927 and 1929 and then between 1935 and 1943. These two periods gave rise to twenty-two sculptural works that remained largely unknown for far too long. Recognised and celebrated for his paintings, Jean Fautrier is also — despite his limited output — one of our foremost sculptors, as André Malraux noted in 1956. Yet Fautrier exhibited his sculptures on numerous occasions, placing them alongside his paintings in his exhibitions. In 1942, the artist was in Paris, working in his studio on Boulevard Raspail on illustrations for the literary works of his friends: Jean Paulhan, René Char, Robert Ganzo, Francis Ponge and Paul Éluard. Emotion lies at the heart of the creation of the *Grande Tête tragique*, produced in 1942 at the height of the Occupation. For Jean Fautrier, technique is merely a means of visual expression in the service of a theme. The subject of this sculpture is the wounded man, scarred by the events of the Second World War. *La Grande Tête tragique* demonstrates the artist’s desire to take reality – historical events – as the ‘initial impetus’ for his work. His early sculptures from the 1920s already had a compact, massive appearance, and a sense of wholeness and indomitability. The artistic treatment of form was not naturalistic and already foreshadowed a tormented vision in which the human figure and the face are mangled and disfigured. In a sculpture from 1940, Fautrier hollows out the human face by removing the eyes from his sculpted faces, leaving only a mask with empty eye sockets. Emphasising this amputation, Fautrier gave the work the title *Les Yeux* (*The Eyes*), signifying to us the absence of these organs. The same process of removal is applied to the *Grande Tête tragique* (*Great Tragic Head*) of 1942. Using his fingers to shape the material, the artist tears away the right-hand side of the bust’s face and renders this void through a striated treatment of the surface. Its unity disrupted, the face is scarred by an extremely direct and brutal modelling of the material. The single eye consists of a cluster of incisions; the nose is flattened and forms the deep vertical line that brutally divides the face into two parts; the mouth is very thick and curved. It opens onto a stifled cry and onto speech that now seems impossible. This head is deeply furrowed and, thanks to the volume afforded by the practice of sculpture, echoes that unique pictorial technique known as ‘les Hautes Pâtes’, which Fautrier elevates to new heights in his painted series *Les Otages*. André Malraux affirmed this in October 1945 in his preface to the catalogue *Les Otages. Peintures et sculptures de Fautrier*: ‘Rather than being paintings by Fautrier, these figures come from his sculpture. From his sculpture, which has found, in torment, what it had long sought in vain: a means of embodiment.” *La Grande Tête tragique* evokes torment and stands as a witness to the human barbarity that Jean Fautrier suggests by inflicting mutilations and scars upon this head. On this subject, Francis Ponge writes of Jean Fautrier’s art: ‘He transforms contemporary human horror into beauty.’ He continues: ‘Something had to be set against the intolerable idea of man torturing man, of the human body and face disfigured by the very hand of man. It was necessary, upon observing the horror, to stigmatise it, to immortalise it.’ Etienne David
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About the sale The Nancy Varenne-Brunot Collection
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Auction time 10/27/2026 at 3:00 PM
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