Paul Huet (1804-1869)

Renoir - Les Baigneuses

When you get so large that your perfumey pink flesh hovers in animated rungs around your body and you are now a living buoy, please call me.

Delacroix, The Lion Hunt

There is a study of this painting in the Orsay, I can't find a good image of it online, but the finished one is almost as intense.

Ok wait, here is the study:



I like it better, it is more roiling and in flux. Hurts are easier to imagine here.

L'Asperge

Ok seriously this was my favorite painting in the Musee D'Orsay. I will post more but...is it just me or is the history of every painting contained in the inflamed tip of this vegetable and the countertop it rests on?

Christmas Retardation

Really have a great Christmas if it is your thing. Enjoy the the atmosphere of selfish consumption and lackluster party planning. Allow yourself to ingest rapid amounts of curdled blood and sink your teeth into the flesh of people's arms who mean nothing to you. Please drool. Please excrete foamy mal-digested pointilist liquid tableaux into your toilet. Take a picture of it and send it to me. Send it via fax or regular mail it doesn't matter.

More Blart

Felix Vallatton, The Church of Souain, 1917


Angela Dufresne, Me and Bruce Lee and another famous yet un-nameable man on the shore in front of an unmade building by Frank Lloyd Wright called the Donahue Triptych, 2004


Mark Bradford, Scorched Earth, 2006

Pleasant dying arches to find your lack of way in.

Tato, Pousette-Dart & Hartung

"Wols" or Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze (1913-1951)

Jean Fautrier (1898-1964)

French artist Jean Fautrier fought in WW I, like many artists of that time. His paintings anticipated the emergence of Art Informel, the European counterpart to Abstract Expressionism. They are dark and ominous, smeared and hazy. Here are two paintings of glaciers from 1926:




From 1934 to 1939 Fautrier stopped painting, became a ski instructor and ran a jazz nightclub in the French Alps.

Later, when he returned to Paris during WW II, he worked in a studio that was near a wooded area where the Nazis executed their prisoners. At night he could hear the screaming victims. In response he created the "Otage" (Hostage) series, which includes sculpture as well as paintings. The paintings feature thickly applied paint and plaster and crudely articulated scribble-like gestures to evoke primitive heads with bumps and holes instead of features, chunks of flesh with bloody gashes.




After the war, he turned to more everyday objects, depicting them in a confectionary palette of pastel hues - but they are painted in the same style as the Otages. The strange and somewhat problematic fusion of kitsch and the horrors of war is interesting to me. As his friend Francis Ponge wrote, Fautrier combines "brilliant discomfort and rage in a smooth bouquet."

There is a great article by David Ebony on Fautrier (Art in America, September 2003). You should read that.