3397614

Jean Fautrier's Jolies Juives
Author(s): Rachel E. Perry

Source: October, Vol. 108 (Spring, 2004), pp. 51-72
Published by: The MIT Press
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Jean Fautrier'sJoliesJuives*
RACHEL E. PERRY
There is in the words "a beautiful Jewess" a very special sexual

signification, one quite different from that contained in the words
"beautiful Rumanian," "beautiful Greek," or "beautiful
American, "for example. This phrase carries an aura of rape and
massacre with it. The "beautiful Jewess" is she whom the cossacks
under the czars dragged by her hair through the streets of her burn-
ing village. And the special works which are given over to accounts
offlagellation reserve a place of honor for the Jewess. But it is not
necessary to look into esoteric literature. From the Rebecca of Ivanhoe
up to theJewess of "Gilles"... the Jewess has a well-definedfunction
in even the most serious novels. Frequently violated or beaten, she
sometimes succeeds in escaping dishonor by means of death, but
that is a form of justice; and those who keep their virtue are docile
servants or humiliated women in love with indifferent Christians
who marry Aryan women. I think nothing more is needed to
indicate the place the Jewess holds as a sexual symbol in folklore.
-Jean-Paul Sartrel
In November 1945, coinciding with the return of the deportees and foll
ing the first published reports and photographs of the concentration camps
Fautrier presented a series of paintings and sculptures under the simple ba
"Otages, peintures de Jean Fautrier" at the up-and-coming Galerie Rene Dr
* Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the College Art Association annual confere
1995 and at Southern Methodist University in 1996. I thank Janice Bergman Carton for solicit
participation in these forums and Susan Rubin Suleiman and Paul Franklin for their insightful com
on these early drafts. Madame Halperyn at the Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine
Marco Bodenstein at the Arno Breker Museum in Bonn are also thanked for their help in facilitat
research and securing documents.
1. Jean-Paul Sartre, Reflexions sur la question juive (Paris: Paul Morihien, 1946); Anti-Semite an
trans. GeorgesJ. Becker (New York: Grove Press, 1960). Susan Rubin Suleiman has analyzed the tro
anti-Semitic undertones of Sartre's important text in her essay "The Jew in Jean-Paul Sartre's Reflexion
la question juive: An Exercise in Historical Reading," in The Jew in the Text: Modernity and the Constru
Identity, ed. Linda Nochlin and Tamar Garb (London: Thames and Hudson, 1995), pp. 201-18.
OCTOBER 108, Spring 2004, pp. 51-72. ? 2004 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Tech
52 OCTOBER
in Paris. Brought together under an attention-grabbing and politica

theme loaded with cathartic promise-made, as Andre Berne-Joffroy la
"attract the crowds"-the exhibition was the culmination of several yea
tine work during the Occupation and consisted of forty-six paintin
sculptures of severed heads and disfigured bodies rendered in the artis
matieriste style. That very same month Jean-Paul Sartre published his pro
influential essay "Portrait de l'antisemite" in Les Temps Modernes. Later in
as the opening chapter of his 1946 book Reflexions sur la question ju
"Portrait de l'antisemite," with its discussion of the figure of the Je
directly to two of Fautrier's earliest Otages-Sarah (1942) and LaJuive (
La Juive, with her whipped-cream, marshmallow fluff texture
coated pastel hues, has been exhibited, cited, and reproduced widely. B
a large public collection (the Musee d'art moderne de la Ville de Pari
passkey, for many, to Fautrier's work and to the Otages series in particula
this painting, like her twin Sarah, is all too often put forth as a key
both the period and the artist's matieriste aesthetic without any of th
data that might allow us to envision what it meant to represent the J
.?
Jean Fautrier Sarah. 1942.
.i.
,? . Sj~
,, , -
? ADAGP, Paris 2004.
Jean Fautrier'sJolies Juives 53
i x^^ii?aa. E _ _.(i,<(By ^- ,
Fautrier. LaJuive. 1943. ? ADA
Otage in 1942 and 1943. Taken together, the presence of two paintings of aJewess
executed during the Occupation deserves considerable explication and certainly
more than has been allotted to them.
The Otages series has traditionally been explained through the lurid circum-
stances surrounding Fautrier's self-internment during the Occupation. Arrested
by the SS in January of 1943, Fautrier is imprisoned and interrogated for four
days.2 Fearing future reprisals, he deserts his apartment at 216, boulevard Raspail
and escapes to Chamonix for several months. Returning to Paris, he takes refuge,
through the assistance of his friend, the writer Jean Paulhan, in a sanatorium for
the mentally ill at the Vallee-aux-Loups, Chatenay-Malabry, under the protection
of the well-known anti-fascist resistance sympathizer, the Docteur Le Savoureux.3
It is here that Fautrier, in near total seclusion, allegedly witnesses mass executions
2. Palma Bucarelli relates the circumstances of Fautrier's interrogation by the SS in Jean Fautrier:
Pittura e Materia (Milan: II Saggiatore, 1960). Apparently the only thing Fautrier feared would incrimi-
nate him (other than his paintings) before the Gestapo was his address book which was, fortuitously,
quickly hidden by his maid.
3. Le Savoureux was the brother-in-law of the man who helped protect Paulhan himself when he
went into hiding in 1941. Denounced to the Gestapo as Jewish (perhaps by Elise Jouhandeau, the wife
of his friend, the writer Marcel Jouhandeau), Paulhan was stopped in May 1941 under further suspi-
cions of having printed the review Resistance for the underground Musee de l'homme cell at his home
on the rue des Arenes. He went into hiding at Georges Batault's apartment, 17, rue Marbeau, and was
released thanks to the intervention of Drieu la Rochelle. Batault was a member of the Action francaise
and the brother-in-law of the Docteur Le Savoureux. Paulhan wrote a text relating his experiences
entitled Une semaine au secret that appeared in Le Figaro, September 9, 1944. See La Vie est pleine de
choses redoutables: Textes autobiographiques, ed. Claire Paulhan (Paris: Verdier, 1989), p. 261.
54 OCTOBER
of hostages taking place in the neighboring woods.4 The Otages, as the

would have it, are born out of this encounter.
This much-mythologized narrative, one certainly fanned by the artist h
has been obsessively reiterated as a means of explaining the genesis of t
the artist's firsthand knowledge of nearby executions inspires a series o
entitled Hostages. Fautrier's investment in this narrative is easily accoun
not only heroizes the artist, presented as a frontline reporter; it dramatizes
and inspiration of the series-the lurid voyeurism of death and torture.5
monial aspect was of particular importance after the war as so many
accounts and photographic records swamped the press. But in reducing t
of the series to one, albeit sensational, incident, it forecloses alternativ
into the cultural context within which Fautrier had begun working.
Palma Bucarelli, in the text accompanying the only catalogue raiso
Fautrier to date (a text written in collaboration with the artist during his li
offers a significantly different narrative. She relates: "He had begun to
Otages] in Paris, during the last months of 1942 and in January 1943."6 Not
the series well under way prior to Fautrier's arrival at Vallee-aux-Loups,
spondence between Fautrier and Jean Paulhan indicates that it was not
of 1944 that Fautrier arrived at the clinic of Le Savoureux under the assumed
nameJean Faron-well over a full year after being arrested by the Gestapo.7 Franci
4. The writer Paul Leautaud mentions visiting the Vallee-aux-Loups in his Journal litteraire whi
specifying that the Docteur Le Savoureux was not only fiercely "Gaullist" and anti-German but engaged
in protecting and giving refuge to a variety of people whom Leautaud, a German sympathizer, charac
terizes as "people who should be stripped of their French nationality, others who should be shot." Se
in particular letters of September 23, 1943, and December 8, 1943, in Paul Leautaud, Journal litterair
15 (Paris: Mercure de France, 1963). Georges Poisson has published a highly dramatized version of th
shootings in his "Tel etait Fautrier,"Jardin des Arts 210 (May 1972), pp. 69-71.
These hostage executions belonged to a larger policy of taking French civilians hostage and
executing them in retaliation for acts of resistance performed by others. The hostage crisis was inst
gated in 1941 when "The MBF (Militarbefehlshaber in Frankreich, or German military authority in
France) issued a decree later known as the code des hotages- for every German killed, they would shoot
between fifty and one hundred hostages." Michael R. Marrus and Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France and th
Jews (New York: Schocken Books, 1983), pp. 224-25. In all, over 500 French citizens were shot a
hostages. Although the hostage code did not specifically mention Jews, the proportion of Jews amon
the hostages was high from the beginning.
5. Bucarelli characterizes Fautrier as a "voyeur," hiding in the woods and scaling the wall that
surrounded the clinic in order to catch a glimpse of the killings. More than simply cognizant of the
shootings, Fautrier had a lurid obsession with the executions.
6. Two articles from the winter of 1943-44 report Fautrier already well at work on the series. Jean
Babelon's article "Visite a l'atelier de Fautrier" describes Fautrier at work on "a mask without a body
blotchy, gashed by black scars" (Beaux-Arts 123 [December 24, 1943], p. 5). Daniel Wallard also
describes what must be an early Otage in his article "L'exposition Fautrier" from January 1944. He cites
Fautrier envisaging a painting he wants to make with "A violent green, unrelenting, which will swoo
down on the night and separate it from the blood. The cadavers will be laid on top, in the eternal
presence of their death, in this sense irrefutable, with their feet to the sky, their heads drowned in th
night and the blood." In Confluences 28 (January 1944), p. 100.
7. In March 1944 Fautrier wrote Paulhan: "Therese [Marvaldi, his companion] tells me that you
and the doctor have been so nice to find me a magnificent room in the Vallee-aux-Loups.... I am mor
decided than ever to go there despite the bad food! I want above all the peace to work-and I have a
Ponge corroborates this chronology

Fautrier, entitled "Fautrier a la Vallee
Gestapo, [Fautrier] has taken refuge h
clearly, holes in the conventional stor
source of these works in one event (th
in hiding), the fact that the series w
than a year prior to the incident in qu
the ideological context within which t
earliest works in the series, Sarah and
What was the political and cultural
work on his two female Jewish hosta
under Vichy in October 1940 and Jun
were stepped up in what was referred to
passed on October 3, 1940, and the se
anti-Semitism was overtly sanctioned e
popularity of the exhibition LeJuif et
ing visitors, by conservative estimate
running until January 11, 1942, the e
the Boulevard des Italiens near the Op
of a caricatural dirty old Jew greedily g
a microphone soliciting passersby.
lot to do." Archives Paulhan in the Institut Me

in Curtis L. Carter and Karen K. Butler, Fautri
p. 40. Fautrier seems to have shuttled back a
November of 1944 he announces that "Without
for the winter-in my room where I hope to be
Pierre Seghers, writer, editor, and publisher
"In Paris, from the beginning of the summer
[an offer to] give me his studio 216, boulevard
1944; "I was working in the old studio of Fautr
three or four days after my arrival, Philippe
Germans were just leaving his place, two ste
Fautrier's.... The Germans must know the addr
time, what carelessness!, on page 2 of the cover
Messages." Pierre Seghers, La Resistance et ses po
8. Francis Ponge, "Fautrier a la Vallee-aux-Loup
9. The exhibition was organized by the Instit
supported by the Germans and founded by Dar
Marques-Riviere with a preface by Pierre Sezille,
of irrefutable and carefully chosen documents h
The exhibition, which covered two floors, was lit
charts for the "edification" of the public. On the
France holding her child aloft while stepping
center of the rotunda.
For further reference, see Andre Kaspi, "'Le Juif et la France' une exposition a Paris en 1941,"
Le MondeJuif (the monthly journal of the Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine in Paris) 79
(1975), pp. 8-20, as well as Joseph Billig, L'lnstitut d'Etude des Questions Juives: inventaire commente de la
collection de documents provenant des archives de l'Institut conserve au C.D.J.C. (Paris: Centre de
DocumentationJuive Contemporaine, 1974).
56 OCTOBER
Six months later, on May 29, 1942, a law was passed requiring all Je
occupied zone over the age of six to wear large, yellow six-pronged stars, ou
black and imprinted with the word '"uif' or "Juive" in a "biblicized," archaic
law put into effect on June 7. With the yellow star, Jews became visible in
in an unprecedented way-marked, exposed, and spectacularized. Thus, an
addendum in the July 1942 issue of Le CahierJaune, an anti-Semiti
periodical that ran out of the Service de la Propagande of the Institut d
Questions Juives, exclaimed, "THERE ARE TOO MANY JEWS ON OUR BOULEVA
Saturday, those wearing the Star of David appear to have multiplied. This ye
ering unfurls down the boulevards."10 The effort to segregate and identify
further abetted and reinforced by the Vichy government, which, in Decemb
ordered all vital personal documents ofJews to be stamped 'Juif' or 'Juive."
The Jewish star, with its ability to identify and segregate, was the
the Final Solution. On June 30, 1942, Adolf Eichmann arrived in Paris
a ruthless edict from Heinrich Himmler: all French Jews were to be d
without distinction or regard for French citizenship. Less than a month
July 16 and 17, 1942, 12,884 Jews were rounded up and deported in "L
Rafle parisienne," otherwise referred to as "la Rafle du Vel d'hiv."
Citing these events, Michael Marrus and Robert Paxton, in their i
study Vichy France and the Jews, situate the summer of 1942-immediat
when Bucarelli contends Fautrier began the series-as "the turning point"
public opinion.1l The public roundups of Jews and their families in the
1942 were impossible to conceal and widespread reports of mass killings abro
filtering through by the end of August. Moreover, by this date women and
began to be included in the roundups and deportations, shattering defin
illusions of the labor camps as merely "work colonies." Due to an increased a
of internment camps such as Drancy (which was under French administr
the summer of 1943, although French gendarmes provided the guard
Liberation), through which over 70,000 Jews passed, most of whom on t
Auschwitz, the complicity of the Vichy regime was slowly revealing itself.
It is within this climate of mounting attacks and privations that
undertakes not one but two paintings that identify the hostage vi
implicitly and explicitly, as a Jewish woman. (The series is otherwise
anonymity, underscored by titles lacking any descriptive detail ot
number-thus Tete d'Otage no. 1, no. 2, and so on through Otage no. 33.
10. Andre Chaumet, "Les necessaires clartes d'une etoile," Le CahierJaune 6 (July 1942).
is superimposed over a field of Jewish stars inscribed with the word Juif Le CahierJaune w
periodical out of the Service de la Propagande of the Institut d'Etude des Questions Juiv
from November 1941 to February 1943.
11. "The Turning Point: Summer 1942" is the title of chapter six in Marrus and Paxton,
and theJews, pp. 215-80.
12. Despite common assertions to the contrary, the Otages were not all titled specif
Otages show in 1945. This misconception has been often repeated after the exhibiti
Fautrier Otages 1942-45 at the Galerie Michel Couturier in 1968 noted that most of the p
only signed and dated by Fautrier in 1945. In fact, Fautrier had many titles selected ove
Fautrier Left: Le Fusille. 1943. Right:

Le Massacre. 1944. () ADAGP, Paris 2004.
remaining works in the exhibition at Drouin, with the significant exception of

Oradour sur Glane, to which we will return in considerable length below, bear
abstract names such as Le Fusille, Massacre, Cadavre, Torse, occasionally accompa-
nied by gender identification as in Torse de femme and Buste de femme. Fautrier
himself described the Otages as "very monotonous-in mass graves.")13
What did the proper name "Sarah" and the generic label "LaJuive" connote
during this period? "Sarah," the name of the wife of the biblical patriarch
Abraham in the Old Testament, would have been immediately perceived as a
Jewish name in the 1940s. As Russell Berman notes, in his foreword to Alice Yaeger
Kaplan's Reproductions of Banality:
To denounce opponents in political or cultural life, Nazi propagan-

dists and Volkish ideologues in Germany regularly insisted on labeling
them with real or, with equal frequency, fictive names that were
intended to sound Jewish. By the late '30s in fact, Jewish men were
uniformly designated as "Israel," andJewish women as "Sara."14
In other words, "Sarah" functions as a synonym; she is "La Juive" par excellence.
But the prevalence of the name Sarah-as opposed to other prototypicallyJewish
female names such as Rachel, Rebecca, and Esther-took on a more sinister usage
in France during this period.
In the contemporary collaborationist press "Sarah" came to symbolize Jewish
treachery and deception. Anti-Semitic texts circulated during the Occupation
half prior to the exhibition. In March 1944, he appealed to Paulhan to help him find "some titles for
my hostages-some are so awful that they should not be used, others seem possible (le profil ecrase, le
fusill, I'homme mort, la supplicie), I need a lot more-help me-." Appendix E, letter 9, in Fautrier
1898-1964, p. 209.
13. Robert Droguet, Fautrier 43 (Lyon: Besacier, 1957), p. 11.
14. Russell Berman, foreword to Alice Yaeger Kaplan, Reproductions of Banality: Fascism, Literature,
and French Intellectual Life (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. ii.
58 OCTOBER
cited the biblical narrative of Sarah's passing herself off as Abraham's

the Pharaoh in Egypt as evidence ofJewish duplicity. A particularly vehem
in Le CahierJaune exploits this story:
From its most distant origins, the genius of the Jewish race has s
itself attentive to the services a woman can contribute in the accompl
ment of its designs. The witless Abraham, who no doubt found no
shameful in sharing with Pharaoh, used this strategy to install himse
Egypt. Sarah, whom he passed as his sister, was hospitable to Phar
This is an entire pr6cis of political penetration, a method of one
enslaving another. Let us underline in passing that this story illustrat
of the methods still used by the Jews: an incredible facility, camoufl
one's origins, the trading of favors and denunciations.15
"Sarah" thus stands for the quintessential assimilated Jew; the threat
in her ability to camouflage and disguise her Jewish identity. (Sarah is, in
a surrogate or alter ego for Fautrier himself, who was, by all accounts
and had gone into hiding in Chatenay-Malabry.16 As the pseudonym
illustrator of Georges Bataille's Madame Edwarda indicates: Jean "Perd
as opposed to Bataille's virtuous "Pierre Ang6lique," but also, quite liter
The biblical story of Sarah thus became particularly relevant du
period, for it addressed many of the issues surrounding the recent enactm
law requiring Jews to wear the Jewish star. As an article in Le CahierJaun
"Of all the Jews, the camouflaged Jew is the most dangerous, the mos
The fear that the Jew, like Sarah in Egypt, will "pass" was bolstered a
pseudoscientific physiognomic analyses of the "pathology of the Jewish r
such as those by Dr. George Montandon in his 1940 book Comment reconn
15. M. de Bonnieres in Le CahierJaune, "Les Trois Esther: Politique tiree de l'ecriture
Archives of the Centre de DocumentationJuive Contemporaine, Paris.
16. Fautrier's father was, by all accounts, Jewish, although under both Jewish law a
Statut desJuifs-which used the criterion of at least three grandparents of theJewish rac
have "defined" Fautrier asJewish. Nevertheless, Marcel-Andre Stalter-who wrote the c
of Fautrier's early work, and interviewed Therese Marvaldi, Fautrier's female companion
1940s-acknowledged that Fautrier was incredibly anxious of being caught during the O
the fact that he had been circumcised. Sarah Wilson corroborates that Fautrier was in all likelihood an
illegitimate child, whose father was aJewish art dealer from London. See 'Jean Fautrier, Ses ecrivains et ses
peintres," in Ecrire la peinture, ed. Philippe Delaveau (Paris: Editions Universitaires, 1991), pp. 241-50.
17. Georges Bataille's Madame Edwarda was published under the pseudonym Pierre Angelique in
Paris by Auguste Blaizot [Le Solitaire] in 1942 [1945] with illustrations byJean Perdu [Fautrier].
18. C. F. Monnet, "LeJuif est-il un homme comme vous?," Le CahierJaune 12 (January 1943), pp. 22-23.
19. Georges Montandon, Comment reconnaitre et expliquer leJuif? (Paris: Nouvelles editions francaises,
1940). The Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine currently houses Montandon's archives.
Jacques Darville and Simon Wichene, in their Drancy la Juive ou le 2eme inquisition (Cachan: A. Breger
Fr&res, 1945), refer to a document signed by Montandon used to verify racial status in which he writes
that "After having examined Mme. Elkane and her daughter, I declare that we should consider Mme.
Elkane as Aryan.... Because, given her advanced age (48 to 50 years), she doesn't present any danger of
procreation. As for her daughter Alice, given that her father was Jewish, she is therefore half-Jewish ...
but given her young age, she presents a real danger of interbreeding and it is therefore necessary to
consider herJewish and deport her" (p. 110).
Filled with photographic documents of Jewish physical characteristics-most

notably a hooked nose; thick "negroid" lips; large ears; bulging, moist eyes; curly
hair, and flat feet-the book concludes with a call to arms against the "harmful
role of the Jew," entailing "measures of preservation and protection" and outlining
"the duty to protect one's race, to reestablish its original purity, to give back dignity
and grandeur to a people debased by a century of 'juiverie."'20
But Montandon's activities under Vichy included more than publishing anti-
Semitic tracts. The director of the Institut d'Etude des Questions Juives,
Montandon also served in an official capacity under Vichy as an "ethno-racial"
expert at the Commissariat g6neral aux questions juives, and he had more drastic
and alarming measures of identification than the Jewish star in mind. His solution
to the "question juive" entailed, for men, either death or castration; for the
Jewess, he proposed "an elegant method to make les jolies Juives hide themselves
away."21 His "elegant" solution consisted of a cosmetic surgical operation on Jewish
women under the age of forty (i.e., of childbearing age), in which the end of the
nose-the Jewish nose, of all things!-would be cut off.22 This facial mutilation, a
perverse kind of nose job, would eliminate the threat of sexual attraction to the jolie
Juive and ensure that other "Sarahs" would not go undetected, making them unable
to seduce and ensnare other unsuspecting Pharaohs.
The radical nature of the assault against the body of la jolieJuive is borne out
most graphically in Fautrier's painting of Sarah. In a series characterized by the
unusually small size of its canvases, both Sarah and La Juive are large, full scale
canvases (measuring 116 x 89 cm and 73 x 115.5 cm respectively-as opposed to the
more typical 27 x 22 cm). In a series largely composed of severed Tetes, Sarah and, to
an even greater extent, LaJuive are all body.23 This disparity is most graphically illus-
trated in the only known remaining photograph of the exhibition. As this crucial
document reveals, the serial accumulation of small severed Tetes d'Otages is broken
only by a larger canvas of a nude female body. Separated formally on a slightly
protruding partition in the wall, this canvas, entitled Corps d'Otage, is strikingly simi-
lar to Sarah. Like Sarah, Corps d'Otage represents a profile view of a woman, without
arms, spread-eagle, exposing her pubis, her breasts suggested by a schematic cursive
line. Yet although both paintings are rendered in similar pinkish tones on a green
background, the differences between them are compelling.
In place of Corps d'Otage's attenuated, wasp waist, Sarah's torso is a mess of
exposed, bloody intestines. Sarah's body has lost its integrity: its liquids have overrun
the tissues that should contain them. A stain circumscribes the figure, marking the
20. Montandon, Comment reconnaitre et expliquer leJuif., pp. 87-88.

21. Montandon, "Le probleme des races: L'ethnie juive devant la science" [1938, XCVIII-33], in
Billig, p. 198.
22. Unpublished text by Montandon of August 1940 [XCV-140], in Billig, p. 189.
23. A number of such female torsos were included in the show: Torse defemme, Buste defemme, Femme
suppliciee, and Le corps de lafemme. This formal differentiation within the series between Tete d'Otage and
Torse de femme rehearses the traditional gendered opposition between the head, as locus for thought
and identity, and the body as site or space of the feminine.
Le Juif et la France,
Palais de Berlitz, Paris, 1941-42.
spread of a viscous hemorrhage and engendering a radical ambiguity as to where

the body ends and the ground begins. Coated in greenish, gangrenous tones of
putrefaction, her right leg foreshadows the complete assimilation of rotting flesh
and muddy earth to which the left leg, merely outlined, has already succumbed. But
the disfiguring violence perpetrated against Sarah is of a sexual nature. Where the
vulva on the Corps d'Otage is outlined and exaggerated but intact, in Sarah there is
only a gaping, eroded vaginal cavity which bespeaks violation and rape-and
conjures up all of the associations Sartre brought to bear on the figure of theJewess
as degraded seductress, and particularly that of sadistic attraction.
The summer of 1942 proved pivotal for Fautrier's work in another regard, and
there is, accordingly, a marked difference between the contemporary works Fautrier
shows in his 1942 exhibition Fautrier oeuvres recentes at the Galerie Alfred Poyet, June
3-18, 1942, and his fall 1943 retrospective at Rene Drouin-in technique, materials,
palette, and tone. (Indeed, in between, Fautrier develops and matures the matieriste
style he will become famous for-delicate pastel pigments dusted over a thick,
malleable white enduit applied to paper mounted on canvas.) In May 1942, Hitler's
official sculptor, Arno Breker, mounted a solo retrospective at the Orangerie, which
overshadowed any other single artistic event in Paris during the Occupation.24 As
24. Breker, quite ingenuously, has claimed that although "I was the only German with a public exhibi-
tion like that ... the exhibition was more or less as it would have been in peacetime." Interview with
Breker in David Pryce-Jones, Paris in the Third Reich: A History of the German Occupation, 1940-1944 (New
,, . , 1 _ s j s, *
I t
tih s r. +s e a s _iF o4-
EX#
Above: Exhibition Fautrier, Les Otages, Galerie Rene

Drouin, Paris, 1945. Fautrier Right: Corps d'Otage.
1943. Below left: Tete d'Otage no. 20. 1944. Below
right: Tete d'Otage no. 1. 1943. ?ADAGP, Paris 2004.
62 OCTOBER
fascism's artistic spokesman, Breker wielded considerable authority in Vic

and he consequently enjoyed extensive publicity and critical visibility. It i
safe to say that Fautrier would have been aware of Breker's show at
and the uses to which the Vichy government was putting it.25 But Fautri
personal relationship with the German sculptor that stretched back s
years. Their paths had crossed first in the 1920s, when they met thr
dealer Jeanne Castel, a mutual friend and one of Fautrier's earliest
Moreover, during this period Breker's future wife, Minima, modeled
for a portrait in 1925, as well as for two nudes, entitled Nu assis and Fem
chemise, mettant son bas. The memory of their encounter was apparently
prompt Breker to intercede with the Gestapo on Fautrier's behalf followin
in January of 1943 (again, precisely when Bucarelli contends that Fautrier
series).26 Moreover, Breker's blockbuster exhibit overlapped with Fau
largely overlooked exhibition at the Galerie Poyet. This concurrence
awareness of Breker's critical reception, for their work was reviewed
publications (most notably La Gerbe, Je Suis partout, and Les Nouveaux te
less of the ideological bent of the journals in question, we know that, at t
Fautrier read the articles devoted to him.27
Following this encounter, and further encouraged by his critical reception
during the war, Fautrier's work slowly begins to resemble a polemic against the fas-
cist ideal epitomized in Breker's work. Where Breker presents the body in health,
Fautrier offers up the body in pain and death. Breker's universe is peopled by tri-
umphant, heroic soldiers-musclemen who advertise Aryan, masculine virtues
and indeed virility itself. As Abel Bonnard, Vichy's Minister of Education,
exclaimed in his address for the inauguration of Breker's exhibition: "You are the
York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1981), p. 220. And this after he states that during his press conference,
he reassured "the assembled journalists that I did not want them writing in admiration because they
thought they ought to. I could guarantee that nobody who was critical would be harmed, and when I
said that, frantic applause broke out."
25. Breker made an occasional appearance at the salon of Florence Gould on Thursdays in her
apartment on the avenue Malakoff. In regular attendance were Paulhan and the critic Marcel Arland
(who also wrote on Fautrier), Marcel Jouhandeau, Paul Leautaud, Gerhardt Heller, Ernst Junger, and
Abel Bonnard (minister of national education in the Vichy government). Several painters also attend-
ed frequently, such as van Dongen and Vlaminck-both later charged with collaboration-as well as
Jean Dubuffet and Braque. For more on these strange bedfellows, see David Boal, Journaux intimes sous
l'occupation (Paris: Armand Colin Editeur, 1993). There is no evidence that Fautrier ever attended.
26. In 1975, Breker wrote a flattering article on Fautrier entitled "Jean Fautrier Peintre et
Sculpteur," for DossierFautrier, which was republished in 1989 by Les Cahiers bleus (Troyes), pp. 65-66. It
concludes with an editorial note: "During the Occupation of France by the German forces, Arno
Breker was able to save Jean Fautrier and Picasso." The Arno Breker Museum in Bonn has several
Fautrier drawings and a bronze sculpture in its collection.
27. Fautrier's correspondence with Paulhan suggests his disappointment with the negative press his
exhibitions received, referring to the "insipid list from Vanderpyl to Jean-Marc Campagne." Letter no.
48 [1944], in Marcel-Andre Stalter, Recherches sur la vie et l'oeuvre deJean Fautrier (1898-1964) de leurs
commencements a 1940: Essai de catalogue methodique et d'interpretation, 9 vols., doctoral thesis, Universite
de la Sorbonne Paris IV, 1982, p. 1074. Moreover, Campagne's second article on Fautrier contains an
anonymous letter clearly sent by Fautrier, in which the artist calls the critic "a false prophet."
sculptor of heroes."28 Fautrier envisions himself,

rather, as the painter of the infirm, the wounded, the
victim, showcasing what Andre Malraux later called a
"hieroglyphics of pain."29 Even when Breker repre-
sents the body of the wounded, as in The Wounded
Soldier, the body remains intact; the "wound" is
staged psychologically and not materially. Breker's '
figure is still undeniably a soldier-a trained fighter
whose pain will be the vehicle to his heroism.30
Where Breker presents the body as whole and
intact, Fautrier offers dispersion and fragmentation.
L'Ecorche is one long serpentine limb of palpitating
viscera, flayed of its skin. LaJuive, too, has undergone
a radical anatomical contraction; decapitated and
28. "Discours prononce par M. Abel Bonnard, Ministre secr6taire d'Etat a l'Education a
l'Inauguration de l'exposition Arno Breker a l'Orangerie des Tuileries, le 15 mai 1942."
29. Andre Malraux, "Les Otages," preface toJean Fautrier les Otages (Paris: Galerie Rene Drouin, 1945).
30. See Steven Kasher, "The Art of Hitler," October 59 (Winter 1992). Kasher writes that Breker's statues
were "erected to stand ready to fight the whole array of those defined by the Nazis as Untermenschen ...
these are musclemen who are acting as guards; they are cocked, primed to release a potential blow. What
they guard is Fuhrer, Reich, and Volk-and Manhood itself' (p. 49).
Breker's exaltation of virility was echoed in contemporary French literature as well. The collabora-
tionist writer Drieu la Rochelle advocated a "philosophy of force" that privileged order, equilibrium,
potency, and "manliness." He defined beauty as "a certain stiffening of all the forces in man" (Drieu
la Rochelle, LeJeune Europeen [1927] p. 31), and claimed: "What I like about fascism is a certain virile
Top: Arno Breker Wounded Soldier. 1937. Bottom: Opening speech by

Abel Bonnard with Drieu La Rochelle, Otto Abetz, Jean Cocteau, Aristide
Maillol in attendance. ? Breker Museum, MARCO-VR, Bonn.
64 OCTOBER
?C) ADAGP, Paris 2004.
dismembered, she is reduced to a rounded, amorphous trunk. This metonymic

abbreviation is carried even further in Les Seins Nus of 1945 but is characteristic of
the series as a whole; a mass of membra disjecta-heads, hands, torsos-the Otages are
characterized by this predilection for the partial object.
Where Breker's academic, classicizing work appears timeless and universal,
Fautrier's, with its eroded surfaces and rough textures, evokes the cast-off and the
ruined. Moreover, Fautrier's scratchings and excoriations into the thick impasto
denote a deliberate return to the "primitive" trace, a provocation to the fascist
censure of the degenerate. Athe ee e he monumental scale of Breker's work, and the
authority this commands, stands in stark contrast to the conspicuously small format
of most of the Otages, their modest size provoking a more private, intimate rela-
tionship with the viewer. Based upon the soldier as prototype, the phallic virtues
of the fascist ideal and its cult of hardness provide a paradigm that Fautrier's
"feminine" aesthetic-with its seductive chromatic choices, excremental pate,
primitivizing graffito, and preoccupation with bodily decay-challenges.31
It is, therefore, not only in the semantic resonances of their charged titles
that Fautrier's Sarah and La Juive engage with fascist aesthetics, although this
certainly helps point us in the right direction. Fautrier marks his paintings in
another way, such that the names or titles are almost incidental; he inscribes this
index of 'Jewishness" into the very fabric of his paintings. As we shall see, this is
most probably whatJean Paulhan meant when he warned Fautrier in the spring of
1943, prior to his first exhibition at Ren6 Drouin, a retrospective entitled Fautrier
disposition." October 5, 1939, Journal, in Robert Soucy, Fascist Intellectual (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1979).
31. Francis Ponge was the first of many critics to insist that "Fautrier represents the feminine side of
painting." See his "Note sur les Otages" (Paris: Pierre Seghers, 1946), reprinted in L'Atelier contemporain
(Paris: Gallimard, 1977).
Oeuvres 1915-1943, which opened on November 18, 1943:32 "We are running risks;
you can't deny that. The exhibition might shock."33 However, if this was so, it was not
due to any seemingly overt anti-fascist gesture on Fautrier's part; the titles were
innocuous, as was the subject matter-primarily still lifes, landscapes, and the occa-
sional Tete de jeune femme or Tete de la Parisienne. No Otages in sight (although these
Tetes in more ways than one lead the way for the series) and certainly no Jewesses, as
was to be expected given the presence of Nazi censors. So in what way are we to
understand Paulhan's admonition? What specific dangers was Fautrier courting?
What risks was he taking? And why would the exhibition have shocked?
All we need do, in fact, to answer these questions is to consult the critical recep-
tion of Fautrier's two exhibitions during the Occupation-a body of documents that
have been stunningly overlooked in the art historical literature. Two injurious articles
reviewing Fautrier's exhibition at Poyet were published in the collaborationist
newspaper Les Nouveaux Temps in June 1942.34 They are authored by Jean-Marc
Campagne, an art critic who had most recently written the preface to Breker's
exhibition catalog.35 Needless to say, Campagne-accused during the epuration of
having belonged to the group Collaboration and of having written brochures of
Nazi propaganda against French art, most notably his preface for Breker's exhibi-
tion-does not mince words. He indicts Fautrier as "the number one example of
the decline of French painting referred to by Vlaminck."36 Pointing to Fautrier's
"forms in gestation and his muted colors," Campagne finds that the artist "loses
himself in 'ectoplasmic' studies."37 Not only was Campagne disturbed by Fautrier's
abject preoccupation with death and decay (for, at Paulhan's urging, Fautrier had
included several of his early corpses and skinned animals in the 1943 retrospec-
tive, most notably L'Homme ouvert of 1929, but also Les Peaux de lapins [1926] and
32. The show consisted of forty-six paintings, five sculptures, six prints, and twenty-one drawings,
of which well over half were dated between 1942-43. The catalog included an essay by Paulhan
entitled "La critique n'a jamais tort," later revised and published by Auguste Blaizot as Fautrier
l'enrag ein 1949.
33. Paulhan to Fautrier, letter number 275 (June 1943) in Jean Paulhan Choix de lettres 1937-1945:
Traite des jours sombres, vol. 2, ed. Dominique Aury and Jean-Claude Zylberstein (Paris: Gallimard, 1992),
pp. 318-19.
34. Jean-Marc Campagne, "Art sterile et art vivant," Les Nouveaux Temps (June 10, 1942), p. 2, and
"Les Beaux Arts," Les Nouveaux Temps (June 24, 1942), p. 2. Directed by Jean Luchaire, Les Nouveaux
Temps was one of the main ideological organs of the Collaboration, created to facilitate and ameliorate
the collaboration between the Vichy government and Nazi Germany. See Claude Levy's Les Nouveaux
Temps et l'ideologie de la Collaboration (Paris: Armand Colin, 1974).
35. Exposition Arno Breker a l'Orangerie, May 15-July 31, 1942 (Berlin: O. von Holten, 1942).
Campagne also authored several articles on Breker for Les Nouveaux Temps: an interview on May 15,
1942, and two articles on his work on May 17 and May 21, 1942.
36. Jean-Marc Campagne, "Les Beaux Arts," Les Nouveaux Temps (June 24 1942), p. 2. The reference
is to Vlaminck's well-known article of the same month in the review Comoedia in which he accuses
Picasso of having driven French art "to negation, to powerlessness, to death." Maurice de Vlaminck
"Opinions libres ... sur la peinture," Comoedia (June 6, 1942), pp. 1-6.
37. Jean-Marc Campagne, "Art sterile et art vivant," p. 2. This article, in which Fautrier and t
Russian Jew Tereckovitch (whose painting is described as "from nowhere" and "typicallyJewish") ser
as exemplars of "l'art sterile," invites comparisons to the rabid anti-Semitic attacks by the critics Fritz
66 OCTOBER
La Mort du sanglier [1926], as well as a more recent Le Lapin ecorche [1

he was likewise unsettled by Fautrier's eroded, scarified surfaces and rough t
that evoke primitive cave paintings. Taking Fautrier to task for de
mimicking "dilapidated statues and excavation shards," Campagne concl
tirade by classifying Fautrier among the adherents of "morbid pain
Jewish painting."38
* By far the most illuminating of the documents is a small review in
Brasillach's fiercely collaborationist and anti-Semitic journal Je Suis Parto
by Pierre Jeannet-perhaps a pen name of the man who was officially his
Suis Partout, the pro-Nazi art critic Lucien Rebatet-the review de
Fautrier's most recent work in the harshest terms:
We cannot recommend this exhibition highly enough to those of you

who love strong sensations. If you want an aperqu of "folie furieuse,"
you will definitely find it before these "mauve landscapes" or "yellow
landscapes" or "pink apple trees" which consist of taking color and
spreading it out on the canvas and throwing over this a black or grey
trail, like the streaks of a burst motorcycle tire. And wham! some trails,
some smoke etc.... and painting by the kilo. What debauchery, good
lord! What a waste of canvas which could have been more usefully
employed for making sheets or baby diapers.39
The antagonism of the review is unmistakable. When Jeannet sees Fautrier's

mauve, yellow, and pink paintings, he sees red. For him, Fautrier's work signifies
excess and debauchery; there is no balance or restraint. It is too extravagant in its
matiere ("painting by the kilo") and too lavish in its color ("folie furieuse"). The
allusion to baby diapers-which hold bodily discharges, a metaphor for Fautrier's
matiere-makes explicit reference to the concept of the excremental, one which
will become a constant refrain in the reception of Fautrier's work. Moreover, the
Je Suis Partout critic refers to the psychoanalytic discourse of hysteria (which has
been based historically upon the excess and abandon of the specifically female
body), when he describes Fautrier's palette as exhibiting all the signs of a "folie
furieuse." The symptoms of Fautrier's pathology are his "sick" colors-mauve, yel-
low, and pink-which connote infirmity and depravity.
Vanderpyl in L'Art sans Patrie, un Mensonge (subtitled Le Pinceau d'Israel [1942]) and Camille Mauclair in
his La Crise de l'art moderne (Paris: Imprimerie C.E.A., 1944).
38. Ibid.
39. PierreJeannet, "Fautrier," Je Suis Partout (November 26, 1943), p. 4. M
Under Vichy: A Case of Prejudice and Persecution (Princeton: Princeton Unive
without any evidence, that "Jeannet" was a pseudonym, as was "l'Encadreu
notorious anti-Semite, Rebatet was responsible for artistic matters at the Inst
Juives (whose most elaborate propagandistic undertaking was the exhibitio
above). Rebatet's pro-Nazi mission as art critic atJe suis partout was to "Aryan
columns, and most notably one entitled "Entre le Juif et le Pompier" (Je
1941), are driven by his call for "Aryanization," an artistic purification design
virus" out of the arts.
Jean Fautrier's Jolies Juives 67
Michele Cone, in her study Artists under Vichy, provides us with a partial
explanation forJeannet's hostile reaction to Fautrier's unsettling use of color and
excremental effusions; she writes that during this period "any image that could be
interpreted as metaphorically representing disequilibirum, disorder, decay ...
paintings, as Rebatet noted, with 'purplish colors reminiscent of Jewish putres-
cence'-suggested Jewishness."40 The alignment of "Jewish putrescence" in
Rebatet's statement is understood as a trope of fascist rhetoric wherein the Jewish
is offered as emblematic of, and rendered synonymous with, decadence and decay.
But, it is the encoding of color, and of "purplish colors" or yellow or pink in
particular, as "Jewish putrescence" that should give us pause. For Rebatet, the
color purple was an arbitrary signifier of what Camille Mauclair, in another
context, called a "g6utjuif."41 The color pink registered in a similar way; as a signi-
fier of the feminization of the male body, pink was the color of the triangular sign
that marked homosexuals in the concentration camps. Ultimately the exclama-
tion "What debauchery!" cannot but be read as a fascist denunciation of excess,
and, by extension, a condemnation of intermixing (blue and red) and diluting
(red and white) colors.
And, it should be said, Fautrier foregrounds his colors; he calls attention to
them in the works' titles themselves. A significant number of the works shown in
the 1943 show specify color-"decadent" color-in their title: Les Pommiers roses,
Les Pommes vertes, Paysage mauve, Le Paysage jaune. This concern with the semantic
resonance of color will be carried over to the Otages exhibition of 1945, in which
of the forty-six paintings shown, only four works were distinguished by an adjec-
tive in their title and of these, three are designated by color. Numbers thirty-seven
and thirty-eight in the exhibition catalog stand out against the monotonous mass
40. Lucien Rebatet, "Les Independants,"Je Suis Partout (March 21, 1941), p. 7, in Cone, Artists Under
Vichy, p. 23. The association of the Jewish body and disease (as diseased) has a long history in France,
one dating at least back to the Dreyfus affair at the turn of the century, during which Jews were
referred to as kikes, pimps, lice, plagues, cancers, and filthy beings. See Susan Zucotti, The Holocaust
and the Jews (New York: Basic Books, 1993) and Jean-Louis Bredin, The Affair: The Case of Alfred Dreyfus,
trans. Jeffrey Melman (New York: George Braziller, 1986). Disseminated within the pages of the very
same Vichy publications that reviewed Fautrier's work are caricatures that depict the Jew as a cancer, a
sickness, an insidious microscopic virus. Au Pilori, a fascist journal devoted to the fight against "judeo-
marxism," announced: "We get rid of lice. We combat epidemics. We fight against microbial invasions.
We defend ourselves against evil, against death ... therefore against the Jews" (Au Pilori, March 14,
1941). Xavier Vallat, Vichy's first commissioner general for Jewish affairs, in an address to students of
public administration in the spring of 1942, comparedJews to "worms who are attracted by gangrenous
wounds" (in Marrus and Paxton, p. 284). Furthermore, the guide to the 1941 exhibition LeJuifet la
France concludes with the sweeping statement: "The Jews dirty, corrupt, spoil, corrode, degrade, debase
everything they touch." Marques Riviere, "Pourquoi une exposition juive," in Le Guide de l'exposition, Le
Juifet la France, p. 30.
41. Mauclair, La Crise de l'art moderne, pp. 30-32. Although he never reviewed Fautrier's work,
Mauclair had much to say aboutJewish painting and theJewish taste for the informe: "TheJewish taste
for ugliness and perversion is deep-seated." All that is bad, decadent, dirty, perverted is encoded as
Jewish, and foreign. Mauclair's statement is a stream of virulent anti-Semitic slurs, held together by an
overwhelming fear of the encroachment "du gout de l'informe." On Mauclair, see Romy Golan's excel-
lent article "From Fin de Siecle to Vichy: The Cultural Hygenics of Camille (Faust) Mauclair," in The Jew
in the Text, ed. Nochlin and Garb, pp. 156-73.
68 OCTOBER
of numerically identified bodies: Cadavre jaune and Grande tete jaune,

are identified by that mostJewish of colors, yellow.
The color yellow-of the Jewish Star, of Le CahierJaune (a public
included Rebatet on its editorial board) -had connotations of disease
Furthermore, starting at least as early as the turn of the century, the
functioned as a symbol of Jewish degeneracy and bespoke the orien
theJewish body. Fautrier's jaundiced images evoked all this.42
In light of the reception Fautrier endured in 1942 and 1943,
more telling that he was secretly at work on two paintings of Jewess
faced with the critical reviews from the earlier shows, Fautrier not o
change his predilection for "deranged" color and "morbid painting,"
ates it; he pushes it even further. Thus Daniel Wallard wrote that Faut
compromised by his exhibition of 1943 ... aggravates his case by prese
gallery Rene Drouin close to forty paintings that he calls 'les Otages."'
of such negative criticism seems to have been that of reassuring Faut
was, more than ever, on the right track, and he only exaggerated the
he had inaugurated during the early 1940s-pumping up his pate and
ever more pastel mauves, frothy pinks, and sulfuric yellows into his palet
This process is most vividly manifest in the passage from Sarah to LaJ
all there: the adoption of increasingly cloying, decadent colors "free
rational connection with torture," an evolution Malraux charted in th
the exhibition;45 the rotation from the vertical to the horizontal axis; the transi-
tion from the specific to the generic and from the figurative to the abstract, where
the head and truncated limbs have been eliminated, leaving in their place an elegant
centralized figure embedded in thick, viscous paste. In this sense, Sarah is the proto-
type-one might say matriarch-not only of Fautrier's earliest Nus in the matieriste
technique (LaJolie fille, Le cadavre de lafemme, and Lafemme supplicie, all of which are
replete with disturbing suggestions of sadism and sexual violence) but of the Otages
series as a whole. Staged as it is on the body of La Jolie Juive, Fautrier's aesthetic
reorientation between 1942 and 1944 is, at least in part, a strategic, dialogic
response to his antagonistic critics.
42. On the connection between Jewish decadence, illness, and the color yellow, see Sander Gilman,
"Salome, Syphilis, Sarah Bernhardt, and the Modern Jewess," in The Jew in the Text, pp. 97-120. The role
of Salome also falls into the destructive joliejuive stereotype of which Sartre wrote; her demand for the
head of John the Baptist was conflated in the fin-de-siecle period with Judith's seduction and behead-
ing of Holofernes. For more on the color yellow and the stigmatizing of various outsiders, including
Jews, see Steven Connor's excellent analysis in his Book of Skin (London: Reaktion Books, 2004). Citing
the work of Michel Pastoureau, Connor illustrates how yellow has lost its semantic prestige in the west
and become the color of aging, disease, and excremental substances.
43. Daniel Wallard, "Les Otages de Fautrier," Poesie (January 1946), p. 86.
44. After his 1943 retrospective at Drouin, Fautrier officially renounced his early work. Thus, he
confided to Jean Paulhan in 1944, "I am aware that I find myself before an art [his early work] that is
definitely dead for me." Fautrier to Paulhan [1944], in Stalter, Recherches sur la vie et l'oeuvre de Jean
Fautrier (1898-1964), p. 1073.
45. Malraux, preface to Les Otages; reprinted in Fautrier 1898-1964 (Paris: Musee d'art moderne de la
Ville de Paris, 1989), p. 222.
The antagonism that Fautrier's develop-

q^^BPI ^^^^^ ing matiriste aesthetic encountered during the
Occupation might be read as symptomatic-
'^ _' J an aversion the fascist would have had to the
,1U L , J representation and evocation of the degener-
B' it~ it'. ate. As Klaus Theweleit has theorized, it is
against the fear of disease and dissolution that
the fascist phallus is erected, as a defense
,.fj against the threat of contamination-the
contamination of life by death, health by infir-
mity, and masculinity by femininity.46 Sarah
~ 'f 'n B , and LaJuive deliberately provoke the abhor-
rence of disease and pollution that lies at the
.,~?B^^~' ^.a^. .core of fascist ideology, goading its anxiety
* sF!";- -, toward filth, abjection, and impotence. Not
only do they activate the topos of the dead
woman, they collapse the semantic axes of gender and "race." The double line in La
Juive, once in pink, twice in purple, that denotes the curve of the breasts, is doubled,
conflating the feminine and the Jewish. A multiplication of hyperbolic breasts and
buttocks, LaJuive is sexual excess, the opposite pole from the chaste, desexualized,
self-controlled virility fascism promoted. Eroticism is projected onto the Other. As
the tits-and-ass in LaJuive stand for Woman, so too does Sarah stand for the Jewess,
and the Jewess stands in metonymically for the Other. In one image Fautrier has
amassed all of the categories most threatening to and despised by the fascist-the
feminine, theJewish, and the corpse.
Aren 't we accomplices ?
-Francis Ponge47
Today, LaJuive is accorded privileged status in the Mus6e d'art moderne de la

Ville de Paris. Hung at the entrance to the contemporary galleries, she advertises
an enlightened, socially conscious postwar French art; her title is the ultimate sign
of the politically committed, "engage" artist. In recent years, scholars have assumed
(wishful thinking?) that LaJuive and, for that matter, Sarah were exhibited in 1945.
Tellingly, neither painting was shown at Drouin in 1945-or, at least under these
titles. La Juive remained in the artist's personal collection and was not let out of
hiding until the late 1950s. It was not shown in France until 1964, the year of
46. Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, trans. Stephen Conway (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1987). Theweleit notes that of all the categories, "more dangerous still is the Jewish woman, within
whom all the threats cluster together" (p. 13).
47. Ponge, "Note sur les Otages," p. 23.
Fautrier LaJolie fille. 1944.

? ADAGP, Paris 2004.
70 OCTOBER
Fautrier's death; Sarah would only see the light of day in France in 19
occasion of Michel Couturier's Otages 1942-45 exhibition.48
If Fautrier had indeed wanted to provoke by using such loaded, at
grabbing titles, why was neither work exhibited in the inaugural Otage
believe that the answer lies in the fact that by the time Fautrier exhibited t
as a series in late 1945, the context had changed irrevocably.49 As incon
it would have been to exhibit either La Juive or Sarah during the Occu
was-disturbingly-equally so in the immediate postwar period. The reco
tion was driven by what Kristin Ross calls a national psychic need for a "red
hygiene."50 Often referred to as "l'ann6e z6ro," the year 1945 promised t
beginning, a slate wiped clean of the experience of four defiling
Occupation. To have introduced a figure such as LaJuive, which, as Sar
carried "an aura of rape and massacre with it," into this context would h
sore reminder to many of a most uncomfortable chapter in recent Fren
a period that many would have just as soon forgotten. As the historian
Rousso has demonstrated, the postwar period was caught in the seductiv
phenomenon he calls the "Vichy Syndrome."51 Promoting the myth of "resis
ism," according to which all but a small minority of French had been
involved in the Resistance, the French practiced a sort of memory lap
came to their support for and complicity with the policies and ideology
Moreover, Michael Marrus has corroborated this disturbing syndrome
that anti-Semitism was at its height immediately after the war.52 Safel
under a collective amnesia, the Reconstruction could proceed.
What brings this point home most dramatically is the fact that Fau
include a painting that made clear reference to current events. Oradour
alone stands out from the mass of undifferentiated, generic titles featu
exhibition. This haunting repetition of ghostly profiles is the only painting
48. La Juive was shown in several exhibitions abroad prior to Fautrier's 1964 retrosp
Musee d'art moderne de la Ville de Paris: in Germany in 1958, at the Venice Biennale in
Fautrier was awarded the Grand International Prize), and in Sweden in 1963. It was don
Musee d'art moderne de la Ville de Paris after his death in 1966.
49. Marcel Arland astutely noted that Fautrier was the victim of an unfortunate case of bad timing:
"Is it because the circumstances have changed.... I no longer see the tragic allure I found to be their
[the Otages'] primary virtue when I saw them at the house of a certain friend [Paulhan no doubt] who
was in hiding and could have become a hostage himself." Arland, "Les Otages de Fautrier," XXeme
Siecle, November 11, 1945.
50. Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 1995), p. 75.
51. Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France Since 1944 (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1991).
52. See Michael Marrus, "Are the French Anti-Semitic?" in Jews in Modern France, ed. Frances Malino
and Bernard Wasserstein (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1985). Raymond Aron has
written of de Gaulle's role in breaking the taboo that was holding anti-Semitism back: "General de Gaulle
has knowingly, voluntarily, opened a new period ofJewish history and possibly of anti-Semitism. Everything
becomes possible again. Everything resumes. No question, certainly, of persecution: only of 'ill will."' Aron,
"Le temps du soupcon," in De Gaulle, Israel et leJuifs (Paris: Plon, 1968), p. 18.
-p Wl 7y S S 1945 that identifies a specific Otage victim or

P '"^ ' "~?' B Xvictims. A village in Central France, near
t ~iogfo-.; ^^ Limoges, Oradour-sur-Glane was the site of a
brutal massacre of 643 men, women, and
children carried out by the retreating Nazi
army.53 On June 10, 1944, four days after the
' 1 < Allied landing in Normandy, German soldiers
set the entire village and its inhabitants on fire
after having shot the men to death by machine
gun and locked the women and children up in
the town church where they were burned alive.
"Oradour" became the sign of French victimiza-
J ^I v . tion at the hands of the invading Nazi forces: an
unequivocal symbol of French innocence before
unspeakable Nazi aggression.54 Moreover, the
dissemination of information about this tragedy
in the French press played a significant role during the Liberation in rallying and
consolidating public opinion against the German forces. The underlying message
behind the painting Oradour-sur-Glane was that, like those slaughtered at
Oradour, all French were, and had been, victims-or, better yet, hostages under
the Occupation.55
LaJuive would have carried an altogether different message. Rather than elicit-
ing identification, she would have signified Otherness. Whereas with Oradour, the full
horror of the Occupation was placed squarely (and safely) in the hands of the Nazi
aggressor, the inclusion of two Jewesses in the 1945 exhibition would have invariably
suggested the complicity-and duplicity-of the French audience.56 Ponge, in fact,
53. Apparently provoked by partisan fire upon the retreating German army, mistakenly attributed
to the inhabitants of Oradour-sur-Glane, German soldiers set the entire village and its citizens on fire.
The most recent and comprehensive account of the massacre at Oradour is by Sarah Farmer, Arret suir
memoire (Paris: Galmann-Levy, 1994), translated as Martyred Village: Commemorating the 1944 Massacre at
Oradour-sur-Glane (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). Farmer explains how the history of
the commemoration of Oradour-sur-Glane was "emptied of its political particularities in order to
become universalized as the ultimate victimization-an archetypal atrocity that could stand as a symbol
for the suffering of France" (p. 58).
54. Today it is designated a "lieu historique." At the head of the last clandestine issue of the Lettres
francaises, which Paulhan founded with Jacques Decour and Jacques Debu-Bridel, was a dirge by Jean
Tardieu entitled "Oradour." A special issue was also published concurrently entitled "Sur les ruines de
la morale: Oradour-sur-Glane." It offered an eyewitness report of the horrors one husband and father
found upon his arrival in Oradour.
55. Ponge, "Note sur les Otages," p. 23. Thus, in his important article "Note sur les Otages,
Peintures de Jean Fautrier" that was published in conjunction with the exhibition, Ponge acknowl-
edged a pervasive, "anti-German unanimity" and a prevailing "desire to kill the torturer" in a "revengeful
wrath"; he demonizes the Nazis as cannibals and he reassures his readers: "Neither you, Sir (dear con-
noisseur), nor I, are savages." Significantly, both Oradour-sur-Glane and the generic Corps d'Otage were
selected as illustrations for Ponge's text. TheJewish Otages were omitted.
56. By the end of 1944, close to 76,000Jews had been deported from France to Nazi killing centers.
Of these, only 3 percent survived. See Marrus and Paxton, Vichy France and theJews.
Fautrier Oradour-sur-Glane. 1944.

?ADAGP, Paris 2004.
72 OCTOBER
alludes to this when he does what amounts to a textual double take and asks: "But
aren't we accomplices?"
This question of where Fautrier positions the audience is borne out in a most
poignant way in the ink-black fingerprints that skirt and punctuate many of the
Otages.57 They function as indexical markers of the artist's tactile, corporeal engage-
ment; as witnesses testifying to physical presence; as signs of sexual possession if not
erotic violence; as a mocking comment on the fetishization of the "sacred touch" and
the autographic stroke. But fingerprints also resonate with references to the policing
of the criminal body; they provide a physical trace of the criminal's presence at the
scene of the crime.58 In the Otages, this incriminating evidence serves to raise the
question of culpability. After all, the issue of establishing guilt and innocence was at
the forefront of the cultural agenda during these years of the epuration.59 In court-
houses and town squares, criminals-those charged with colluding with the Nazi
occupier-were being denounced, heckled, shorn, and executed as the purges swept
the country. Sartre pushed this one step further when he extended criminality to
desire. Immediately following the passage that serves as my opening epigraph he
wrote: "The anti-Semite is, in the very depths of his heart, a criminal. What he wishes,
what he prepares for, is the death of theJew"-or, in this case, theJewess.60
With Sarah, the viewer is implicated, thrust into the position of the criminal,
the executioner. Standing over the woman, lying ravaged on the ground, our hands
are dirty. Ultimately, the Otages-but most acutely Sarah and LaJuive, with their
sensuous colors and material effusions-force the viewer to find beauty in bodily
mutilation and decomposition. In so doing, they compel one to consider the
possibility of complicity with the enemy, the torturer. In a review of David Rousset's
Les jours de notre mort (1947), an account of life in a concentration camp, Georges
Bataille joined the chorus of voices that cautioned "But we are not only the potential
victims of the executioners; the executioners are just like us.... Our potential is thus
not only that of pain, it extends to the rage to torture."61
57. For more on this subject, see my Ph.D. dissertation, "Retour a l'Ordure: Defilement in the
Postwar Work of Jean Dubuffet andJean Fautrier," Harvard University, 2000.
58. See Allan Sekula on the use of the fingerprint in the criminal archive in "The Body and the
Archive," October39 (Winter 1986), pp. 3-64.
59. The number of casualties the ipuration took has been the subject of a great deal of debate. In
February 1945, the Socialist Minister of the Interior, Adrien Tixier, reported a greatly exaggerated 105,000
victims. This number was brought down more recently by Robert Aron in his Histoire de l'epuration to
30,000-40,000. Peter Novick revised these sensationalized reports and provides the now generally accept-
ed figure of 9,673 executions. On the subject, see Aron, Histoire de l'Epuration (Paris: Fayard, 1967-75);
Pierre Assouline, L'Epuration des intellectuels, 1944-1945 (Brussels: Editions Complexe, 1985); Herbert
Lottman, The Purge (New York: William Morrow and Co., Inc., 1986); and Novick, The Resistance vs. Vichy:
The Purge of Collaborators in Liberated France (New York: Basic Books, 1968). Sarah Wilson briefly examines
the Otages in relation to the purges in her article "Paris Post War: In Search of the Absolute," in Frances
Morris, Paris Post War: Art and Existentialism 1945-55 (London: Tate Gallery, 1993), p. 27.
60. Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, p. 49.
61. Georges Bataille, "Reflexions sur le bourreau et la victime: SS et d6portes," Critique 17 (October
1947), in Allan Stoekl, Politics, Writing, Mutilation: The Cases of Bataille, Blanchot, Roussel, Leiris, and Ponge
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), p. 95.

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Jean Fautrier's Jolies Juives

Author(s): Rachel E. Perry

There is in the words "a beautiful Jewess" a very special sexual

in Paris. Brought together under an attention-grabbing and politica

Fautrier. LaJuive. 1943. ? ADA

of hostages taking place in the neighboring woods.4 The Otages, as the

Ponge corroborates this chronology

lot to do." Archives Paulhan in the Institut Me

Fautrier Left: Le Fusille. 1943. Right:

remaining works in the exhibition at Drouin, with the significant exception of

To denounce opponents in political or cultural life, Nazi propagan-

cited the biblical narrative of Sarah's passing herself off as Abraham's

Filled with photographic documents of Jewish physical characteristics-most

20. Montandon, Comment reconnaitre et expliquer leJuif., pp. 87-88.

spread of a viscous hemorrhage and engendering a radical ambiguity as to where

tih s r. +s e a s _iF o4-

Above: Exhibition Fautrier, Les Otages, Galerie Rene

fascism's artistic spokesman, Breker wielded considerable authority in Vic

sculptor of heroes."28 Fautrier envisions himself,

Top: Arno Breker Wounded Soldier. 1937. Bottom: Opening speech by

?C) ADAGP, Paris 2004.

dismembered, she is reduced to a rounded, amorphous trunk. This metonymic

La Mort du sanglier [1926], as well as a more recent Le Lapin ecorche [1

We cannot recommend this exhibition highly enough to those of you

The antagonism of the review is unmistakable. When Jeannet sees Fautrier's

of numerically identified bodies: Cadavre jaune and Grande tete jaune,

The antagonism that Fautrier's develop-

Aren 't we accomplices ?

Today, LaJuive is accorded privileged status in the Mus6e d'art moderne de la

Fautrier LaJolie fille. 1944.

-p Wl 7y S S 1945 that identifies a specific Otage victim or

Fautrier Oradour-sur-Glane. 1944.

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