Jean Fautrier was born in Paris in 1898. In 1908 his mother moved with him to London, where Fautrier took painting lessons. Beginning in 1909 he studied at the Royal Academy and the Slade School of Art. In 1917 he returned to Paris for war service. From 1920 to 1921 he lived in Tyrol, and in 1923 he exhibited his work for the first time in Paris. He developed a gestural style of painting in the 1920s, and in doing so became a precursor of Art Informel. For financial reasons he worked as a skiing instructor in the Alps and ran a hotel from 1934 to 1938, with little time to paint. 1940 found him once more in Paris. He began painting in a pastose manner, creating relief-like surface structures. In the late 1940s he developed his Originaux Multiples, a reproduction method that made it possible to produce almost identical versions of original works. At the 30th Venice Biennale he was awarded the Grand Prize for Painting. He died in 1964 in Châtenay-Malabry.
