Summary of Matter Painting
Matter Painting refers to any approach to painting in which materials other than pigment and water are mixed in with them. In this sense, the phrase takes in a vast sweep of global art history, from the ancient cave painters who bound their pigment with animal fat, to the egg tempura masters of the Italian Renaissance. The term is generally used, however, to refer to the Art Informel movement of the mid twentieth century, based mostly in France but spreading all over Europe, whose artists experimented with a huge array of materials, from sand and pebbles to cement and glass, to give their paintings texture and verve. These were some of the most extraordinary, radically adventurous painters of the twentieth century, including Jean Dubuffet, Alberto Burri, and others, united by a desire to break away from all canonical and tutored approaches to art-making. In this sense, Matter Painting is a hallmark of some of the most thrilling canvas-based art created in the last 100 years.
Key Ideas & Accomplishments
- By incorporating found materials into paint, the Matter Painters were rejuvenating a tradition that stretched back to the beginning of time. The earliest human artists, after all, are believed to have mixed natural pigments and water with materials such as animal fat, plant juices, ground-up crustaceans and insects, charcoal, even saliva, urine, and excrement. In this sense, Matter Painting taps into an ancient creative heritage, giving the style a raw, primal power.
- One of the great achievements of Matter Painting was to find a wholly original creative space in-between painting and sculpture. While the assemblages of Dada and Cubism had incorporated found objects into wall-based artworks, Matter Painters such as Bram Bogart achieved a totally new effect. Using nothing more than the paint itself, and the materials and matter mixed in with it, they created paintings whose huge brushstrokes bulged and jutted forth to occupy space like a sculpture. This was a new and thrilling chapter in the development of Abstract Art.
- After the Second World War, artists across Europe were looking to find ways to express the trauma and rage left behind by the conflict, without returning to figurative, subject-led art, which they felt was cliched and untruthful. Matter Painting placed an emphasis on the physical and emotional force of the brushstroke, because of the dramatic presence which paint assumed on the canvas in this type of art. As such, Matter Painting became a unique way of expressing strong and violent emotions without resorting to literalism or allegory.
- In its emphasis on intuitive impulse and abandoning conventional techniques and materials, Matter Painting was closely connected to Art Informel and Art Brut. Like those movements, it influenced many subsequent styles and artists favoring an instinctive and emotional approach, including the Arte Povera movement and German artists Anselm KieferAnselm Kiefer and Joseph Beuys.
Progression of Art
Tête d'Otage no. 20 (Head of a Hostage #20)
French painter Jean Fautrier's most famous series is Les Otages ("The Hostages") (1942-45), which expressed his despair and outrage at the atrocities committed in Nazi-occupied France during World War Two. Fautrier had heard the torture and murder of several civilians from his room at the asylum outside Paris where he was confined at the time, having been arrested by the Gestapo in 1943 as a member of the French Resistance. The Otages series was created during his time in the asylum.
In Les Otages, Fautrier depicts a set of quasi-abstract, decapitated heads, using a haute pâte (high paste) technique, layering a mixture of thick white paste and oil paint heavily and gesturally on the paper. Ink and pigment powder is added to replicate the colors and texture of mutilated flesh. Fearing further persecution for creating politically subversive work, Fautrier only dared sign these works after the war had ended. Art critic Karen Rosenberg writes that, "as works inspired by wartime acts of brutal terror, the 'Otages' are particularly unsettling now - all the more so by virtue of Fautrier's status as a purely aural witness. Tête d'otage #20 (Head of a Hostage #20, 1944) is the most disturbing, its trowelled surface bisected by a stripe the exact colour of oxidized blood." Fautrier later developed the series into prints and sculptures.
Fautrier's Otages shocked audiences when first exhibited in 1945 in Paris at the Galerie René Drouin. French novelist André Malraux referred to the paintings, with their abstracted, disfigured faces, as "the most beautiful monument to the dead of the Second World War," and as "hieroglyphics of pain". Arts writer and collector Castor Seibel notes that "the public had difficulty in perceiving what the artist had wanted to express, and reactions were often sharp: backgrounds appeared to have been mistreated by a trowel, an obvious provocation, although this contrasted with a degree of delicacy in the manner of drawing and an attractive palette. An entire new generation would be inspired by his work. A violent indictment of crime and massacres, his works show us the emergence of reality, beyond simple appearances." More recently, art historian Siegfried Gohr has written that the "rough heads", "isolated against their grounds ... become brutal, brutalized, clotted masses of paint ... powerful emblems for an anguish that is both personal and collective, specific and general".
Oil on paper mounted on canvas - Private Collection, Cologne
Jean Paulhan
The French artist Jean Dubuffet was one of the pioneers of the haute pâte technique. Dubuffet took Fautrier's use of over 50 tubes of white paste for his Les Otages series as a sort of challenge, and set out to create works of immense weight. For his haute pâtes works, Dubuffet carved and etched into thickly applied pastes, creating child-like images. One early example is Jean Paulhan (1946), in which Dubuffet emphasized the subjects's close-set eyes, long nose, broad upper lip, large front teeth, and long unkempt hair. This work comes from a series of 170 portraits of the artist's friends (writers, poets, and visual artists) and is one of 28 portraits of Paulhan, a writer, publisher and trusted critic. Paulhan was very much involved in the process of developing haute pâtes, being gifted a number of Dubuffet's early works in the style (which melted and crumbled around his home), and soliciting advice from the Cubist painter Georges Braques and others as to how Dubuffet could best create the works.
As art historian Rachel E. Perry writes, "Dubuffet was not firmly established in the art world before the unveiling of his [hautes pâtes] in 1946. Loading the support with so much weight was a risky venture - a weighty decision, in both senses of the word - bringing with it entirely unpredictable consequences: notoriety if successful, but real hazards....With paintings so choked with matter, their mass could deter potential clients and negatively impact their salability". Dubuffet's early explorations in hautes pâtes were problematic, with works melting, falling away, and breaking apart from the canvas. He went through a long process of trial and error, trying out various liquid, powder, and paste materials, like chalk, bitumen, lime, cement, varnishes, drying agents, glues, sand, pebbles, shards of mirror, broken bottles, frayed string and twine, straw, gilded tin, asphalt, plaster, caulk, and grout, before finally arriving in 1947 at a base mixture of whiting chalk and rabbit-skin glue.
As Perry reports, when Dubuffet's haute pâtes paintings were first exhibited, "the press erupted with cries of 'cacaïsme' ["feces-ism"] and 'peinture à la merde', pronouncing him a 'peintre en excréments' ["painter in shit]." She goes on to explain that the exhibition's livre d'or (guest book) was "littered with swastikas and the francile, the insignia of Pétain's collaborationist regime, the anonymous comments inscribed in the pages of the Guest Book charge Dubuffet with 'décadence totale', characterising his art as 'judéo-décadent'." The works did not allude to contemporary events but "the materiality of his work raised anxious references to the polemic on decadence waged during the Occupation." For the artist himself, the materials of Matter painting were "living, breathing things, made of vital, vibrant matter" (Perry). "Restless, agitated and spitting", Perry notes, "he viewed his paintings as oversized, overweight animals, heaving and languishing in the heat, exuding beads of perspiration and sticky streams of steamy sweat".
Acrylic and oil on Masonite - Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
It's All Over
German artist Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze, known by his pseudonym "Wols", relocated to Paris in the 1930s, where he came into contact with a number of avant-garde modern artists, most notably the Surrealists. Though he worked primarily as a photographer, he did produce paintings (less than 100 in total) from the mid-1940s onwards. From the Surrealists (particularly Max Ernst), he borrowed the "grattage" technique of scraping sharp objects across oil paint to produce unique surface textures. He also adopted the Surrealists' automatist techniques, allowing the unconscious to guide him as he threw and layered paint onto the canvas.
It's All Over (1946-47) is typical of Wols's Matter paintings, employing dripping, flinging, and grattage techniques, as well as scrape-marks made by dragging paint tubes across the canvas. In many of his paintings, which often recall plant forms and root systems, Schultz layered up different materials, developing sections of impasto and sections of translucent paint. The poet and philosopher Botho Strauss wrote that Wols recorded "the explosion of the brain's activity". On seeing a 1947 exhibition of Wols's work, the French artist and art theorist Georges Mathieu stated that "each of [the pieces] is more shattering, more heart-rending, bloodier than the next: [they are] a considerable event, probably the most important since the works of Van Gogh. The most lucid, evident, moving cry, expressing the tragedy of a man and of all men". Wols's Matter paintings were inspirational to the German artist Bernard Schultze, co-founder of Quadriga, the pioneering group of German Informel painters. The artist, writer, and curator Simon Coates, meanwhile, views Wols as a "progenitor" of Tachisme.
In spite of his influence on his peers, the artist's life was chaotic. Coming from a wealthy, respected family, by his thirties he found himself destitute and a drunk. After moving to Spain in the 1930s, Wols was briefly interned by authorities in Barcelona for not having a residency permit. Crossing the Pyrenees on foot to return to Paris, he was incarcerated again, by the French authorities, between 1939 and 1941 due to his German nationality. During his periods of imprisonment he created art from scraps of paper and other found items as a means of grappling with the horrors of war and the injustices that he was experiencing. Wols died (supposedly from food poisoning, though the circumstances are unclear) in 1951 at the age of just 38.
Oil on canvas - The Menil Collection, Houston
Cretto Bianco (White Crack)
Dubuffet's hautes pâtes paintings were a major influence on the Italian artist Alberto Burri, part of the Art Informel circle and later a foundational figure in the Arte Povera movement. Burri had graduated from medical school and served as a combat medic in the Italo-Ethiopian War until he was captured by the British and handed over to the Americans. While interned at a prisoner-of-war camp in Hereford, Texas in 1944, Burri began using objects and materials he found around the camp to create art. Back in Europe following his repatriation, he encountered Dubuffet's work on a trip to Paris, and spent the next few years experimenting with unconventional materials such as tar, sand, zinc, burlap, bark, linen, pumice, aluminum dust, and more to produce highly sculptural paintings, sometimes even inserting objects behind the canvas to push it outward. Burri also experimented with charring, scorching, and melting his materials with a blowtorch, creating what he called Combustiones.
Burri's Cretti (Cracks) series was begun in 1954, though the majority of the constituent works were produced in the 1970s. Cretto Bianco (1958) was inspired in part by the artist's visits to the mud flats of Death Valley National Park in California, and in part by his interest in the way in which the Old Masters' paintings underwent craquelure (cracking) over centuries, which he saw as beautiful topographical landscapes. In the monochromatic works of the Cretti series, Burri recreated craquelure by layering a Celotex support with a mixture of kaolin, resin, zinc pigment, and polyvinyl acetate that would crack as it dried. The drying process could sometimes take a week or more, and during this time he would continue to work on the material, molding it with his hands and scoring it with sharp tools. Finally, he would stop the cracking process and "fix" the work with vinyl glue.
In demonstrating the physical properties and chemical processes that animate certain materials, Burri's Cretti paintings are a clear precursor to the later work of the Arte Povera group which he helped to found, and which was concerned with framing the dynamism of the natural world. Art historians M. Di Capua and Lea Mattarella have written that, "by highlighting a very strong reference to the earth's surface, to its features and ... to the conflict between vitality and destruction, it is as if the artist, through this difficult procedure, wanted to reorder the natural processes, to defeat Chaos." The artist himself stated that with these works he wanted "to demonstrate the energy of a surface".
Acrovinyl on Celotex - Lévy Gorvy Dayan, New York
A La Recherche D'Adam ("In Search of Adam")
Marcelle van Caillie was born in 1919 on the outskirts of Bruges, Belgium, to a mother who had worked in the French Secret Service during World War One and returned to active duty during World War Two. Marcelle became a fierce, independent woman, defending her right to divorce, to maintain custody of her child, and to have a career of her own. After studying under the French Fauvist Othon Friesz in Paris at a time when female artists were generally granted few opportunities, van Caillie was given a solo exhibition at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels in October 1941, at the age of 22, the youngest woman ever to have received that honor.
Later, in the 1950s, van Caillie relocated to London with her second husband. Whereas her early work had mostly been portraiture, at this point she became preoccupied by texture and began incorporating natural and synthetic materials into her thick impasto paintings, including fiberglass, scrap metal, wood, sand, nuts, coffee grounds, and dried peas. A La Recherche D'Adam ("In Search of Adam"), which features a deep-red middle portion and a number of slashes through the canvas, dates from the artist's time in England. It is one of a number of van Caillie's Matter paintings to which feminist analysis has been applied. The critic Beth Elliott, for example, says of A La Recherché D'Adam, that "there's something very blood-like ... in the red, neither menstrual nor specifically the result of violence (though it could be), that is very matter-of-fact in a 'blood and the peeling back of layers of the body happen, this is life, this is natural' kind of way." Elliott concludes that the work "speaks ... of a woman's unflinching awareness of all the business of blood".
Van Caillie's work has often been praised for its emotional power. Filmmaker Pierre Rouve, for example, once wrote of "the difference between Marcelle van Caillie and a host of artists who have placed their faith in brute matter". "Some, like Tàpies, have soon bent its independence under a beautifying yoke. Others have followed Dubuffet's lead and have reduced its alphabet to a few letters capable of conveying only baby talk and infantile emotions. Marcelle van Caillie is seldom tempted by such inverted sophistication: she dares to be crude only to be true".
Mixed media on canvas
Le Désert Cruel (The Cruel Desert)
The Dutch artist Jaap Wagemaker originally trained in decorative arts, but shifted his focus to painting after visiting Paris several times as a young man in the 1920s-30s. Initially painting in an Expressionist style, he became involved in the Art Informel movement, and in particular with Matter Painting, from the late 1950s onwards. His paintings from this time are heavily influenced by his extensive travels throughout North Africa and the Near East. They were also inspired by his extensive collection of ethnographic art, gathered from his travels and from flea markets in Paris, where he lived on the same street as the Dutch Cobra artists Corneille and Karel Appel and fellow Matter Painter Bram Bogart. Inspired by Fautrier, Dubuffet, Wols, Tàpies, and Burri, Wagemaker's Matter paintings feature thick impasto, primarily using brown and black paints, into which he added a range of materials including sand, ashes, bone, wood, burlap, jute, and more. He first exhibited his Matter paintings in Amsterdam in 1957, and they became especially popular in Germany.
Wagemaker was fascinated by the textures and shapes of rock formations, and by the dry desert landscapes he encountered on his travels. Many of his Matter paintings reference these landscapes in both appearance and title, including The Cruel Desert (1959-60). Curator Maria Rus Bojan notes that Wagemaker's "interest in natural objects and forms expresses a spiritual desire of connecting with nature and the mystical powers that lurks beneath the surface. For [him], the natural, primal, and unworked objects of nature speak of universal mysteries and spiritual experiences, reflecting on Matter as a primal source of energy and life. His choice for Matter art has not only to do with spirit of the time, but reflects upon infinite power of earth and nature to always resurrect in new forms, beyond the rational and known". Like Tàpies, Wagemaker begin to affix larger objects to his paintings during the 1960s, creating what were called "assemblage paintings", which had the appearance of abstract scale models of landscapes or architectural forms.
Mixed media on burlap and board - Private collection
Le Chapeau Renversé («The Overturned Hat »)
Around 1954-55, the self-taught Spanish artist Antoni Tàpies began creating his signature Matter Paintings or pintura materica. Inspired in part by Dubuffet, as well as by the "readymades" of Marcel Duchamp, and the irrationalism of the Surrealists, he incorporated non-traditional, "poor" objects and materials into his paintings, such string, straw, hair, clay, soil, cardboard, marble dust, and other materials found at hardware stores or around the house. The result was a number of thick-impasto, sculptural paintings such as Le Chapeau Renveré, whose emotive abstraction invited myriad interpretations from audiences.
In spite of their abstract qualities, Tàpies's Matter Paintings were clearly inspired by his eventful and often traumatic life. The artist was a teenager when the Spanish Civil War broke out, and he witnessed the partial destruction of his hometown, Barcelona, as well as the violence, hunger, and death that resulted from the conflict. His paintings, which he called "battlefields where injuries are increasing at infinity", can be seen to channel the resulting emotions of grief, anger, and fear. Tàpies was also inspired by the protest graffiti that covered the city walls of Barcelona, which he emulated in his art by scratching aggressively into the thickly-painted surfaces. At the same time, as Borja-Villel explains, the artist's incorporation of fine-grained materials like sand and marble dust into his pigments was "heavily influenced by scientific studies on the constituent elements of matter, of atoms and subatomic particles", much of which was connected to the development of the atomic bomb.
Writing about his own work, Tàpies noted that "we believe things are solid bodies, but we should know that, inside all of this, there is an enormous dynamism. I created materials that would allow me to discover what happens inside matter....This feeling of mystery in my painting, a great mystery that, far from guiding us to what is beyond, is content with taking us back to what is here". For the art historian and curator Manuel Borja-Villel, "perhaps no other modern artist explored the expressive properties of material as Tàpies did throughout his extensive career." His tactile, textured Matter Paintings, with their humble and unconventional materials, anticipated the Arte Povera movement that developed in the 1960s in Italy.
Paint with glue and marble dust on marouflée canvas on wood - Centre Pompidou, Paris
The Secret Life of Plants
Probably the best-known artist using the techniques of Matter Painting over recent decades is the German artist Anselm Kiefer. His works often deal with themes related to German history, Jewish mysticism (though Kiefer himself is not Jewish), and the Holocaust. Born shortly before the end of World War Two, Kiefer grew up in a culture permeated by shame, and by an attempt at collective forgetting regarding the atrocities in which his country had been complicit. As a young adult, he travelled extensively and developed an interest in the mythology, mysticism, and visual artifacts of various cultures. In the early 1980s, as a proponent of the Neo-Expressionist painting style of the time, Kiefer began incorporating unconventional materials into his impasto, including straw and flowers, ash, lead, and glass. The artist approaches his practice from a lofty philosophical viewpoint, stating: "I am ... in the matter, in the paint, in the sand, directly in the clay, in the darkness of the moment. Because the spirit is already contained in the material....It is a strange, contemplative internal state, but also a form of suffering in its lack of clarity".
Kiefer's monumental work The Secret Life of Plants (2001-02) developed out of an idea first put forth by the English physician and occultist Robert Fludd in the seventeenth century: that each plant on the earth has an equivalent star in heaven. Kiefer created this work to explore this idea that the macrocosm and microcosm are intricately entangled with one another, by coating plant matter (branches) in plaster and affixing them to an elemental lead base. Indeed, lead is one of the artist's favored materials. "Lead", he states, "affects me more than all other metals. In alchemy, this metal stood on the lowest rung of the process of extracting gold. On the one hand, lead was bluntly heavy and connected to Saturn, the hideous man - on the other hand it contains silver and was also already the proof of other spiritual levels". Not as bleak in subject matter as much of Kiefer's oeuvre, The Secret Life of Plants frames the inherent properties, one could even say the "life force", of the materials used to make the work in order to amplify the deep questions the work asks us to ponder.
Oil, emulsion, shellac, acrylic, chalk, glue and plaster coated branches on lead laid down on canvas
Beginnings of Matter Painting
Matter in Painting throughout History
The terms "Matter Painting", "Matterism", and Haute Pâte (French for "high paste") appeared around 1950 to describe a trend in art closely linked to Art Informel and Tachisme. They were used to refer to a new type of painting in which paint was applied in heavy impasto, often with additional materials (such as sand, dirt, cement, shells, and twigs added, resulting in highly textural, even sculptural-seeming paintings. However, the incorporation of natural and found materials into painted works dates back to the beginning of humanity. Our earliest ancestors around the world used things like charcoal, ground rocks and minerals, clay, flowers, pollen, ground insects, shellfish, and even dung, to create and enhance pigments.
Since ancient times, artists have mixed paint pigment and water with natural substances such as egg yolk and animal glue to create longer-lasting works with glossier finishes. Known as "tempera", this kind of paint was used in Ancient Egypt, including for the mummy portraits placed on upper-class coffins (Fayum portraits) during the period of Romanised rule in Egypt. There is also evidence that the Greeks and Romans used similar methods, working with egg yolk ("egg tempera") and other materials such as gum Arabic and casein (an emulsifier found in cow's milk).
During the late Middle Ages, artists in Italy discovered that mixing egg yolk with powdered pigment and water caused the paint to adhere strongly to the painted surface. This resulted in glossy, transparent effects. The addition of honey would help the paint to dry more slowly. The use and popularization of egg tempera by medieval artists such Cimabue, Lippo Memmi, and Simone Martini, and by Renaissance artists such as Botticelli, Michelangelo, and da Vinci, could be considered a rediscovery of the medium.
By the early 1500s, egg tempera had fallen out of fashion as oil painting gained popularity. But it was later revived, notably by some Romantic artists, including William Blake, Pre-Raphaelite artists such as Simeon Solomon, and artists of the Arts and Crafts movement such as Joseph Edward Southall. In 1901, a group of artists in the United Kingdom were inspired by the Arts and Crafts movement to found The Society of Painters in Tempera. Led by artist, critic, and art patron Christiana Herringham, who had worked as a copyist of Italian tempera paintings in galleries, the group also included John Roddam Spencer Stanhope, Walter Crane, Louis Davis, and Roger Fry. A number of women artists were part of the group, like Mary Sargant Florence, Estella Canziani, and Margaret Gere. In 1912 the group was merged into a new Mural Decorators' Society, though it was revived under its original title in 1997 in both the United States and Great Britain.
The Pre-Raphaelites were also fans of another, particularly curious and controversial, material to pigment their paint: crushed, mummified corpses (usually of cats or humans). Mixed with white pitch and myrrh, the resultant deep brown pigment is known as Mummy Brown, Egyptian Brown, or Caput Mortuum, and its earliest recorded use dates to 1712. Artists who used Mummy Brown include Eugène Delacroix, Edward Burne-Jones, and Benjamin West. Understandably, access to mummified corpses was limited, and the production of Mummy Brown may well have resulted in the destruction of archaeologically significant objects. Thus, by the mid-1900s, it was no longer available.
Many other artists prior to the 1940s have used unconventional materials in their paintings. Native American Navajo and Pueblo Indians of the southern United States (and, to a lesser extent, Plains and California Indians) have made intricate sand paintings or "dry paintings". So too have Aboriginal Australians, while Tibetan Buddhists have made similar, "sand mandalas". These are meant to be ephemeral and impermanent works, serving more of a ceremonial or ritual function than an aesthetic one.
Art Informel
Some of the techniques of the Surrealists during the 1920s-30s can be seen as a precursor to Matter Painting as it was used in Art Informel and Tachisme. The artist Wolfgang Paalen, for example, developed a method called fumage which involved creating impressions on paper or canvas using smoke from a candle. Cubist and Dadaist collage and assemblage art of the 1910s-20s might also be seen as precursors to Matter Painting.
However, Matter Painting enjoyed its true renaissance during the 1940s-50s, when several distinct approaches to art-making emerged, grouped under the umbrella term Art Informel (coined by the French art critic, curator, and collector Michel Tapié in 1951). What these approaches had in common was a desire for spontaneity, improvisation, and informality (even irrationality). This led Art Informel artists to turn to the automatism of the Surrealists, but their own work had more of an emphasis on abstraction. Most painted works included in the category of Art Informel can be described as highly gestural, the final form deriving from the feeling and emotive force of the manual gesture which applied the paint.
Besides Matter Painting, other Art Informel sub-variants include Tachisme (the European equivalent to American Abstract Expressionism, with paint dripped, dribbled, or flung onto the canvas). There was also lyrical abstraction (which, as opposed to geometric abstraction, emphasised free, emotive, and typically harmonious and soothing abstract compositions). Art Brut, CoBrA, and the Gutai group are also associated with Art Informel, and placed particular emphasis on the creative insights of "outsider" creatives such as children and people deemed to be mentally ill. A number of German artists were influenced by the French Art Informel artists, such as Bernard Schultz and Emil Schumacher. Both utilized the heavy application of paint associated with Matter Painting. So too did the Japanese artist and member of the Gutai group, Kazuo Shiraga, known for his "foot paintings", which involved the artist hanging from the ceiling by a rope and using his feet to apply oil paint to the canvas.
Jean Fautrier's Hautes Pâtes
In the mid-1940s, the French artist Jean Fautrier, who was associated with the Art Informel and Tachisme movements, began creating what he called hautes pâtes (thick or high paste) paintings. These were characterized by a very heavy impasto: the application of paint and other substances to the canvas in such quantities, and with such pronounced textural effects, that the final works almost takes on the appearance of abstract relief sculpture. In effect, these can be seen as the first clear examples of what is now called Matter Painting. Fautrier's version of hautes pâtes involved placing paper over canvas before applying layers of plaster and adding paint to the plaster while it was still moist. As he explained to his friend, the writer and critic Jean Paulhan, "the canvas is merely a support for the paper. The thick paper is covered with sometimes thick layers of a plaster - the picture is painted on this moist plaster - this plaster makes the paint adhere to the picture perfectly - it has the virtue of fixing the colors 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 as well and the quality of the matter is achieved." Tapié, who once witnessed Fautrier destroying some of his works, wrote: "I know how much strength he had to exert in order to tear up those glued surfaces." He described the dense, coarse, coagulated layers of paint as being "hard as stone".
The hautes pâtes technique can be seen most prominently in Fautrier's series Les Otages (The Hostages) (1943-45) and Tête de Partisans, Budapest (Head of the Partisans, Budapest) (1956). The artist had been arrested in 1943 for his participation in the anti-fascist French Resistance movement. Following his release, he sought refuge in a psychiatric institution just outside Paris, where he was tormented by the sounds of Nazis torturing and executing prisoners in the surrounding forest. He created Les Otages at the hospital, inspired by the traumatic experience of bearing witness to such atrocities, though he intended the series as a universal homage to all victims of war. Meanwhile, the Tête de Partisans, Budapest series was created in response to the Budapest Massacre between December 1944 and January 1945, during which some 20,000 Jews were shot along the banks of the Danube and thrown into the river. Fautrier's hautes pâtes works later influenced the rough, textured 1950s sculptures of Scottish artist William Turnbull.
Jean Dubuffet's Hautes Pâtes
Associated with the Art Informel movement, the French sculptor and painter Jean Dubuffet was forever in search of what he called Art Brut ("raw art"), a term coined in his 1949 essay "Art Brut Préféré aux Arts Culturels" ("Raw Art Preferred to Cultural Arts"). He was particularly interested in techniques and approaches that had no connection to the formal western artistic canon. As such, he was naturally drawn to techniques such as hautes pâtes which seemed both intensely gestural and largely divorced from previous techniques in painting and sculpture.
Around 1945, Dubuffet began painting his own hautes pâtes paintings using a heavily applied paste of tar, asphalt, and white lead. This was often enriched with cement, plaster, or varnishes. Into the surface he would stick things like sand, coal dust, pebbles, straw, and pieces of glass. These works usually employed minimal color and sometimes featured scratches through the paint. Their rough, sculptural quality was intended to evoke deep emotional responses in the viewer.
As the art historian Rachel E. Perry notes, Dubuffet's highly unconvential approach to painting had strange physical side effects. "Experimenting with unorthodox materials and untried techniques, [Dubuffet] loaded his canvases with materials so unwieldy and unstable that even before their public debut in the [1946] exhibition Mirobolus, Macadam et Cie., Hautes Pâtes strange things began happening. A wandering eye, a missing tooth: Dubuffet's too-heavy pastes were cracking, crumbling, and, in some cases, melting off the canvas and onto the floor. According to Dubuffet's apologists, he welcomed these modifications, delighting in mutable materials that succumbed to the forces of gravity and entropy. Declaring himself an 'actualist', and a 'presentist and ephemeralist', he made works that were not only hard to hang (as they were so impractically heavy) but also difficult to preserve (being so precariously unstable)."
As an example of this, one of the first works Dubuffet executed with the hautes pâtes technique was a View of Paris (c. 1944). He took this to the critic Jean Paulhan's home and left it on the radiator. Eager to hear his friend's praise for the work, Dubuffet got in touch with him and was shocked to hear Paulhan's negative reaction. This was, in fact, because the painting, sitting on the warm radiator, had melted off the canvas. The curator and collector Michel Tapié recalled: "one painting, over the course of an entire night, spit all over the harmonium, to the great fury of Lili" (Dubuffet's wife, Emilie Carlu). Another of Dubuffet's works, Monsieur Macadam (1945)", according to Tapié, "allowed itself a similar unseemliness all over Jean Paulhan's mantelpiece." Dubuffet "enjoys these adventures enormously", Tapié went on, calling them "hippopotamus sudations".
Dubuffet often used medical and physiological terms to describe the uncontrollable qualities of his artworks. For example he, called these instances of melting paintings as "phenomenon of hematidrosis," referring to the medical term for sweating blood. He marvelled at the "flows that stain everything placed under the painting in the dirtiest way". Before settling on the term hautes pâtes a month before his 1946 exhibition Mirobolus, Macadam et Cie., Hautes Pâtes, he had been planning to call the works "séquelles", from the Latin term sequi or séquelles, meaning aftereffects or consequences. For Tapié, "Dubuffet's original title suggests that he viewed the paintings ... as the unintended, uncontrollable consequences of a physical accident or infection."
Summing up such adventures, Perry notes that, for Dubuffet, "the elaboration of the hautes pâtes was a lengthy process of trial and error, false starts, and missteps. Dubuffet experimented with a cocktail of, in his words, 'unusual materials and techniques' that lacked any fine-art connotations, any suggestion of refinement, expertise, aesthetic decorativeness, or permanence. Committed to the principle that 'All of the usual tools of painting - canvases, easels, brushes, paint tubes - bring about a paralyzing effect on whoever uses them', he embarked into uncharted territory." This relates to the central premise of Art Brut: the desire for a complete break with tutored and canonical modes of art-making, in an attempt to achieve a sort of radical and liberatory naivety of technique and effect.
However, some expert or at least informed opinions were required. Dubuffet ended up consulting with Fautrier and the Cubist painter Georges Braque, for example, to solicit their observations and advice. He was interested in their thoughts "on the use of sorel or contreplaqué, and how to organize the layers of coats in order to achieve a quick drying of the color even when it is used in thick masses (like Fautrier achieves) and how to obtain a certain mat shine, etc" (Rachel E. Perry). Dubuffet also consulted with paint industry experts and chemical engineers for "information about the physical properties and chemical composition of the fixatives, emulsions, glazes, and varnishes on the market" (ibid.).
Dubuffet's hautes pâtes paintings were harshly criticized. In 1946, critic Frank Elgar wrote "the bitumen, pebbles, trash, mud that he mixes with an indescribable refinement are threatened by deterioration and destruction in no time. What remains of a painting which negates itself to this extent?" Critic and curator René Huyghe wrote that that works were "as good today as sculpture as they were yesterday as painting". It is reported that at exhibition, some viewers even took to slashing, ripping, and defacing six of the paintings (seemingly in line with the "broken window theory": that is, if viewers saw the paintings as damaged already, they would be incited to damage them further). The writers Georges Ravon and artist Leon Barrotte later commented that the damage inflicted on the works by viewers "would be barely visible if the gallery didn't point it out with a sign".
Dubuffet's American dealer, Pierre Matisse, was also nerve-wracked about these works, writing to the artist about certain pieces: "I doubt even the most fervent of your admirers will have the courage to hang it on their walls...The more thinly painted areas are cracking, falling off in slabs and plates, exposing a virgin, immaculate canvas underneath. It's a bit worrisome and I am starting to shudder at the thought of these small pieces of painting that your American amateurs could find one day at the foot of their canvases".
Matter Painting
Dubuffet and Fautrier, as well as the German artist Wols (who was also connected to the Art Informel movement, and often worked with sand in his paint) were represented in Paris by the artist and gallerist René Drouin. To the shock of many, Drouin showed Fautrier's Les Otages series in 1945 became a fervent champion of what became known as Matter Painting (the term that replaced hautes pâtes in common usage). Also involved with Art Informel and Matter Painting (but not with Drouin) was the French artist Pierre Soulages, who applied paint thickly before etching and carving into it with various tools. Soulages also experimented with painting using substances such as petrol and walnut oil. Throughout the 1950s, Matter Painting caught on more widely, particularly with Dutch, Belgian, and Spanish painters such as Bram Bogart, Jaap Wagemaker, Bert de Leeuw, René Guiette, Antoni Tàpies, and Marc Mendelson. The Italian Alberto Burri was another artist to make important contributions to the fields of Matter Painting and Art Informel.
Each of these artists brought new approaches to Matter Painting. As Bogart put it, "the artist is constantly trying to find new ideas, i.e., to use the same material to make new works that are totally different, in form and colour, from the previous ones." A Dutch-born Belgian artist initially involved with the CoBrA group (itself connected both to Art Brut and to the radical politics of the Situationists), Bogart relocated to Belgium in the late 1950s and began to experiment with extremely thick, slab-like layers of paint. He would model and manipulate these near-sculptural forms into highly tactile and textural works, some of which weighed hundreds of pounds. Bogart often incorporated natural ingredients into his paint, such as oils, glue, and powdered chalk, in order to achieve different textural and visual effects. Bogart was very influential upon younger artists. For example, the French-American artist Niki de Saint Phalle was inspired by Bogart's heavy impasto to develop her "shotgun paintings", for which she shot at bags of colored paint placed over white canvases.
The Dutch artist Jaap Wagemaker created Matter Paintings from 1956 onwards. It was that year that he began to experiment with adding materials such as sand, wood, fibers, slate, ashes, bones, metals, and sacking to his paints, taking inspiration from the natural world (including the textures of rock formations) and various world cultures. The Catalan artist Antoni Tàpies created Matter Paintings which he hoped would "be interpreted from a symbolist perspective that emphasised metaphor, allegory and myth", as the Museum Tàpies explains. However, from the mid-1950s onwards he increasingly came to feel that "the materials [had] ceased to be subject to an idea and became the idea itself, in which form and matter coincided. The canvas was no longer a window onto the world, but had become a physical wall." Tàpies's Matter Painting features thick impasto with scratch marks inspired by ancient graffiti and cave paintings, as well as the graffiti he saw around Barcelona. He often incorporated other materials such as textiles into his paintings.
Matter Painting appeared elsewhere too. The Polish artist Tadeusz Kantor made several trips to Paris in the mid-1950s, where he encountered Art Informel. Back in Poland, he adopted several Art Informel techniques into his own works, blending Tachisme with ideas from Matter Painting, incorporating materials like sheet metal and rags into his paintings. This resulted in pieces like Peinture (1958). Kantor's work was rooted in a similar kind of Primitivism to that which defined Dubuffet's approach. He once stated that "in every work of art there exists, independent of artist, an UR-MATTER that shapes itself and in which dwell all possible scenarios of life".
In the 1960s, the Australian abstract artist Ralph Balson, heavily influenced by Tápies and Burri, as well as the Action Paintings of Jackson Pollock, produced a Matter Paintings series for which he poured paint (sometimes mixed with polymers, enamel, cement, or sand) onto composition boards. He then moved the boards around, allowing the paint to drift, drip, pool, and crack. Curator Miriam Kelly explains that "Balson's approach to painting was inspired by his prolonged study of scientific and mathematical discussions of nature, time and change and, particularly, a fascination with Einstein's theory of relativity." Kelly posits that Balson's "tough, late works, such as Matter painting [1960] and Matter painting no. 4 [1962], are some of his most evocative, created in a quest to respond to notions of flux and existence".
Concepts and Styles
Impasto
Impasto refers to the thick, heavy application of paint onto a surface, using a brush, palette knife, or other tool to add three-dimensionality and texture. Impasto can cause unique lighting effects in a painting through the way that the shaped surface creates shadow. It also serves to call attention to the movement and emotion of the artist as they paint - as in North-American Action Painting - by drawing pronounced attention to the application of paint. Thus, instead of paint being used to create a "window" into a illusionistic world, impasto gives the painted surface a dynamic life of its own. Matter painters often take impasto to the extreme, such as Dutch-born Belgian artist Bram Bogart, who at times applied hundreds of pounds of paint to a single canvas.
Impasto is usually done with oil paint, as it is thick and slow to dry. However, impasto can also be achieved with other types of paint, such as acrylic, if a thickening agent is used. Impasto is a foundational technique for Matter painters, who seek to explore the material qualities of paint and to give it a sculptural quality. A surface that has been painted with impasto is often to as "pastose," and a painting in which impasto features prominently is sometimes called "painterly". For Matter painters who incorporate other materials into their paintings, the pastose serves as a sort of paste to hold this other material.
Unconventional Materials
Many Matter painters incorporate unconventional materials into their works, either as thickening agents in the paint, so that it can be worked and made more "sculptural" (as Dubuffet did with rabbit-skin glue), or as visible, autonomous objects set within the paint, carrying meanings of their own. The latter effect can be seen in Anselm Kiefer's works that include branches or straw. These found and incorporated materials might also add adding interesting textural elements, as in Jaap Wagemaker's inclusion of burlap in his Matter Paintings. Sand, salt, bone fragments, shells, and a wide range of other unconventional materials have been used by Matter painters.
Some artists have played around with including larger found objects into their works, blurring the lines between Matter Painting and assemblage. Jaap Wagemaker's painting Bandiagara (1963), for example, is one of a number of works referred to as "assemblage paintings" in which pipes, containers, and other medium-sized objects are suspended within the pastose to create the effect of abstract, scale-models of topography or architecture. Antoni Tàpies created a number of similar works.
Graffito
Many Matter painters, like Dubuffet, Wols, and Tàpies chose to scratch or etch into the thick impasto of their paintings, creating a sort of graffito effect (from the Italian graffiato, meaning "scratched"). Tàpies cited the protest graffiti he saw around Barcelona in his youth as an influencing factor, and indeed, the resultant effect of graffito in much Matter Painting elicits associations with the sort of frenzied, passionate emotions behind street graffiti. Such "scratch-making" in Matter Painting also brings up associations of what was seen as "raw" art forms, such as images made by prison inmates and mental asylum patients, as well as prehistoric cave paintings.
In its use of language-like marks and forms, Matter Painting came close to some of the effects of Abstract Expressionist painting, notably the work of Jackson Pollock and Mark Tobey, which often includes designs that have the appearance of letterforms or pictographs. The interest of Matter Painters in graffiti predicted the advances of French Nouveau Réalisme, whose associated artists, including Yves Klein, François Dufrene, Jacques Villeglé, and Mimo Rotella, presented torn layers of posters found on city walls and advertising hoardings, as original, décollage artworks.
Dark Subject Matter
In the post-war period, particularly in Paris, people were feeling a range of emotions, including elation and hope, but at the same time confusion and grief, as they struggled to come to terms with the atrocities of war. Artists were no exception, and many attempted to grapple with these emotions on canvas. Arts writer Camille Coquet explains that "artists who identified with Art Informel all sought to explore themes of war, trauma and death. Abstraction and Art Informel made it possible to express what was then difficult to express through figuration and envisage a new future both for art and for society in general."
For Matter Painters, flat images were not enough to convey the power of their emotions. Adding a three-dimensional aspect to their painting seemed to satisfy a need to express profound and often violent feelings. Moreover, the creation of Matter Paintings would often be a physically demanding process, the artist first layering on several pounds of paint then work it across the canvas with gestural strokes, and even scratching into it violently. It is easy to understand how such a physically all-consuming process could be cathartic for artists working through difficult emotions.
Later Developments - After Matter Painting
Although Matter Painting, as a subcategory of Art Informel, could be seen to have fallen out of fashion during the 1960s, many artists, such as Tápies and Burri, continued to have success with the style into the 1970s and beyond. Other, younger artists, such as the German Anselm Kiefer and Chinese Zhu Jinshi, took up styles heavily informed by Matter Painting but without using the term. These two artists continue to this day to produce paintings characterized by thick impasto and the occasional integration of unconventional materials such as sand, cement, and plant matter, all techniques pioneered by the Matter Painters.
Matter Painting's greatest immediate impact, however, was on the Italian Arte Povera ("poor art") movement of the 1960s. Established by Alberto Burri and others, Arte Povera focused on the use of simple, inexpensive often found or natural objects, though its works were rarely made on canvas. Arte Povera thus took the untutored exuberance of Matter Painting and applied it to sculptural and installation-based practice, with a more far-reaching message about using art to depict magical and transformative processes in the natural world. Arte Povera also stood for a rebellion against the commercial art world, returning art to a place of simplicity, ritual, and connection to the human body.