Multitalented and multidisciplinary, Jean Léon Fautrier combined the roles of painter, illustrator, printmaker, sculptor, and engraver. He was at once a prominent representative of Informalism, leading practitioner of Tachism, pioneer of the matter painting (haute pâte) technique, and co-inventor – alongside his wife Jeannine Aeply – of the “multiple originals” (originaux multiples) process integrating chalcographic reproduction and painting. Arrest and imprisonment by the Gestapo in 1943 inspired his Otages (Hostages) series of paintings, his personal response to the plight of French citizens during WWII. He would return to the same motif and create the Têtes de partisans (Heads of Partisans) series in 1956, following the Soviet Union’s brutal crackdown on the Hungarian Uprising. His post-WWII works were often abstract and small-scale, combining mixed media on paper. For him, abstraction is not beyond but within reality, one with “asceticism, purge, and catharsis”, as French poet Francis Ponge described.