Vatican Museums

Christ on the Cross is an isolated presence in Jean Fautrier’s paintings. The work was produced in 1929, and marks the moment at which the artist began to drift away from realistic renderings, giving rise to funereal apparitions typified by concentration on a single element. Educated in London at the Royal Academy and the Slade School of Art, he was particularly fascinated by Turner, and by this time he had already initiated the process of the gradual dissolution of form that characterises his mature work. Christ on the cross appears alongside butchered animals and large figures of men and women, without descriptive details: the thick layer of paint, applied in dense clumps, prefigures his future transformation, which at the beginning of the 1940s made the artist one of the most important European exponents of “Informal art”.