Jean Fautrier was a French painter and printmaker. His first pieces in the beginning of the 1920s were figurative, where he built up forms with thick layers of paint. Two decades later, he was fully immersed in non-figurative painting, with a strong emphasis on the materiality of color. In this phase, he made marks with a brush or spatula, creating simple forms called "Otages" in muted colors, often only in shades of gray. Fautrier became a leading figure in the development of material as a means of expression towards "new realism" in the late 1950s. In his graphic work, he used lines as a contrast to the heavy color matter in his paintings.