French painter, draughtsman, illustrator and sculptor, Fautrier studied at the Royal Academy School in 1912 but left because considered the teaching too traditional. He then entered the Slade School of Fine Art which, in spite of being considered a vanguard school, disappointed him once again. Finally, he chose to work alone and turned to painting, mainly naked figures and still lifes. In 1922, he moved to Paris where, in 1924, he held his first one-man show at the Visconti Gallery. During the 30s, and due to his lack of funds, he had to find other kinds of jobs, leaving artistic production aside to some extent. In 1945, he had his first major success with the series Hostages and, around 1950, he developed the technique of "Multiple originals", combining elements of printing with painting, allowing the production of several versions of the same work. This new technique again brought commercial failure that he would only recover from in 1960 when awarded first prize at the Venice Biennale. In 1961, he received another prize at the Tokyo Biennale and, in 1964, he donated some of his pieces to the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris which, at the end of 1979, presented a major posthumous, retrospective exhibition.