The series of Otage was revolutionary both for the new artistic process in Fautrier’s works and for its portrayals of or reference to the victims of Nazi. In January 1943, Fautrier was arrested by the Gestapo. He was released later, and arrived in the Vallee-aux-Loups under the assumed name Jean Faron. He painted the Otage between 1943 and 1945, in the woods outside Paris at the medical clinic of Dr. Henry near Chatenay-Malabry, where Fautrier had his atelier during the war. He is said to have heard the cries of the Nazi’s victims while he worked on Otage. An exhibition of Jean Fautrier’s Otage paintings opened at the Galerie Rene Drouin in Paris, on October 26, 1945. Andre Malraux, one of the France’s foremost writers and a resistance hero, had written the preface to Fautrier’s exhibition catalogue. Malraux, a life-long friend and correspondent of Fautrier, wrote texts for various of his exhibitions. Fautrier’s Otage attracted the faithful support of several French existential writers. Fautrier was submerged in Sartre’s existentialism in the mid-forties. Three Important literary writers, Andre Malraux, Francis Ponge, and Jean Paulhan who were associated with existentialism, had written essays on the Otage series. Paulhan was closely connected to Merleau-Ponty and Sartre. In the mid-forties, the existentialism contained a traumatic experience of the war, and the Otage were the outcry against the anti human violence of the Nazi. Therefore, his Otage join the antifascist protest of Picasso’ Guernica, recording the horrors of the Nazi’s invasion of Guernica, Spain. The series of Otage has today come to symbolize a moment of ideological resistance to the Nazi massacres then taking place throughout France and Europe. The Otages are a traumatic witness to this tragedy, documenting France’s troubled relationship with Nazi Germany. The Otage were not immediately popular with the public, but this helped win a place of lasting importance for Fautrier in the history of art. The Otages of 1943~1945 led Tapie to declare Fautrier, the foremost precursor of Informel and a main practioner. He came to prominence in the late forties by some of the same French poets and intellectuals. He is notable for materialism and often placed in the category of Art Informel. Fautrier’s works were well suitable with the purpose that Tapie strived in Informel. But, he refused all categorization. Fautrier introduced ‘haute pate’ in the Otage series. Fautrier emphasized the importance of painted matter: a thick, built-up surface, a variety of delicate color applications. In its peculiar fusion of paper, gesso, paint, inks, and canvas, Fautrier’s surface forms a fragile membrane rather than an architectonic relief. His Otages in ‘haute pate’ memorialize the tortured bodies of the massacred prisoners and on the other hand, Fautrier’s ‘haut pate’ is a medium that intensifies the articulation of painterly contradictions. For Fautrier, the painting acquires an utterly hybrid status between artistic and material processes. In the Otage series, Fautrier does not seek to disclose his experience through representation, Fautrier’s ‘haute pate’ evokes a sympathetic response from the viewer. Fautrier’s Otage are pictures of the dead, but they are not portraits that represent a specific person. They are modern ‘memento mori’ as pictures of still life. They are not figurative delineations that indicate a real world, but pictures that represent composition and harmony of matter and texture. They are not modernist abstractions. Fautrier’s relationship to the world was based on the interaction of cognition with visual perception and bodily sensation. They are only the contemporary art after all. Fautrier symboled contemporaries in the French Art after the Second world War. Fautrier won the grand prize at the Venice Biennale in 1960 and at the Tokyo Biennale in the next year. He exerted particular influence on younger artists in Italy and Germany, and embraced in Europe and Japan.