Simon Hantaï French, 1922-2008
Simon Hantaï is considered one of the most important figures in postwar modern painting. In 1948, the Hungarian artist emigrated to Paris, where he quickly became part of the burgeoning avant-garde scene. After an initial surrealist phase, he turned to informal painting in the 1950s and, at the same time, engaged intensively with the work of Jackson Pollock.
The year 1960 marked a turning point in Hantaï’s work: from that point on, he focused his radically experimental explorations on “folding as a method”—works in which he covered a folded canvas with oil or acrylic paint to bring forth luminous, colorful patterns arising from chance. In 1980, Hantaï received the Grand Prix National des Arts Plastiques; two years later, he represented his adopted country at the Venice Biennale.
Simon Hantaï was born in Bia, Hungary, in 1922.
Entering the Budapest Academy of Fine Arts in 1941, his student life was marked by his activism: he notably expressed his disapproval of the Hungarian government, which was then collaborating with Nazi Germany. After Hungary was liberated by Soviet troops, Hantaï joined the Hungarian Communist Party. It was in this uncertain political climate that Hantaï and his wife settled in Paris, following the cancellation of a scholarship.
His arrival in Paris marked a period of intense learning and experimentation. In museums and galleries, he discovered the works of painters of the School of Paris, as well as those of the Surrealists—whose movement was undergoing a period of reconstruction at the time—and American artists. Debates surrounding abstraction and figuration were central to the art scene of the era. Hantaï became involved with the Surrealist movement through André Breton; however, this membership in the group lasted only three years, as he broke with the Surrealists in 1955. His early Parisian works bear witness to these multiple influences, from which he gradually distanced himself to develop research closer to informal abstraction.
Material, gesture, and the multiplicity of possibilities offered by painting began to appear as territories of exploration for Hantaï, who took a keen interest in the work of Jackson Pollock. It was at the beginning of the 1960s that the painter made a radical shift, developing what he called “folding as a method.” The artist no longer painted on a stretched canvas: he crumpled or folded it multiple times before applying the paint. Once unfolded, the canvas was only partially covered; The artist thus no longer fully controls the forms and patterns created and plays with chance and the physical properties of the support.
This new method revolutionizes the traditional relationship between the artist and their work, since they create the conditions for the image's emergence while adopting a stance dependent on chance. The artist's will is then inextricably linked to random parameters and the accidents of the material.
In 1980, he received the Grand Prix national des arts plastiques (National Grand Prize for Visual Arts) and represented France at the Venice Biennale in 1982. After this period of international recognition, Hantaï gradually withdrew from the art scene and ceased exhibiting regularly, though he continued his research until his death in 2008.
