Paul Rodgers/9W Obituary

 EUROPEAN ARTIST, SIMON HANTAI
(BORN BUDAPEST 1922/TO PARIS 1948) IS DEAD AT AGE EIGHTY FIVE.  

  Simon Hantaï, artist of legendary reclusion, who nevertheless enjoyed almost mythical status in the French art world and a major position in the Pompidou Center's account of post-World War Two art, died in his sleep during the night of Thursday, September 11, at his home in the 14th arrondissement of Paris. 

    Hantaï’s American reputation was mostly confined to specialists, although he exhibited in New York with the Pierre Matisse Gallery during the nineteen seventies and again in 1981 at the André Emmerich Gallery.  He never personally visited the United States. 

    As commentators over the years, beginning with André Breton, have pointed out, Hantaï was a fiercely independent artist, motivated above all by an ethical reflection on art.  Throughout his career he insisted,  uncompromisingly, on the aesthetic primacy of art over its commercialization.  This defense of art's integrity obliged Hantaï to live in self-imposed isolation yet he saw his work as deeply engaged with the world and with the question of human fate.

    The aesthetic story of Hantaï's career is also very complex.  He continued to successfully explore the aesthetic of Abstract Expressionism with original, major work in the 1960's, when the consensus was that it would be impossible to make significant painting after Pollock.   He also strongly refuted the 'formalist' criticism of abstract painting, then current, insisting instead that art must contain vital intellectual content.  Further, the technique of painting that he invented, called 'the folding method', pointed the way towards the 'Process' aesthetic of 1970's art, thus allowing Hantaï’s thinking to encounter and make common cause with that of American avant-garde land artist and theorist Robert Smithson.  Hantaï’s aesthetic position refuted the notion that advanced contemporary art would in the future be the exclusive preserve of sculpture and new media. 

    Simon Hantaï was born December 7, 1922 in Bia, a small rural town outside Budapest, Hungary, of Roman Catholic Swabian heritage which had fled religious persecution in post-Reformation Germany.  He later recollected that in his rural environment there was no tradition of visual art but that he identified with the reformation music of Schutz, which his forbearers had brought with them under special papal dispensation.  Three of his sons, Jerome, Mark and Pierre would later emerge as prominent interpreters of the Baroque on the contemporary classical music scene. He further recollected that he had lived to the age of sixteen without access to electric light.  For an artist whose career spanned the second half of the twentieth century, and remained at the forefront of artistic innovation, rather than signifying an anachronism, this remark may be taken to question the claim of technology to represent the sole measure of modern culture. 

    He studied at the School of Fine Arts in Budapest and was prominent in anti-Nazi student circles during the War, narrowly escaping detention and quite possibly worse.  After the War, he presented a manifesto of free artistic expression to Georg Lukacs, who would briefly become Minister for culture in the Hungarian revolutionary government of 1956, prior to the Soviet invasion. Hantaï recounted that he was told, perhaps ruefully and with regret on Lukacs’ part, that he should come back to see him in fifty years.  Shortly afterwards, Hantaï left Hungary with his newly-wed wife Zsuzsa. They first crossed Italy on a pilgrimage to sites of the Italian Renaissance. Then, when summoned back to Budapest, where he would undoubtedly have been sent to Moscow for integration in the Soviet art system, they made their way to Paris, taking up permanent residence there in 1948. In 1966 Hantaï became a naturalized French citizen.

    In Paris, Hantaï quickly began to learn about developments in avant-garde artistic circles and gravitated towards the Surrealist movement that André Breton was intent on relaunching, after his return from war-time exile in New York.  According to the story, Hantaï anonymously deposited an art work outside Breton’s apartment door, which led to his first exhibition at the Etoile scellée Gallery in 1953, prefaced by Breton himself, who wrote “Again, as it happens once every ten years, a great new beginning …”  However, Hantaï would not long remain affiliated with the Surrealists.  He became interested in the ‘new American painting’, which would be known by the name of ‘Abstract Expressionism’, then being filtered into Europe through American art magazines, and especially in Jackson Pollock.  He was disappointed to be told, on inquiring more closely of André Breton and Marcel Duchamp about this strange and exciting new art, that he should not pay it attention.  The artist later recollected that Duchamp, in exasperation, finally exclaimed to him: “Alright, if you insist, take Gorky, but above all, not Pollock, if you follow him you will be lost!” 

    However, the questions raised by Pollock’s art seemed central to Hantaï, especially the Surrealist technique of ‘psychic automatism’, derived from Freudian psychoanalysis, as a means of achieving access to the unconscious life of the mind. He broke in 1955 with Breton and the Surrealists with a letter in which he declared his intention of exploring “the non-figurative consequences of automatism”.

    What had originally interested Hantaï the most in Surrealist art was its openness to the exploration of new techniques, which was strongest in the work of Max Ernst, notably collage.  He also stated that what interested him in the American painting of the nineteen forties and fifties was that it uncovered “what was really at stake in modern art, beyond aesthetic considerations, the non-formalist aspect.” 

    Over the next few years, Hantai cast restlessly about in different styles, quickly abandoned, until in 1958 he set himself the task of copying in minute, illegible script, throughout an entire calendar year, the accumulated theological, philosophical and poetic wisdom of western culture, in an apparent effort to overturn language and extract its pictorial essence.  Hantaï has stated that he was driven to undertake this work out of desperation and despair.  Such feelings were shared by many in the post-war period: Samuel Beckett and Barnett Newman, among others, notably come to mind.  What emerged, in Hantaï’s case, was a beautiful, mysterious and monumental painting, measuring almost 11 x 14 ft. in size.  Much as was the case with Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon, the painting perplexed Hantaï’s inner circle and remained in the shadows of the artist’s studio for almost two decades, until it was illuminated by a ground-breaking text from the French critic Marcelin Pleynet in the catalogue for the artist’s 1976 mid-career survey exhibition at the French National Museum of Modern Art, then housed on Avenue President Wilson in Paris.  The painting, titled Peinture (Ecriture rose) – The Rose Tinted Writing Work - now forms one of the corner stones of the Georges Pompidou Center’s permanent collection and this summer figured as the frontispiece for the catalogue of the museum’s theme exhibition ‘Traces du Sacré’.  In his preface, Alfred Pacquement, director of the Pompidou Center, heralded the painting as “a timeless masterpiece”. 

    The Ecriture rose painting took Pollock’s technique and focused it on the notion of ‘process’.  In doing so, it allowed Hantaï to break through to his own original, signature technique of painting, known as ‘the folding method’.  This technique, in which the unstretched canvas is folded, so that a surface of positive and negative space is created, situated art at the cross roads between modern philosophy and science where the origin of time and the cosmos are explored. For Hantaï, the folding method offered the freedom to reinvent form and color, to meditate on what is given for the eye to see and what remains invisible. 

   The folding method is above all a process, and Hantaï based it on industrial production. It is in this respect that Hantaï’s work can be related to Andy Warhol and Minimalism.

       Beginning in 1960, with a series titled the ‘Mariales’ or ‘Cloaks’, the theme of landscape is clearly evident.  A later series, the ‘Meun’ 1967-68, turns to consider the figure.  With the ‘Studies’ of 1969, a new dislocation of form enters into play and the white background of the canvas asserts its independence.  The artist stated “It was while working on the ‘Studies’ that I realized what my true subject was: the resurgence of the ground beneath my painting.”  In 1973 with the ‘Whites’, the white canvas ground is given full and active expression.  The theme of energy releasing light and revealing color will become central to the artist’s concerns.  However, Hantaï will also look back in the early ‘Tabula’ paintings, in which, beginning in 1974, he explores the Minimalist grid, to personal memory, notably referring to a photograph taken in 1917 of the mother that he had been forced to leave behind when he went into exile.

    Hantaï never returned to Hungary.  Again, his attitude towards his homeland may have resembled that of Picasso who swore never to revisit Spain as long as Franco was alive.  Hantaï felt the division of Europe into East and West keenly.  The folding method expresses this physical and cultural disruption in its sundered forms.  Not even when the Communist system collapsed and the borders were opened did the artist relent.  By then it was too late for him.  Near the end of his life, more than ever, everything for Hantaï had to be said, and lived, through painting. 

    However, the future may recognize that a consolation, if not a cure, for the tragedy of industrial civilization in the Two World Wars of the twentieth century was pre-figured in Hantaï’s art.  Nor did Hantaï ever lose his attachment for his native home.  He would walk on the open expanses of the Isle de France, in the vicinity of his summer home near Fontainebleau, mentioning on one occasion to this writer, that it reminded him of the Central European plains of his childhood.

    Hantaï exhibited regularly in Paris with his long-time dealer Jean Fournier, first at the Galérie Kléber, where Fournier was director, and then at the Galérie Jean Fournier.  Hantaï also had numerous museum exhibitions in France, notably his mid-career survey at the Museum of Modern Art that would later become the Centre Georges Pompidou.  Hantaï represented France at the Venice Biennial in 1982. Shortly afterwards, he announced that he would cease to exhibit and withdrew into seclusion.  In 1993, then director of the Pompidou, Dominique Bozo, announced an Hantaï retrospective in the museum’s calendar, to open October of that year. The exhibition never took place because the artist declared his unwillingness. In 1998 he stated to the Monde newspaper:

“The reason was that I became uncomfortable with the situation.  I felt that the art world was going wrong.  I was starting to receive commissions.  I was being asked to paint the ceiling of the Paris Opera House.  Society seemed to be preparing to paint my work for me.  I could have obeyed, many, perhaps most, painters do.  The prospect did not coincide with my desire. (…) I withdrew from the center, because the ambition to occupy a position at the center of things has no meaning.  It prohibits you from maintaining an independent vision.”

    Nevertheless, that same year the artist made a donation of five major paintings to the Musée d’art moderne de le ville de Paris which occasioned an exhibition with a catalogue. The following year Hantaï agreed to show his late work titled, ‘The Leftovers,’ at a private art foundation in Paris. The same year he also showed a selection of works spanning the folding method, 1960-1995, with a catalogue, at the Westfalisches Landesmuseum in Münster, Germany, carefully overseen by the artist.

    After this last show, Hantaï returned to his life of seclusion and maintained public silence until his death. His last years were partly occupied by a joint endeavor with the leading French philosophers of the day, first Gilles Deleuze, and later Jaques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy with whom he published a book, La connaissance des textes, which serves as a postscript to his oeuvre.