SIMON HANTAÏ

 PART ONE: EARLY LIFE & WORK

   1922 – Simon Hantaï is born in Bia, a small village outside of Budapest, Hungary.  The Hantaï family is of Roman Catholic Swabian origins that had emigrated from Germany in the seventeenth century.  This close-knit community of expatriates had conserved its German cultural identity, most notably the musical tradition of Heinrich Schutz which was incorporated in their religious service.  The artist’s father changed the family’s German name of ‘Handel’ to the Hungarian form of ‘Hantaï’ in protest against the German invasion of Hungary at the time of the Second World War.

    The artist remembered that at the age of eight years old he was temporarily blinded by diphtheria.  This experience later had bearing on his thinking about art and the notion, central to his ‘folding method’, of painting with closed eyes.  He also remembered that his village did not get electric light until he had reached the age of sixteen.

    1942-48 – Hantaï studied at the Budapest School of Fine Arts.  In 1943 he was President of the Student Union and found himself briefly under Gestapo arrest for a political speech.  After an unsuccessful attempt to enlist the support of George Luckacs in defense of artistic freedom, he left for an extended visit of Italy with his wife Zsuzsa and never returned to Hungarian soil.

    1948 – Under orders from its Ministry of Culture to return to Hungary, where he faced being sent to Moscow for training as an artist, Hantaï made his way to Paris, which became his permanent home.  Hantaï began to familiarize himself with the different aspects of the Parisian avant-garde, with an emphasis on technical experimentation employing collages and extra-pictorial materials. He discoved the Surrealist movement which André Breton had relocated back to Paris, following its exile in New York during the War.

     1952 – Towards the end of this year, Hantaï left one of his paintings on the door-step of André Breton’s apartment without revealing his identity.  This act gained Breton’s interest and led to their meeting.

     1953 – Hantaï had his first one-man exhibition of at the Galerie Etoile Scellée, prefaced by André Breton who wrote “Again, as once in every decade, a great new beginning...”  Hantaï threw himself into a brief Surrealist period which was marked above all by attention to Max Ernst’s experimental techniques.  Hantaï became aware of the Abstract Expressionist movement that had developed in New York during and after the war and sought to learn more from both André Breton and Marcel Duchamp.  Hantaï was particularly attracted to the notion of ‘automatism’ that the Abstract Expressionists had adopted from Surrealism, and above all to the work of Jackson Pollock.  To his surprise, Breton and Duchamp revealed themselves to be universally hostile to the American painters, and to Pollock in particular.

    1955 – Hantaï severed his connection to the Surrealist movement with a letter to Breton in which he declared his intention of exploring the non-figurative consequences of ‘automatism’.

    1955-60 – Hantaï traversed a period of turbulent research into the significance of painting and particularly the consequences of ‘automatic’ technique.  This period is marked by the appearance of a unique and extraordinary painting, titled in French ‘Écriture rose’, which might translate in English as ‘The Rose-Colored Writing Work’. Everyday, for the entire year of 1958, Hantaï copied in pen and ink from his wide reading in theological, philosophical, aesthetic and poetic texts onto an enormous canvas, measuring 330 x 425 cm. (10ft. 8in. x 13ft. 9in.) The painting represents a vast exploration of the physical process of making a work of art. Today, the painting hangs in the Musée National d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, and poses a colossal, open and largely unanswered question to the art and culture of the twentieth century.

    1960 – Simon Hantaï invented the ‘folding method’ of painting with which his name and work are henceforth synonymous. The method of ‘folding’ allowed Hantaï to synthesize the lessons offered by Pollock’s practice of ‘automatism’ and develop an entirely original abstract painting based on heterogeneous, organic energy.  Throughout the 1960s, ‘70’s, and beyond, Hantaï used this technique to anticipate and explore the key ideas of international contemporary art.  The ‘folding method’ developed over the succeeding four decades, with the series of ‘Cloaks’, ‘Catamurons’, ‘Bandages’, ‘Meuns’, ‘Studies’, ‘Watercolors’, ‘Whites’, ‘Tabulas’ and ‘Left Overs’. The invention of the ‘folding method’ has come to be understood as representing a key step in the emergence of the amorphous, multi-media art movement that will later take the name of ‘Process' art.