The Brooklyn Rail

Making a mark upon the world can be seen as an act of hubris or a frank recognition of the limits of unique inscription, depending upon one’s philosophical inclinations. Simon Hantaï (1922–2008) realized the latter in his painting after having disproven to himself the moral efficacy of the former. Arriving in post-war Paris from his native Hungary in 1949, at a time when the marks of man upon the world were yet freshly traced in martial scarification, he found himself displaced and grasping at the tattered hem of “The Absolute” (of essentially Catholic exegesis),¹ among the remnants of the Surrealist circle of André Breton. He developed in this milieu from the anthropomorphic figuration of Surrealism toward the basic activity of the automatism that prefigured such. Benjamin Buchloh described the situation of HantaÏ’s response to the necessity of redefining painting in a shattered post-war France as both recovered interest in Matisse’s late cutout works (works which significantly declare the limits of the anthropomorphic gesture by the square) and his ambition: “to conceive of a new type of painting of pure—almost self-generated—design outside of an author's intentional composition; to allow for a random constellation of chroma and aleatory, yet serialized form, in order to transcend both the limitations of a Constructivist techno-scientific abstraction and those of the biomorphic and automatist design of the Surrealists of the 1920’s.”² His devolution from the quasi-illustrative body toward the more fundamental instantiation of the embodied gesture was largely prompted by his encounter with Jackson Pollock’s “drip” compositions of the late 1940s and early 50s. Hantaï understood Pollock’s hands off approach to painting—his stick-dangled divination of centripetal form, hovering ritualistically above the prone and unstretched canvas—as a way to reanimate automatist gesture in order to make the traditional, authorial hand disappear. If one imagines academic painting technique as a way for the artist to “cover their tracks” (their marks upon the world) with technical (prideful) mastery, in contrast Hantaï’s response to Pollock was to further expose the aleatory nature of the painterly gesture for and by itself, effectively leaving himself out of the picture. His pliage (folding) technique was an intentional act of “deskilling” that opened his work to a much more egalitarian interpretation of the crafting of form and, in terms of social analogy, a philosophy of the commons.

Molly Warnock, who has written searchingly on the artist’s work, has chosen a representative selection of each distinct phase of Hantaï’s career, from a classic asymmetric pliage composition exemplified in the electric blue shards of Catamurons, (1963) to a bright orange Meun (1967-68), to the gridded constructs of the artist’s “Tabula” series. As Warnock notes, the “Meun'' series marked a significant turn for the artist: “The Meuns generally are taken to mark a key crux in the pliage work—at once the onset of Hantaï’s mature reckoning with a prior French tradition in which Cézanne and Matisse figure crucially, and, by that same token, the definitive overcoming of Surrealist outrance by modernist discipline.”³ The “Tabula” series is represented by one small and three monumentally-scaled iterations (1974–81). These later works demand a much more sustained viewing in terms of their regularized patterns, as opposed to the earlier works in which one feels an immediate somatic affinity to their kinetic unfurling. The device of the tied, folded, and then stained canvas stretched in asymmetric arcs graphically evoke elemental explosions that pull at one’s gut consciousness.

The earlier works are charged with the thrill of the artist’s discovery of that binding and unfolding process of painting which would become his proxy “signature.” Hantaï’s fold was an interpolating device akin to Pollock’s sticks and dried brushes, occasioning the conduction of an image rather than its manifestation in pre-conceived composition. Both painters basically “found” their imagery in their respective processes. Rather than resultant from mere coincidence however, the significance of the found gesture is really a universal recognition of the eventuality of all gestures, such a discovery thereby taking on, ironically, an archetypal quality rather than a unique one. One senses, in Hantaï’s later grid-structured works, that he recognized a recurrence of such a discovery is really nothing new at all. Each unfurled square in the “Tabula” paintings retains the form of chance but is presented in such a logical format that such risk is diminished within the grid’s regularized dispersal. The works from this series that are monochromatic, such as the smaller, red Tabula (1974), are chromatically consistent with the artist’s critique of chance as rote performance. One larger polychromed Tabula (1980) presents an array of fold-derived rectangles in predominantly analogous hues of blues, greens, and violets accompanied by contrapuntal reds, oranges, and yellows tactfully distributed in between. This painting could be read as a further self-reflexive critique of aesthetic decorum, of fussy arrangement. Three years after its creation, Hantaï withdrew from exhibiting for a decade and a half. In doing so, he essentially modeled a position of exhausted aesthetic propriety. There’s a generosity to the artist stepping aside, making space for a communal reception of their work rather than leaning back on its merely interrogatory insistence. In the words of the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, a friend and discussant of Hantaï’s oeuvre, “There is no meaning if meaning is not shared, and not because there would be an ultimate or first signification that all beings have in common, but because meaning is itself the sharing of Being.”⁴

With the turn of a fold, the forensic trace of an implicate order,⁵ Hantaï declined to participate in what he remarked was a choice between the “French delicacy” or “American sloppiness” of his contemporaries, operating instead from within a relative blind spot of intentionality. Interestingly, as a child Hantaï experienced the trauma of temporary blindness, which may have occasioned a sublimation of the event via creative disassociation in which a conflict between willful determination and accidental fate remains perpetually unresolved.⁶ Yet if one were to lean into not seeing, that conditional acceptance can contain unforeseen possibilities. Perhaps the most inspirational take away from Hantaï’s grappling with contemporary visuality is a shared realization that the fugitive autonomy of abstract painting makes up its own rules as it goes along, and that there are none whose eyes are so open to that unfolding process as those whose will “not-sees.”

1. The imprinted Catholicism of Hantaï’s youth, as well as that of the majority of the European Surrealists, figured as a philosophical grounding for their poetic adaption of the Catholic liturgy of the Word (of God) made incarnate, a figurative mysticism sorely tested by the unprecedented literal mortification of flesh made word (disappeared to order) in the Nazi death camps.
2. Benjamin Buchloh, “Hantaï, Villegle, and the Dialectics of Painting's Dispersal,” October 91, (Winter 2000): 28.
3. Molly Warnock, “Engendering Pliage: Simon Hantaï’s Meuns,” Nonsite.org, Articles Issue #6, July 1, 2012.
4. Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural, trans. Robert Richardson and Anne O'Byrne (Stanford University Press, 2000), 2.
5. Implicate order is explained by physicist and theorist David Bohm as follows: “The whole object is not (being) perceived in any one view, but rather, it is grasped only implicitly as that single reality which is shown in all (possible) views.” See David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order (London and New York: Routledge Classics, 2002), 10.
6. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the fear of blindness is something shared by other painters. In a 1988 interview with Yves Michaud, the American painter Sam Francis (an American in Paris arrived a year after Hantaï), expressed “I had momentary fears of blindness…The idea of just opening your eyes and looking so that the image is received is a little different than trying to pierce the veil…There are two different kinds of seeing: viewing and the will to power through the eye.” See Yves Michaud, “Conversations with Sam Francis,” Santa Monica, May 14–17, 1988.