Simon Hantaï

(French/Hungarian, 1922–2008)

Simon Hantaï was a French-Hungarian Conceptual artist and painter. During the 1960s, he developed a signature method of folding canvas and covering it in paint, which when opened revealed a distinctive pattern of color and negative space: a technique he called “pliage,” or folding. Some of his notable works include Mariales (Cloaks) (1960–1962) which emphasized color, and, by contrast, Les Blancs (Whites) (1973–1974), which stressed the absence of color. “It was while working on the Studies that I realized what my true subject was—the resurgence of the ground underneath my painting,” he once remarked. Born on December 7, 1922 in Bia, Hungary, he studied at the Budapest School of Fine Art before moving to France. Though Hantaï initially fell in with the Parisian Surrealists—especially André Breton, who wrote the preface to his first exhibition catalogue—he eventually broke with the group over an aesthetic argument regarding automatic processes of artmaking. The artist became a French citizen in 1966, and went on to represent his adopted country at the Venice Biennale in 1982. He famously retreated from public life thereafter, living as a recluse until his death on September 12, 2008 in Paris, France. In 2013, the Centre Georges Pompidou held a posthumous retrospective of the artist in honor of his legacy. Today, Hantaï’s works are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Ludwig Museum of Contemporary Art in Budapest, among others.