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Painting lesson: Hantai and his critics.

Article Excerpt
A canonical figure of contemporary French art, the Hungarian-born Simon Hantai is often characterized as the "painter of withdrawal par excellence," his social and artistic itinerary marked by the experience of exile. (1) Crossing cultures from the village of Bia to Paris, he also negotiated diverse artistic practices and political stances which informed, conditioned, and disrupted his oeuvre. The process of his canonization has entailed the retrospective correction of this trajectory and its assimilation to dominant social and artistic patterns of postwar French culture. This reconstruction, performed as a collaboration between the artist and the community of critics and historians, has made Hantai's oeuvre particularly resistant to contextual historical analysis. Such difficulties are hardly unfamiliar to those working on living artists. What makes Hantai's case particularly instructive is that the series of readjustments produced both by the experience of displacement and by the French state-sanctioned artistic models to which his oeuvre was assimilated throw these familiar difficulties into relief, allowing us a clear view of the forces at play.

While pursuing his studies at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts during World War II, Hantai, an antifascist and later an ardent communist, advocated socially engaged, representational painting. In spring 1948, he obtained a one-year travel grant to Paris from the Hungarian government, which was revoked by a regime turned Stalinist after his departure. Forced to choose between staying in France without resources and returning to Hungary, he opted for the former. (2) Four years later, with the support of Andre Breton, he became a member of the Surrealist group. His affiliation with the Surrealists did not last long, however, and after breaking with Breton's group in March 1955, he abandoned figurative painting and began working on large-scale, gestural abstractions. The change in his practice was followed by a short-lived collaboration with Georges Mathieu, an affiliation accompanied by a radical shift in Hantai's politics as he left behind his strong Marxist beliefs, becoming interested in religious spiritualism and Catholic theology. In March 1957, he and Mathieu organized Ceremonies Commemorating the Second Condemnation of Siger de Brabant. Inaugurated by a mass at Notre Dame and patronized by seven French archbishops, Ceremonies celebrated, among other things, the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre and the condemnation of the French Revolution by Pius VI. A series of exhibitions where "painting was excluded, and ideology ruled," Ceremonies was violently condemned by both Breton's Surrealist group and Guy Debord's Situationists as a fascist intervention. (3)

In 1960 yet another rupture in Hantai's oeuvre occurred: he launched his first series of pliages, paintings created by what would become his emblematic method of folding. (4) Winning the first Maeght prize in 1967 indicated his work's growing critical and institutional acclaim. Hantai's painting became the subject of such prominent critics as Marcelin Pleynet and Dominique Fourcade, and was supported by the eminent Parisian dealer Jean Fournier and, beginning in the mid- 1970s, by the directors of the Musee national d'art moderne. He had a large-scale retrospective at MNAM in 1976, and, after Dominique Bozo assumed the directorship there in the early 1980s, a room of his own. His painting provided a model for...

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