SIMON HANTAÏ, WHAT HAPPENED THROUGH PAINTING
Texts and interviews...
par Elza Adamowicz
May 15, 2022
"Painting exists because I need to paint. But that cannot be enough. There is a questioning of the gesture that imposes itself." These words by the artist Simon Hantaï (1922-2008) reveal the importance for the painter not only of painting as a practice but also of reflection on painting, an importance that finds a wide echo in the choice of documents gathered by Jérôme Duwa, Simon Hantaï. Ce qui est arrivé par la peinture. Born in Hungary in 1922, Hantaï studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest; in 1948 he left the country that had become communist, to settle in France, first in Paris then from 1965 in the village of Meun. He frequented painters (including his artist companions at the Cité des Fleurs Michel Parmentier and Daniel Burren), philosophers (Georges Didier-Hubermann, Gilles Deleuze...), writers (Henri Michaux, Jean Schuster...) as well as members of the surrealist group (as a collaborator first, then as an adversary). A major figure of post-war abstraction, he inspired numerous studies (Anne Baldassari, Molly Warnock among others) and exhibitions, including a retrospective at the Centre Pompidou 2013 and an exhibition opening this May at the Vuitton Foundation in Paris.
Published by l'Atelier contemporain and the Simon Hantaï Archives, the work is a collection of texts (including unpublished ones) and interviews (1953-2006), selected and presented by Jérôme Duwa. Among them, texts by Hantaï himself, proposing both an account of his artistic practice and a reflection on painting; interviews (with Georges Charbonnier, Jean Daive among others); the script of documentary films about the painter (by Jean-Michel Meurice 2013 or Pierre Desfons from 1981). This rich documentation allows us to follow the thread of his questioning of aesthetics, elaborated very close to his pictorial creation, and his positions, often polemical. Add to this an iconographic booklet of color reproductions of his paintings, numerous photos (notably by Edouard Boubat) showing Hantaï in his studio; and a series of photograms extracted from Desfons' film where Hantaï seems to dance with his immense canvases from the Tabulas series (9 x 15 m) in the Lainé warehouse in Bordeaux (pp.174-5). The result: a publication rich in documents that bring the painter's canvases and reflections to life, as well as the analyses of art historians or philosophers.
The interest of the work does not stop there, however. Jérôme Duwa, known for his research on post-1945 surrealism, particularly on Jean Schuster (Les Batailles de Jean Schuster. Défense et illustration du surréalisme (1947-1969), 2015), presents the texts by situating them in their artistic and political context, in relation not only to the great avant-garde polemics on abstraction, but also to the invasion of Hungary by Soviet troops in 1956 or the Algerian war. He thus gives us keys for reading the texts and interviews, without however crushing them under too heavy knowledge, while adding the sensitivity of someone who knew the painter and was thus able to follow his work closely. Particularly perceptive, in my opinion: the analysis of the notion of "gift" on the occasion of the painter's note-glosses accompanying his donation of paintings to the MAMVP (pp.179-81); as well as the discussion of his relations with surrealism.
Indeed, even before joining the surrealists, Hantaï shows affinities with the movement: he practices scratching, collage, assemblage, he paints biomorphic forms and hybrid beings, he privileges themes of eroticism or the abject. In December 1952 Hantaï anonymously deposited in front of Breton's door on rue Fontaine a canvas entitled Regarde dans mes yeux. Je te cherche. Ne me chasse pas, as a personal message addressed to the poet. A month later the latter would offer the painter his first Parisian solo exhibition in the new gallery A L'Etoile Scellée of which he is the director. Breton's enthusiastic text, printed on the front of the exhibition invitation, with Rimbaldian resonances ("Once again, perhaps every ten years, a great departure"), appropriates the painter for surrealism. Hantaï's paintings, like those of Jean Degottex, René Duvillier or his compatriot Judit Reigl, exhibited at the Etoile Scellée, renew the practice of automatism thanks to a gestural freedom that gives new impetus to surrealism.
Between 1952 and 1955 Hantaï participated in surrealist activities, its games ("Ouvrez-vous?") and debates, its meetings and exhibitions. He contributed to the journal Médium (directed by Jean Schuster) where he was in charge of illustrating the first issue (November 1953). He also wrote with Schuster an essay, "Une démolition au platane" (Médium 4, 1955), where the authors defend automatism as the central principle of surrealism while renewing the debate around automatism and abstraction. Beyond surrealism, Schuster and Hantaï also engage in the debates of the time on art and ideology, where they clash in sometimes virulent polemics: defenders of abstraction against figuration ("the trompe-l'œil fixation of dream images"); proponents of "lyrical" abstraction against those of "geometric" abstraction. Artists and writers thus seek to position themselves in often mined territories, between socialist realism and abstract expressionism.
The reception of "Démolition..." will be largely hostile, eclipsed it must be said by Breton's essay published in the same issue, "Du surréalisme en ses œuvres vives". Subsequently Hantaï will distance himself from the movement: first on the occasion of an exhibition conceived by Charles Estienne (Alice in Wonderland) which snubs Jackson Pollock's painting; then through his collaboration with Georges Mathieu, a Catholic and royalist painter, with whom he conceived in 1957 the exhibition Cérémonies commémoratives de la deuxième condamnation de Siger de Brabant (which would give rise to the violently anti-Catholic surrealist tract Coup de Semonce). The "Notes confusionnelles..." of 1958 will mark the painter's definitive break with surrealism.
Having freed himself from the constraints imposed by Breton's entourage, Hantaï turns to a more objective painting, and for this purpose he develops from 1960 a particular technique that he calls "folding as method." His painting now stands between two extremes of contemporary art – "There is Matisse, there is Pollock" he declares (quoted by Baldassari): between the cut papers and the large Chinese ink drawings of the first, on the one hand, and the "decentered space" and randomness of the second; between the passage from the vertical space of the easel to the horizontal space of the floor. Let us add the influence of Cézanne, whose canvases contain "holed" spaces, these whites between colors, that Hantaï will experiment with thanks to his folding technique, where the canvas is crumpled, folded, flattened, the surface painted then unfolded to reveal the whites in the hollows of the folds. "When I fold, I am objective and it allows me to get lost," affirms the painter. Indeed, thanks to folding he establishes a new relationship with the canvas, which is no longer conceived as a projection screen ("No more mirror, composition, control, corrections, positions"), but as a "birthing pocket" where the absence of subjective investment ("not to be the owner" of the painting) gives way to the surprises of randomness, the unexpected
Duwa's work succeeds in bringing to life technical procedures, positions and polemics in the painter, situating them in a framework that includes surrealism while largely surpassing it. It offers us an essential guide for visiting the retrospective of the centenary of the artist's birth (curator Anne Baldassari) bringing together more than 130 works at the Vuitton Foundation from May 18 to August 29.
Elza Adamowicz
29.4.2022