Journal of Contemporary Painting - Volume 1, Issue 2, 2015

Simon Hantaï’s reputation was established from the early 1960s, with regular exhibitions up until his withdrawal from the art world in 1982. His work had a consistent impact in France where he is regarded as a major post-war artist who initiated a crucial rethinking of painting in the wake of Pollock and Matisse, influencing most specifically the generation epitomized by the groups Buren, Mosset, Parmentier and Toroni and Supports/Surfaces. More recently, however, an exhibition at the Paul Kasmin Gallery in New York (2010) and a major retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in Paris (2013) have contributed to a growing interest in, and recognition of, Hantaï’s work outside of France. This issue of the Journal of Contemporary Painting is an intervention within this emerging reception.

This series of translations offer recent engagements with Simon Hantaï’s work in France for the first time to an English-speaking audience. They include a text by Hantaï himself as well as texts on, and letters to Hantaï by Georges Didi-Huberman, Hubert Damisch, François Rouan and Jean-Luc Nancy. Representative of the wide-ranging conversations, dialogues and exchanges Hantaï entertained with philosophers, art historians and other artists, the translations reveal the extent to which Hantaï’s method of folding can be understood in philosophical, historical and theoretical terms.

This article deals with the results of a preliminary catalogue of Simon Hantaï’s wonderfully rich collection of personal archives, left untouched in his studio at the time of his death. From 1984, as he voluntarily withdrew from the artistic scene and the public arena, Hantaï never actually ceased working. In the last fifteen years of his life, when he was particularly active, a large part of the work archived was created or else collected, manipulated and reused. These archives are part and parcel of Hantaï’s original creative process at the time, as he reassessed and continued his work.

The objective of the round table was to open up a discussion around Simon Hantaï’s work with questions that are specifically from a non-French position. Isabelle Monod-Fontaine, as one of the three curators of the 2013 Centre Pompidou exhibition and François Rouan, as both a friend and a younger painter, offer intimate perspectives on Hantaï’s life and work. The discussions look at key issues in both the production and the reception of Hantaï’s painting. The relationship between method and process is opened up as a key distinction, against the background of American art and painting. Hantaï’s withdrawal from the studio and his uneasy relationship to the art world are also discussed.

This is a transcript of an interview with Éric de Chassey conducted by Mick Finch on the occasion of the Simon Hantaï exhibition curated by de Chassey at the Villa Médici in Rome between the 12 February to 11 May 2014. De Chassey is Professor of Art History at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Lyons and has, since 2009, been the Director of the French Academy in Rome, the Villa Medici. The Villa Medici exhibition took place after the major Hantaï exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in 2013 for which de Chassey had contributed an catalogue essay on Hantaï’s silkscreen work. The interview discusses the context of the Villa Medici exhibition and particuarly the way Hantaï’s latter years were represented. The interview took place at the Villa Medici on Sunday 11 May 2014.

This article, in the form of a conversation between Daniel Buren and Daniel Sturgis, reflects upon Daniel Buren’s friendship and respect for the work of Simon Hantaï. Daniel Buren talks of his introduction to Simon Hantaï’s work, and how Hantaï influenced not only himself but also other artists from his generation and in particular Michel Parmentier. Daniel Buren also looks critically at the Simon Hantaï retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in 2013, which he felt did not fully capture the radical qualities that first drew him to Hantaï’s paintings and installations.

In a series of works dating from 2013–2014, the British painter Andy Harper ‘doubles’ painted images using a direct form of contact printing. This operation on the part of the painter brings together the traditional practice of painting with the purely mechanical act of printing, a doubling of the image. The accompanying text considers the principle of symmetry implied in this act, through a reading of Kant’s early philosophy of space and the crucial role played in it by the notion of ‘handedness’ or orientation.

The Journal of Contemporary Painting invited five contemporary artists to reflect on the work of Simon Hantaï. Reflections by British artists, Stuart Elliot and Andy Harper; Belgian artist, Amelie de Beauffort; and American artists, Joe Fyfe and Marjorie Welish, are collected here. Each artist wrote from a different proximity to the work of Simon Hantaï – through seeing the work in recent exhibitions or catalogues – but always grounded by engagements with their own studio practices. A brief introduction by Laura Lisbon offers a glimpse at one of the many provocations that Hantaï’s work offers through viewing in person the major retrospective exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, in 2013. The viewing of the exhibition acted as the initial prompt to invite contemporary artists to reflect on Simon Hantaï at this point in time. The artists’ reflections collected here explore insights into the aleatory, temporal, topological and historical dimensions of Hantaï’s work.

‘John Timberlake: We Are History’, Beaconsfield, London, 28 June–30 August 2014

‘An Appetite for Painting. Contemporary Painting 2000–2014’, Museum of Contemporary Art, Oslo, Norway, 12 September 2014–4 January 2015

‘Nasreen Mohamedi’, Tate Liverpool, 6 June–5 October 2014

‘The Art of Dansaekhwa’, Kukje Gallery, Seoul, 28 August–19 October 2014

‘Christina Ramberg’, 42 Carlton Place, Glasgow, 4–21 April 2014