Description
Book SynopsisExplores the career of Hungarian-born French painter Simon Hantaï (1922–2008) from his earliest paintings and writings in France in the 1950s through his final abstractions of the 2000s.
Trade Review“Warnock’s achievement in bringing together Hantaï’s modernist ambition with his extremely conservative use for religion is enormous. She is thorough but never boring and never even for a moment suggests that there’s anything odd about the premises with which he works.”
—Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe Critical Inquiry
“Molly Warnock, a skilled academic art historian, offers an elaborate reconstruction and explication of Hantaï’s aesthetic.”
—David Carrier caa.reviews
“Through sustained analysis of both Hantaï’s canvases and writings, [Warnock] provides the most extensive reading of the artist to date.”
—Matthew Bowman nonsite.org
“Warnock makes forays into the intellectual world of Hantaï’s postwar Paris and then uses her findings to guide us across and into the complex surfaces of the paintings themselves, many of which are buried in vaults and seen far too rarely. The focus is tight, which is arguably appropriate for the first scholarly monograph on the artist in English, and her command of the material is impressive.”
—Harry Cooper nonsite.org
“Warnock’s monograph makes a signature contribution to the study of Hantaï’s body of work and to the wider history of modernism. She explicates the fundamental theoretical and practical concerns of an understudied artist whose work, while important, is not well known to a broad audience. Without a doubt, her scholarship provides the most sophisticated art-historical analysis of Hantaï’s thought and practice to date.”
—Michael Schreyach,author of Pollock’s Modernism
“With this book we finally have a beautifully written, deeply researched, and comprehensive account of one of postwar Europe's most significant artists. Far from the cliché of Simon Hantaï and his folded (‘pliage’) paintings as detached and impersonal, Molly Warnock reveals the artist’s full investment in a ‘deep context’ of ideas, historical issues, and major artistic movements: from surrealism to minimalism via abstract expressionism, traversing the terrain of the Catholic liturgy, philosophies of community and phenomenology, and questions of writing and legibility, while never forgetting the techniques and fundamentals of the practice of painting.”
—Natalie Adamson,coeditor of Material Imagination: Art in Europe, 1946–72
“A beautiful monograph . . . focused, exquisitely written and illustrated in colour, with lots of careful meditations on the artworks themselves.”
—Victoria H. F. Scott 21: Inquiries into Art, History, and the Visual
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part 1: Writing and Painting
1. Unfolding Automatism
2. Excessive Gestures 1
3. Excessive Gestures 2
4. Ordinary Painting
Part 2: Folding and Cutting
5. The Passage to Pliage
6. Figuring Finitude 1
7. Figuring Finitude 2
8. Abandoned Painting
Envoi: A Politics of “With”
Appendix 1: “A Plantaneous Demolition”
Simon Hantaï and Jean Schuster
Appendix 2: “Notes, Deliberately Confounding, Accelerating, and the Like for a ‘Reactionary,’ Nonreducible Avant-Garde”
Simon Hantaï
Notes
Bibliography
Index
