Simon Hantaï

Simon Hantaï (Biatorbágy, Hungary, 1922 – Paris, 2008) was an abstract painter, born in Hungary and a French citizen from 1966. He is best known for the folding method, which he developed in the 1960s and which shaped his work for the rest of his career. His art joined the automatism of Surrealism with the gestural allover painting of American Abstract Expressionism.

He was born near Budapest into a family of Danube Swabians who had changed the surname Handl to Hantai. He studied at the Budapest School of Fine Arts and then travelled through Italy on foot. He moved to France in 1948, and André Breton wrote the preface to the catalogue of his first exhibition in Paris. In 1955 he broke with the Surrealist group, after Breton refused to accept any similarity between automatic writing and the action painting of Jackson Pollock.

Around 1960 he began his pliage paintings. He folded the canvas into various shapes, painted it, and then unfolded it, leaving unpainted areas crossed by bright splashes of colour. The technique is said to have been inspired by the marks left by the folds of his mother's apron, and it dominated the rest of his career. His series include Mariales (Cloaks, 1960–62), Meuns (1967–68), Etudes (Studies, 1969), Blancs (the Whites, 1973–74), Tabulas (from 1974) and Laissées (Leftovers, 1981–1994). The Meuns series, named after a small village in the Forest of Fontainebleau where he lived from 1966, examines the human figure, while in Studies the figure dissolves and the white ground becomes dynamic.

A retrospective of his work was held at the Centre Pompidou in 1976, and in 1982 he represented France at the Venice Biennale. During the 1980s and 1990s he withdrew almost completely from the public scene. His work is held in the Centre Pompidou and the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, and a major retrospective opened at the Centre Pompidou in 2013. He was also the father of the musicians Marc, Jérôme and Pierre Hantaï.