ABSTRACT
The Hungarian-born French painter Simon Hantaï (1922–2008) is well known for the abstract canvases that he produced between 1960 and 1982 in the medium that he called pliage, or “folding.” These paintings are central to Hantaï’s reputation as one of the earliest artists in Europe to have noticed and responded powerfully to the work of Jackson Pollock. By contrast, little attention has been paid to the painter’s practice in the final quarter century of his life. During that period, which saw Hantaï declining to show his work on all but a handful of occasions, the artist produced a number of photographically based and digitally transformed iterations of previously completed paintings, the “originals” of which had been destroyed (in most cases, by Hantaï himself). Yet with few exceptions, critics have tended to treat the results as constituting a largely dispensable aftermath to the artist’s heroic achievements in preceding decades, and this corpus was notably excluded from Hantaï’s 2013 retrospective at the Centre Georges Pompidou. This chapter addresses that lacuna, reframing these works as integral expressions of the painter’s mature conception of his medium. Special emphasis is placed on the artist’s exchanges with the philosophers Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy.
