Simon Hantaï and the Reserves of Painting

The Hungarian-born French painter Simon Hantaï (1922–2008) is best known for abstract, large-format works produced using pliage: the painting of a crumpled, gathered, or systematically pleated canvas that the artist then unfolds and stretches for exhibition. In her study of this profoundly influential artist, Molly Warnock presents a persuasive historical account of his work, his impact on a younger generation of French artists, and the genesis and development of the practice of pliage over time. Simon Hantaï and the Reserves of Painting covers the entirety of Hantaï’s expansive oeuvre, from his first aborted experiments with folding around 1950 to his post-pliage experiments with digital scanning and printing. Throughout, Warnock analyzes the artist’s relentlessly searching studio practice in light of his no less profound engagement with developments in philosophy, psychoanalysis, and critical theory. Engaging both Hantaï’s art and writing to support her argument and paying particular attention to his sustained interrogation of religious painting in the West, Warnock shows how Hantaï’s work evinces a complicated mixture of intentionality and contingency. Appendixes provide English translations of two major texts by the artist, “A Plantaneous Demolition” and “Notes, Deliberately Confounding, Accelerating, and the Like for a ‘Reactionary,’ Nonreducible Avant-Garde.”Original and insightful, this important new book is a central reference for the life, art, and theories of one of the most significant and exciting artists of the twentieth century. It will appeal to art historians and students of modernism, especially those interested in the history of abstraction, materiality and Surrealism, theories of community, and automatism and making.

“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

Molly Warnock is is an art historian and critic based in Baltimore.