Simon Hantai

Simon Hantai – Alliance and break with the Parisian Surrealists

Simon Hantai was born in Biatorbáge in Hungary on 8 December 1922. At the age of eight he was temporarily blinded - an experience which greatly affected him and had a lasting influence on his later relationship with painting - his characteristic and unusual working methods could thus largely be traced back to his childhood. In Budapest, he studied for a time with István Szöny before emigrating to France in 1948 where he shared a room with his friend, the French painter Christian d’Orgeix, who facilitated him entry to the art world. At the beginning, the Surrealists around André Breton warmly welcomed him into their circle, with Breton writing the forward to Simon Hantais’ first exhibition in Paris in 1953. Despite this, he ultimately broke away from the Surrealists due to too many irreconcilable differences of opinion: about the exclusion of Max Ernst as well as the relationship of surrealism to the methods of Jackson Pollock. The latter induced Simon Hantai to a comprehensive engagement with abstraction, and at the same time, the artist felt an ever-stronger connection to Catholicism. 

Painting with closed eyes

Simon Hantai, together with the Tachist painter Georges Mathieu and the abstract artist Pierre Sages, became one of the ‘conservative revolutionaries’ of French art of the of the 1960s. In contrast to his colleagues, his works had a light, optimistic manifestation with their lighter colour palette which could sometimes lead to a certain weightlessness. Simon Hantai experimented with numerous techniques, but the technique of canvas folding which he invented and used for a large number of his works, became characteristic for the artist: For this method, the artist folded the canvas and covered up the paint, and then opened it up and saw an artwork of blank areas and colour zones. This technique had the advantage that it could be carried out even with eyes closed. Painting with eyes closed fascinated Hantai, who, from personal experience, knew what it felt like to do be love without ability to see, a power so important to human beings. 

Celebrated participant of Documenta and Biennale.

Simon Hantai was a participant and object of various important exhibitions. As early as 1959, he took part in Documenta II in Kassel, and in 1984 represented France at the Venice Biennale. He subsequently withdrew for a long time before surprising the artworld with a new series of works in 1998. Collections of his works are found in the Musee National d’Art Modern in Paris, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, Vatican Museum in Rome, and the Ludwig Muzeum in his birth town of Budapest.

Simon Hantai died on 12 September 2008 in Paris. His three sons, Pierre Hantai, Marc Hantai and Jérôme Hantai, are musicians specialised in historical performance practice.