Simon Hantaï

Private Collection, France (acquired from the artist in the 1950s)

Acquired from the above by the present owner

Maklary Kalman, Simon Hantaï, Budapest, 2012, vol. I, illustrated in colour pp. 123-125

Born to a German émigré family living in Hungary, Hantaï studied at the Budapest School of Fine Arts in the early 1940s. In 1948 he received a grant from the Hungarian Ministry of Culture to continue his studies in Paris. Before reaching France, Hantaï and his wife travelled to Rome, Ravenna and Venice during the 24th Venice Biennale, where he discovered the painting of many of his European contemporaries. The couple arrived in Paris in September 1948, and Hantaï soon started visiting museums and galleries, acquainting himself with the European as well as American avant-garde and with the artistic discourse of the moment.

 

In the catalogue of the recent Centre Pompidou retrospective of Hantaï’s work, Bénédicte Ajac wrote about the artist’s encounter with the Parisian Surrealists: ‘In December 1952, Hantaï leaves a small unsigned painting-object on André Breton’s doorstep. The latter immediately installs the piece in a showcase at the new Surrealist gallery À l’Étoile Scellée and offers Hantaï his first one-man show in January 1953. In the preface to the catalogue, Breton resoundingly welcomes Hantaï to the group and concludes: “Once again, as perhaps every ten years, a GREAT DEPARTURE”’ (B. Ajac in Simon Hantaï (exhibition catalogue), Centre National d’Art et de Culture Georges Pompidou, Paris, 2013, p. 53).

 

During the early 1950s Hantaï used a number of Surrealist techniques including frottage, grattage, decalcomania and collage, merging these automatist practices with biomorphic abstraction. Often working on a large scale, he produced paintings populated by organic shapes and forms that resemble microscopic organisms depicted in bright colours, as in the present composition.  In November 1953 Hantaï’s painting was the subject of a special issue of the magazine Medium: communication surréaliste edited by Jean Schuster, with whom he continued to collaborate over the next couple of years. Increasingly drawn to the action painting of the Abstract Expressionists, he eventually broke with the Surrealist group in 1955.