Photo: Simon Hantaï: Étude, 1969, oil on canvas, 103 1⁄8 by 89 3⁄4 inches at Paul Kasmin. Fortunately, the catalogue by art historian Molly Warnock, who curated the show, does a fine job of integrating Hantaï’s work into the context of late modernist painting in both Europe and the U.S.
The 2001 “Suaire” (Shroud) series, consisting of digital prints on canvas based on a group of “Tabula” paintings from 1982, was not sampled at all-despite being his last major body of work and his first use of digital technology. Moreover, although Hantaï often produced bright, multicolored canvases, this selection portrayed him as a relatively subdued monochromist. Only one work from the ’70s was included. Hantaï’s work is not widely shown in this country-his last shows in New York were at Pierre Matisse (1970, 1975) and André Emmerich (1982), and he thereafter turned down all gallery exhibition offers (as well as a second Centre Pompidou retrospective)-so it’s unfortunate that this sparse exhibition gave a skewed vision of the artist’s oeuvre.
#MONOCHROMIST SERIES#
Two examples from the “Laissée” (Leftover) series of the 1980s to mid-’90s allot equal visual weight to figure and ground, creating a perceptual back-and-forth. The two largest paintings in the show-the red Tabula (1976) and the blue Tabula (1980), both about 14 feet wide-present mottled grids with ragged white dividing lines. As Eliott Erwitt says COLOR IS DESCRIPTIVE. An allover pattern of wrinkles gives Étude (1969) the look of a high-contrast photograph of grass and flowers. Most of my artworks inspired by galaxies, mystic worlds, parallel worlds, metaphysic’s life, musics that I’ve listened and movies that I’ve seen and generally everything that I’m living with. The large, green organic forms in Meun (1968) call to mind the voluptuous shapes in late Matisse collages. The other nine works on view represented some of the varied effects that Hantaï was able to achieve from his folding method. Though there is something Pollock-like about their alloverness and shallow space, these compositions are not gestural in the conventional sense. Each large (roughly 10-foot-high) work features a dark, tangled mass of shapes cropped by the framing edge. The two earliest paintings in this exhibition, Peinture (1962-63) and m.c.8 (1962), reflect Hantaï’s move away from the improvisational techniques of Art Informel and Tachisme.
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