Hantai, Paintings, Watercolors 1971-1975 (Book)

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Hantai, Paintings, Watercolors 1971-1975 (Book) Author Bonnefoy, Paperback, Like New, Color and Black and White Illustrations, In English, 15 Pages, 1975.

Simon Hantaï’s work astonishes with the multiple artistic paths of the 20th century he has traveled (surrealist painting, gestural, all-over, writing, folding, etc.). He fascinates with the peaks of his different periods, resolutely singular paintings, unpublished in the history of Western painting. He also questions with the silence, the reserve that followed him: in 1982, Hantaï, at the height of recognition, withdrew from the art scene for many years.

Simon Hantaï is a Franco-Hungarian painter and conceptual artist. During the 1960s, he developed a method of folding canvases that he then covered with paint. When opened, the painting reveals a distinct pattern of color and negative space: a technique he called folding. Some of his most famous works include Mariales (1960–62), which emphasizes color in contrast to the work Les Blancs (1973–74) and its absence of color. Born on December 7, 1922 in Bia, Hungary, he studied at the Budapest School of Fine Art before moving to France. Hantaï first became acquainted with Parisian surrealists—André Breton would write the preface to the catalogue of his first exhibition—and eventually left them due to a debate over automatic processes in the visual arts, which the surrealists advocated but Hantaï rejected. The Pompidou Center in Paris dedicated a retrospective to him in 1976. He became a French citizen in 1966 and represented France at the Venice Biennale in 1982. He then withdrew from public life, living as a recluse until his death on September 12, 2008 in Paris.