Hantai Blancs Preview

SIMON HANTAÏ BLANCS

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PA U L K A S M I N G A L L E R Y 2 9 3 T E N T H AV E N U E N E W YO R K

HantaĂŻ studio, Meun, 1973-4.

The best account to date of the Blancs is by Marcelin Pleynet, a poet and critic whose affiliations with the journals Tel Quel and, later, Peinture, cahiers théoriques, among others, made him one of the most prominent art theorists in France during the years in which Hantaï developed his pliage practice.

He was also, not incidentally, one of the first in that country to write sympathetically about postwar American abstraction, in ways that proved pivotally defining for the younger artists associated with the group Supports/Surfaces. In an important text of 1983 entitled “The Identity of Light”—an extract of which, translated into English for the first time, is included in this catalogue—Pleynet insists on the close relationship that he believes exists between the Blancs and the slightly earlier Études, 1969-71 (see pages 16-21). Pleynet’s account remains an indispensable point of departure for all further thinking about the series.

The Études, Pleynet tells us, bring to light the constitutive activity of the presumed “ground”: the white support left untouched during the painting process and only revealed upon unfolding. Already in the Meuns, Hantaï had allowed this reserve to infiltrate the painted fields; now, by the artist’s own assessment, it becomes the main event, so powerfully does it modulate our perception of the monochromatically pigmented areas. Indeed, as Pleynet notes, differently sized and shaped parcels of the same color—in the 1969 example included in this exhibition, a flat Kelly green—can appear radically heterogeneous, depending on the local relations between colored surface and nonpainted void. Otherwise put, the variously distributed areas of blank canvas help transform material uniformity into virtual polychromy.

varied colors simply resume the traditional dominance of “the painted”? “A series of canvases called ‘Blancs,’ made in order to see if the reversal (the non-painted becoming active) remains, even if candid [franches], multiple colors are used again,” Hantaï would later write, summing up the suite.5 Here as throughout pliage as a whole, it is crucial to the painter’s conception of his practice that the work can fail; the operations at stake are never surefire. Where the Blancs succeed, however, one will feel that the little “s” in the title has been deeply earned. * * * Pleynet’s insights suggest that, for Hantaï, polychromy is not an end in itself. Rather, the central issue, in the Blancs as in preceding suites, is the relation of painted to nonpainted. Where the Études bring that interplay to the fore with unprecedented clarity, the 1973-74 canvases show the artist grappling with what just as quickly emerges as the inherent instability, indeed the essential heterogeneity, of each pole in that driving opposition—terms that Hantaï had previously conceived as monolithic. The painter applies multiple colors so as to draw out more fully the primordial plurality—the extraordinarily fecund impurity—of this white ground that is not one.

The Blancs build upon, but also partially invert, the recognition at the heart of the Études. Now Hantaï uses multiple colors on a single canvas, so as to show that the appearance of the white of the support is no less contingent upon the neighboring color zone or zones; that “the nonpainted” is, in fact, so many whites, plural from the first. But as always with this artist, the demonstration is also a test: Would the whites continue to “paint”—as Hantaï liked to put it—in the face of more immediately apparent polychromy? Or would the newly Meun, 1968, oil on canvas, 100 3/8 x 88 1/2 inches, 255 x 225 cm

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Yet even as this investigation can seem the logical extension of Hantaï’s practice to date, it nonetheless compels a significant procedural shift—one whose stakes are not simply formal. From the later Meuns through the Études, Hantaï’s use of monochromatic color had facilitated an increasingly neutral covering of the entirety of the exposed canvas. In many earlier Meuns—for instance, an emerald-colored example of 1968— the painter’s brushwork appears highly conscious of the limits of each particular painted area: Certain traces read as limning that shape, while others suggest a circling motion within it. This handling appears keyed to the relative largeness of the zones in question. Among the later Meuns and the Études, by contrast, the turn to tighter, more allover crumpling discourages such an approach. Here, one feels that Hantaï has painted a total surface, rather than lingering over individual facets (or more precisely, shards).

Something else happens with the Blancs. The method of folding remains largely the same: As in the Études, Hantaï crumples the canvas from edge to edge. Yet the turn to polychromy forecloses indifferent coating of the resulting relief.

Rather, as studio photographs make clear, the painter has repeatedly to make two fundamental determinations: which creases among the many before him to take as defining a discrete zone, and which color to place within those bounds.

Some pictures suggest that he may even have elected to leave certain exposed areas blank, thus breaking with the supposed principle according to which “the painted” covers without remainder the surface given to the gaze. If the Études, more than perhaps any other series in Hantaï’s oeuvre, minimize the role of the painter’s intentionality, the Blancs implicate it anew: Each color patch speaks to specific acts of selection and placement. What had been a rapid, quasi-automatic task is broken down into a host of temporally and spatially discrete deeds. * * * To understand the stakes of this shift more fully, we need to go back to Hantaï’s work on the eve of his move to pliage.

His writings of the 1950s circle incessantly around what he

sees as the worrying subjectivism or indeed psychologism of contemporary art, a problem intricately bound with such matters as the commodification of the work of art, its loss of any genuinely collective dimension, and its descent into so much literary dabbling.6 Resisting those developments, he seeks repeatedly to connect his painting to something higher or lower than the self.7 During his early years in Paris, spent in André Breton’s Surrealist circle, the key notion is automatism, construed as an opening to what Hantaï’s first published text in French calls “a post-human condition”8; later, as the painter adopts a more gestural style, he investigates other avenues by which to “exit the self,” from Georges Bataille’s conception of eroticism to considerably older models of mystical illumination.

Throughout this period, and particularly in the years 195558, Hantaï’s canvases track his sustained, if continually selfcomplicating, attempt to “outrace” psychology. This is manifest primarily in his negotiations with gesture. Variously disposed about the painted field, his rapidly executed traces—which are almost always scraped out of, rather than applied to, a coat or coats of darker pigment—reveal a quasi-graphic impetus indebted to the Surrealist practice and theory of automatic writing and its subsequent transformation in painter-theorist Georges Mathieu’s “aesthetic of speed.”9 By contrast, color appears as a decidedly secondary concern: High-keyed from the first, his searing hues are nonetheless largely confined to areas of under-painting and veiled by varnish-heavy layers of brown or black paint. Indeed, a number of works in the years 1957-58 show Hantaï restricting himself entirely to the blackwhite axis. Temporal compression and chromatic contraction are of a piece here, as indeed they will be throughout the artist’s work of the 1960s.

Toward the end of that decade, however, the painter clearly felt the need to reassess. An important text of March 1958 identifies “the trial of the spiritual by and for the temporal” as “the only question worth asking today,”10 while his last major work before the turn to folding, the very large canvas known as Peinture (Écriture rose), 1958-59, suggests at once a concerted slowdown and a desire for stricter subordination of the self to a notionally communal code. In keeping with his practice to

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previous page (50): Blancs, 1973 acrylic on canvas 78 x 84 5/8 inches, 198 x 215 cm

(52): Blancs, 1974 acrylic on canvas 92 1/2 x 104 3/8 inches, 235 x 265 cm previous page

Tabula, 1973-1983 acrylic on canvas 89 3/8 x 137 3/4 inches, 227 x 350 cm

Aquarelle, 1971 watercolor on canvas 35 3/8 x 35 3/8 inches, 90 x 90 cm

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