A Monographic Album of Simon Hantaï, 1-2, Kálmán Makláry Fine Arts

Text: György Szegő

After the one in 1976 Centre Pompidou once again welcomes visitors to a retrospective exhibition of Hantaï Simon open from May to September this summer. A total of 130 paintings by the artist are on show now proving that he was an outstanding figure of 20th-century European painting who had gone his own way whilst painting and hiding in Paris from 1949 on. The album is designed in harmony with the superlatives of the exhibition in the Pompidou Centre and thus also with the significance of the artist. The two volumes are prestigious pieces of this genre and represent top-quality so far unprecedented in Hungarian publishing. The studies they contain were written by the author who had acquired scientific qualifications in Paris and New York and Ágnes Berecz art historian who is also a lecturer there. The first volume covers the period between 1949 and 1959, whilst the second one from 1960 to 2011 interpreting Hantaï’s works based on almost scientific „investigation”, as well as the professional and empathic approach to data. The first volume analyses the creative period of the artist associated with his mentors, first André Breton, the pope of Surrealism, then Georges Mathieu who went face-to-face against Breton. The second period starting in the 1960s is praised as the development of pliage which the artist developed as his own way of painting: actually, it is a spatial painting shining bright at the intersection of textile-folding and batik.