Simon Hantaï and the Reserves of Painting 9780271086620

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Simon Hantaï and the Reserves of Painting

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Simon Hantaï

A N D T H E R E S E R V E S O F PA I N T I N G

Molly Warnock

The Pennsylvania State University Press | University Park, Pennsylvania

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this book is made possible by a collaborative grant from the andrew w. mellon foundation.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Warnock, Molly, 1977– author. Title: Simon Hantaï and the reserves of painting / Molly Warnock. Other titles: Refiguring Modernism. Description: University Park, Pennsylvania : The Pennsylvania State University Press, [2020] | Series: Refiguring modernism series | Includes bibliographical references and index. Summary: “Explores the career of Hungarian-born French painter Simon Hantaï (1922–2008) from his earliest paintings and writings in France in the 1950s through his final abstractions of the 2000s”—Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2019058400 | ISBN 9780271085029 (cloth) Subjects: LCSH: Hantaï, Simon—Criticism and interpretation. | Painting, Abstract—France. Classification: LCC ND553.H22 W37 2020 | DDC 759.4—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019058400

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Copyright © 2020 Molly Warnock All rights reserved Printed in Turkey Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA 16802–1003 The Pennsylvania State University Press is a member of the Association of University Presses. It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-free paper. Publications on uncoated stock satisfy the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Material, ansi z39.48–1992. Additional credits (all Simon Hantaï): frontispiece, Mariale m.a.2, 1960, detail; iv: Tabula, 1980 (fig. 94); 12: Untitled, 1951 (fig. 4); 30: dépliant for the exhibition Sexe-Prime (fig. 19); 60: dépliant for the exhibition Souvenir de l’avenir (fig. 27); 86: Peinture, 1959–60 (fig. 40); 116: M.A.4, 1960 (fig. 47); 134: Meun, 1968 (fig. 66); 162: Tabula, 1980 (fig. 91); 188: Laissée, 1981–94 (fig. 109). Archives Simon Hantaï / ADAGP, Paris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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For my mother

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Contents

Writing and Painting

List of Illustrations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .viii

PART 1

Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .xi

1. Unfolding Automatism . . . . . . . . .13 2. Excessive Gestures 1 . . . . . . . . . . .31

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .1

3. Excessive Gestures 2 . . . . . . . . . . 61 4. Ordinary Painting . . . . . . . . . . . . 87

PART 2

Folding and Cutting

Envoi: A Politics of “With” . . . . . . .217 Appendix 1: “A Plantaneous Demolition” 219 simon hantaï and jean schuster Appendix 2: “Notes, Deliberately Confounding, Accelerating, and the Like for a ‘Reactionary,’ Nonreducible Avant-Garde” 227 simon hantaï

5. The Passage to Pliage . . . . . . . . . . 117

Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 234

6. Figuring Finitude 1. . . . . . . . . . . . 135

Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 252

7. Figuring Finitude 2. . . . . . . . . . . .163

Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 258

8. Abandoned Painting . . . . . . . . . 189

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Illustrations

8. Hantaï, Peinture, 1955. Photo: Jacqueline Hyde 36 9. Hantaï, Peinture, 1956. Photo: Philippe Fuzeau 37 10. Hantaï, Peinture, 1955. Photo: Jacqueline Hyde 38

All works of art by Simon Hantaï © Archives Simon Hantaï / ADAGP, Paris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Unless otherwise noted, all photography courtesy of Archives Simon Hantaï, with assistance from Galerie Jean Fournier, Paris. 1. Diagram after Jean Clair, from Art en France: Une nouvelle génération (Paris: Chêne, 1972). Drawn by Lael Ensor-Bennett 2 2. Simon Hantaï, Pliage, 1950 6 3. Hantaï, Untitled, 1949. Photo: Laurent Lecat 15 4. Hantaï, Untitled, 1951. Photo: Laurent Lecat 16 5. Marcel Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), 1915–23. © Association Marcel Duchamp / ADAGP, Paris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2018. Photo: The Philadelphia Museum of Art / Art Resource, New York 25 6. Hantaï, Sexe-Prime: Hommage à Jean-Pierre Brisset, 1955 32 7. André Masson, Dessin automatique, 1924. © 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, New York 35

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11. Georges Mathieu, La bataille de Bouvines, 1954. © 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. Photo © CNAC / MNAM / Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York 39 12. Mathieu, viewed from behind, beginning La bataille de Bouvines, April 25, 1954. Photo: Robert Descharnes / © Descharnes & Descharnes sarl 2018 40 13. Mathieu, seen from above, his pigments on the ground, April 25, 1954. Photo: Robert Descharnes / © Descharnes & Descharnes sarl 2018 41 14. Hantaï, Peinture, 1956 42 15. Hantaï, Peinture, 1956 43 16. Hantaï, dépliant for the exhibition Sexe-Prime: Hommage à Jean-Pierre Brisset et autres peintures, May–June 1956, Galerie Kléber, Paris, detail 48 17. Hantaï, dépliant for the exhibition Sexe-Prime, detail 49 18. Hantaï, dépliant for the exhibition Sexe-Prime, detail 51 19. Hantaï, dépliant for the exhibition Sexe-Prime, detail 53 20. Hantaï, Souvenir de l’avenir, 1957 62 21. Hantaï, dépliant for the exhibition Peintures récentes. Souvenir de l’avenir, March 3–30, 1958, Galerie Kléber, Paris, detail 63

22. Invitation to Les cérémonies commémoratives de la deuxième condamnation de Siger de Brabant: Cycle Royale, March 7–27, 1957, Galerie Kléber, Paris 68 23. Unattributed photograph of Cérémonies commémoratives, published in Panderma: Revue de la fin du monde 2 (1958) 70 24. Unattributed photograph of Cérémonies commémoratives, published in Panderma: Revue de la fin du monde 2 (1958) 70 25. Unattributed photograph of Cérémonies commémoratives, published in Panderma: Revue de la fin du monde 2 (1958) 70 26. Hantaï, dépliant for the exhibition Souvenir de l’avenir, detail 79 27. Hantaï, dépliant for the exhibition Souvenir de l’avenir, detail 80 28. Hantaï, Saint François Xavier aux Indes, 1958. Photo: Jacqueline Hyde 84 29. Hantaï, Peinture (Écriture rose), 1958–59 88 30. Hantaï, Peinture (Écriture rose), 1958– 59, detail. Photo: Piotr Trawinski 89 31. Hantaï, Peinture (Écriture rose), 1958– 59, detail. Photo: Piotr Trawinski 90 32. Hantaï, Peinture (Écriture rose), 1958– 59, detail. Photo: Heidi Meister 90 33. Hantaï, À Galla Placidia, 1958–59 94 34. Hantaï, Peinture, 1958–59. Photo: Laurent Lecat 95 35. Hantaï with Écriture rose in his studio in Paris, winter 1958. Photo: Étienne Sved 96 36. Hantaï’s hand-annotated Ordinaire de la Messe, detail 101

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37. Hantaï, Peinture, 1958–59. Photo: Piotr Trawinski 105 38. Hantaï, Peinture, 1958–59, detail. Photo: Piotr Trawinski 106 39. Hantaï, Peinture, 1958–59. Photo: Laurent Lecat 107 40. Hantaï, Peinture, 1959–60. Photo: Laurent Lecat 109 41. Hantaï, Peinture, 1959. Photo: Jacqueline Hyde 110 42. Hantaï, Peinture, 1959 112 43. Hantaï, catalogue for the exhibition Peintures 1960–1967, June 22–July 31, 1967, Galerie Jean Fournier, Paris, detail 118 44. Hantaï, catalogue for the exhibition Peintures 1960–1967, detail 119

of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, New York 133 55. Hantaï, Meun, 1968 136 56. Hantaï, Meun, 1968 137 57. Hantaï, Sexe-Prime: Hommage à Jean-Pierre Brisset, 1955, detail 138 58. Hantaï, Femelle-Miroir I, 1953. Photo: Laurent Lecat 140 59. Hantaï, Femelle-Miroir II, 1953. Photo: Jacqueline Hyde 140 60. Pablo Picasso, Seated Bather, early 1930. © 2018 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, New York 142 61. Hantaï, Panse, M.M.3, 1965. Photo: Jacqueline Hyde 146

72. Diagram after Jacques Lacan, from Encore: On Feminine Sexuality; The Limits of Love and Knowledge, 1972– 73, vol. 20 of The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, translated by Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999). Drawn by Lael Ensor-Bennett 157 73. Hantaï, catalogue for his exhibition Hantaï, Musée national d’art moderne, Paris, May 26– September 13, 1976, detail 158 74. Hantaï, catalogue for his exhibition Hantaï, detail 158 75. Hantaï, catalogue for his exhibition Hantaï, detail 160 76. Hantaï’s studio in Meun with a Tabula in progress, ca. 1975. Photo: Daniel Hantaï 164

45. Invitation card for Peintures Mariales, May 25–June 1962, Galerie Kléber, Paris 121

62. Hantaï, sketches of works in the Panses series, date unknown 147

78. Hantaï, Untitled, ca. 1948–49 167

46. Peintures 1960–1967, installation view 122

63. Hantaï, Panse, 1965. Galerie Jean Fournier, Paris 148

79. Hantaï, La joie de vivre, 1946. Photo: Laurent Lecat 168

47. Hantaï, M.A.4, 1960 124

64. Hantaï, Panse, 1964 149

80. Hantaï, Az erkélyen, 1947 169

48. Hantaï, M.C.8, 1962. Photo: Laurent Lecat 125

65. Hantaï, Meun, 1968. Photo: Jacqueline Hyde 150

81. Hantaï, Nature morte, 1947 169

49. Hantaï, M.D.1, 1962 127

66. Hantaï, Meun, 1968. Photo: Laurent Lecat 152

50. Hantaï, M.C.7, 1962 128 51. Hantaï, Catamurons, 1960–64 129 52. Folded Panses in Hantaï’s studio in Paris, ca. 1964. Photo: Daniel Hantaï 130 53. Hantaï’s hand-annotated copy of Ignatius of Loyola, Les exercices spirituels, detail 132 54. Duchamp, Passage from the Virgin to the Bride, 1912. © Association Marcel Duchamp / ADAGP, Paris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2018. Digital image © The Museum

67. Hantaï, Meun, 1968. Photo: Laurent Lecat 153 68. Hantaï, Meun, 1968. Photo: Laurent Lecat 154 69. Hantaï, Meun, 1968. Photo: Jacqueline Hyde 155 70. Hantaï, Meun, 1968. Photo: Jacqueline Hyde 155 71. Hantaï in his studio at Meun, 1967– 68. Photo: Édouard Boubat 156

77. Hantaï, Tabula, 1974 165

82. Hantaï, Peinture (Les baigneuses), 1949. Photo: Laurent Lecat 170 83. Hantaï, Peinture, 1950. Photo: Alberto Ricci 171 84. Hantaï, Espaces engourdis, 1950–51 172 85. Hantaï, Peinture, 1950. Photo: Laurent Lecat 173 86. Peintures 1960–1967, installation view. Photo: Galerie Jean Fournier 174 87. Peintures 1960–1967, installation view. Photo: Galerie Jean Fournier 174 88. Hantaï, Étude, 1969. Photo: Laurent Lecat 176

IllustratIons

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ix

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89. Hantaï, Blancs, 1973 177 90. Hantaï, Bourgeons, 1974 178 91. Hantaï, Tabula, 1980 179 92. Invitation card for Hantaï, Tabula, suite récente, October 14–November 15, 1980, Galerie Jean Fournier, Paris, detail. Photo: author 180 93. Invitation card for Hantaï, Tabula, detail. Photo: author 180 94. Hantaï, Tabula, 1980. Photo: Laurent Lecat 183 95. Hantaï, Tabula, 1981 184

105. Canvas fragments in the studio, Meun, 1995. Photo: Archives Simon Hantaï 197 106. Hantaï with Tabula, 1981, Meun, 1995. Photo: Archives Simon Hantaï 198 107. Laissées et autres peintures, Renn Espace d’art contemporain, Paris, March–June 1998, installation view. Photo: Alain Turpault 199 108. Photograph with undated annotations by Hantaï 200 109. Hantaï, Laissée, 1981–94 201

96. Hantaï, Tabula, 1980 185

110. Hantaï, Laissée, 1981–94. Photo: Laurent Lecat 202

97. Hantaï, Tabula, 1980 186

111. Hantaï, Laissée, 1981–94 203

98. Hantaï, photograph of studio wall in Meun, 1975. Photo: Archives Simon Hantaï 190

112. Hantaï, Laissée, 1981–94 204

99. Hantaï, photograph of studio wall in Meun, late 1990s. Photo: Simon Hantaï 190 100. Simon Hantaï 1960–1976, CAPC / Entrepôt Lainé, Bordeaux, 1981, installation view. Photo: CAPC 193 101. Hantaï at work, Maisons-Alfort, 1981. Photo: Kamill Major 194 102. Photograph of Tabula, 1981, in the garden at Meun, August 1995. Photo: Archives Simon Hantaï 197 103. Hantaï slicing Tabula, 1981, Meun, August 1995. Photo: Archives Simon Hantaï 197 104. Fragments of Tabula, 1981, in the garden at Meun, August 1995. Photo: Archives Simon Hantaï 197

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113. Hantaï, Laissée, 1981–95 204 114. Hantaï, Laissée, 1981–95. Photo: Laurent Lecat 205 115. Canvas fragments set aside for composting, Meun, August 1995. Photo: Archives Simon Hantaï 206 116. Hantaï, Untitled, 1981–96 206 117. Hantaï, preparatory study for a silkscreen print, 1996, based on a photograph taken by Kamill Major in 1981 at the Maisons-Alfort 207 118. Hantaï at work, Maisons-Alfort, 1981. Photo: Kamill Major 207 119. Fables du lieu, Le Fresnoy-Studio national des arts contemporains, Tourcoing, February–April 2001, installation view. Photo: Olivier Anselot 208

120. Tabulas lilas, Galerie Jean Fournier, Paris, June–July, 1982, installation view. Photo: Galerie Jean Fournier / Jacqueline Hyde 209 121. Tabulas lilas, installation view. Photo: Galerie Jean Fournier / Jacqueline Hyde 209 122. Invitation card for Hantaï, Tabulas lilas, June 17–July 17, 1982, Galerie Jean Fournier, Paris, detail. Photo: author 209 123. Invitation card for Hantaï, Tabulas lilas, detail. Photo: author 209 124. Simon Hantaï, Venice Biennale, French Pavilion, June–September 1982, installation view. Photo: Galerie Jean Fournier 210 125. Photograph of Hantaï, Tabula lilas, 1982, used by the artist in the making of Suaires and H.b.l. 211 126. Quatre impressions numériques sur toiles de Simon Hantaï provenant de “Fables du Lieu,” Fresnoy, Studio national des arts contemporains, Galerie Jean Fournier, Paris, May– June 2001, installation view. Photo: Galerie Jean Fournier 212 127. Hantaï, Suaire, 2001. Photo: Patrice Vermeille 213 128. Hantaï, H.b.l., 2004 214 129. Hantaï, H.b.l., 2004 215 130. Hantaï, Suaire, 2001, detail 216

IllustratIons

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acknowledgments

This book began to take shape in the spring and summer of 2013. Thanks to the indefatigable efforts of Jean-Loup Champion, my editor at Gallimard, I had already published a book on Simon Hantaï’s art, a close study of the artist’s paintings and writings of the 1950s entitled Penser la peinture: Simon Hantaï (Paris: Gallimard, 2012). Aimed at a French audience much more familiar with Hantaï’s best-known body of work, his pliage canvases of the years 1960–82, that monograph sought to fundamentally reframe the issues at the heart of the painter’s enterprise. But I knew that I had not yet said everything I wanted to say about Hantaï’s work and soon came to feel the necessity of an admittedly daunting prospect: a more expansive study encompassing the entirety of the artist’s oeuvre in France, from his earliest experiments with folding ca. 1950 to his final post-pliage works in the 2000s. That examination is what I have tried to put forward in these pages. I am grateful to Eleanor Goodman, executive editor at Pennsylvania State University Press; Jonathan Eburne, editor of the Refiguring Modernism series; Annika Fisher, manuscript editor extraordinaire; and the entire staff of the Pennsylvania State University Press for bringing this project to fruition. I also extend my heartfelt thanks to the two anonymous readers who helped guide my revisions.

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A prior version of chapter 6 appeared as “Engendering Pliage: Simon Hantaï’s Meuns” in nonsite.org, no. 6 (July 2012), online at http://nonsite.org/feature/engendering-pliag e-simon-hantais-meuns. Parts of chapter 8 appeared in “Simon Hantaï After Pliage,” in Robin Schuldenfrei, ed., Iteration: Episodes in the Mediation of Art, Architecture, and Design (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020). I wish to thank those publishers for kindly permitting me to reprint that material in the present volume. I have also developed ideas first put forward in a host of other articles and exhibition catalogue essays. A number of institutions and fellowships supported the researching and writing of this book, including a month-long residency at eikones— Center for the History and Theory of the Image, at the University of Basel; a Clark Fellowship at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Massachusetts; and a Dean’s Award for Excellence in Research from the Johns Hopkins University. I am also grateful to the Johns Hopkins University for generous financial support, including a publication subvention, and for two junior leaves in 2015–16 and in 2017. For their unflagging help collecting and preparing images, I would like to thank the Archives Hantaï, the Galerie Jean Fournier, the Archives Descharnes, Ann Woodward, and Lael J. Ensor-Bennett. Josette Hébert kindly granted permission on behalf of Jean Schuster to translate “Une Démolition au platane.” Ashley Costello, Donald Juedes, Amy Kimball, and the staff of the Sheridan Libraries at Johns Hopkins University supported this project in innumerable ways. Many friends and colleagues have helped me to think through the issues at stake in this book, asked questions that set me on new paths, and provided support at crucial moments. I am most

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profoundly indebted to two mentors who have been there from the first: Michael Fried and Stephen Melville. For their intelligence, their generosity, and their resourcefulness, I am also grateful to Natalie Adamson, Julie Ault, James Bishop, Jennifer Cohen, Todd Cronan, Jérôme Duwa, Lisa Florman, Paul Galvez, Stefanos Geroulanos, Jason Gladstone, Marc Gotlieb, Michael Ann Holly, Aden Kumler, Michelle Kuo, Megan Luke, Katherine Markoski, Tom McDonough, Christine Mehring, Keith Moxey, Christina Neilson, Charles Palermo, Marcelin Pleynet, Elodie Rahard, Lynette Roth, Marin Sarvé-Tarr, Robin Schuldenfrei, Daniel Sherman, Kavita Singh, Joyce Tsai, Ralph Ubl, and Andrew Wegley. Nils Schott deserves a

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special mention for his thoughtful rereading of my translation of Simon Hantaï’s 1958 “Notes confusionelles”; I have incorporated many of his suggestions in the version that appears here. My colleagues and students at Emory University helped me to develop the ideas at the heart of this book at a crucial stage. At Johns Hopkins, I have especially benefited from conversations with Marica Antonucci, Meghaa Ballakrishnen, Stephen Campbell, Miriam Grotte-Jacobs, Christopher Lakey, Leonardo Lisi, Mitchell Merback, Jason Mientkiewicz, Anne Eakin Moss, and Yi-Ping Ong. My deepest thanks go to the Hantaï family, especially Zsuzsa, Daniel, Anna, and Jean Haury, and to my family.

aCknoWledgMents

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Introduction

Throughout Europe and increasingly in the United States, the Hungarian-born French painter Simon Hantaï (1922–2008) appears as a central figure in histories of later twentieth-century art. His reputation rests in particular on the expansive body of abstract, often very large paintings that he produced over the course of twenty-two years, from 1960 to 1982, through diverse techniques of pliage (folding). During this period, the artist worked almost exclusively with unstretched cloth supports that he crumpled, knotted, or systematically pleated in various ways prior to brushing them with paint. Unfolded and subsequently stretched for exhibition, the resulting works reveal variously colored zones fractured by unpainted reserves. Early on, the latter areas frequently evince preliminary staining or dripping; later, they are most often blank. Major suites executed in this manner include the Mariales of 1960–62; the Meuns of 1967–68; and the Tabulas, produced intermittently during much of the last decade of his pliage production, from 1972 to 1982. Hantaï’s reception to date has turned upon a cluster of closely related claims. First and foremost, he is widely acknowledged as one of the earliest artists in Paris to have noticed and taken seriously the work of Jackson Pollock and other abstract expressionists—and so pliage has been seen as playing a defining role in the French reception of post–World War II American painting. For many admirers, struck by the sheer coloristic exuberance of his mature practice, Hantaï appears to be a profound renovator of the modern tradition, effectively remaking Henri Matisse (and through him, Paul Cézanne) in an allover abstract idiom. The artist, for his part, has powerfully reinforced this view, situating his work as directly responsive to Matisse’s and Pollock’s innovations above all others.1 At the same time, critics and artists alike have cast the painter as an important predecessor in his own right. Indeed, writing about Hantaï has focused largely on the impact of the folded

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FIg. 1 diagram after Jean Clair, from Art en France: Une nouvelle

génération (Paris: Chêne, 1972).

and unfolded paintings on the aesthetic strategies of a subsequent generation of artists in France, including such internationally renowned figures as Daniel Buren and Claude Viallat, among others.2 Broadly put, the prevailing narrative casts pliage as a crucial link between two important painterly epistemes: the emphatically gestural tendencies of the later 1940s and 1950s, known variously in France as abstraction lyrique, tachisme, and informel, and the “critical,” “analytic,” or “deconstructive” abstraction of the later 1960s and 1970s (all three adjectives are used, sometimes interchangeably). This view of Hantaï’s art goes back at least to 1972, the year French critic Jean Clair, then editor-in-chief of the review Les chroniques de l’art

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vivant (Chronicles of living art) published his influential volume Art en France: Une nouvelle génération (Art in France: A new generation). Clair’s survey organized the heterogeneous sweep of contemporary production into four different categories, which he discussed in the text and also diagrammed, in a kind of homage to Alfred Barr, in the book’s closing pages (fig. 1).3 There one finds “Hantaï (foldings)” at the midpoint of an otherwise uninterrupted line linking “Matisse, Rothko, Newman” to the famously volatile collectives “B.M.P.T.” and “support/ surface.”4 The figure is a neat visualization of a linkage that became widespread in the wake of Clair’s text, as Hantaï’s work began to be shown by leading museums throughout France. Indeed, although the advent of pliage predates Buren, Olivier Mosset, Michel Parmentier, and Niele Toroni’s first manifestation by seven years and the inaugural

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exhibition of Supports/Surfaces by more than a decade, it was largely through the lens of those later developments that Hantaï’s folded and unfolded canvases became visible in the 1970s. References to affinities between the elder man’s autograph methods and those of the “new generation” are staples of the critical literature since Clair, and this perceived kinship powerfully conditioned reception of the artist’s first major retrospective, held at the Musée national d’art moderne (MNAM), Paris, in 1976.5 Indeed, by 1987, Catherine Millet’s foundational survey of contemporary art in France could present Hantaï’s painting as having been “pulled in” from its initially marginal status by the regard of his younger admirers.6 She, too, emphasizes apparent continuities between pliage and the preferred strategies of his presumed heirs. Of particular interest here, as Art en France’s diagram also suggests, is the notion of “le support” (the support), the categorical heading Clair felt best reflected these figures’ shared orientation to the physicality of painting and its literal constituents. In turning away from what the critic calls “the image” (another of his four rubrics) to rediscover the obdurate materiality of paint, canvas, and stretcher, the featured producers were seen as according unprecedented emphasis to the “real” of painting—a formulation clearly encouraged by the Paris leg of the traveling 1968 exhibition The Art of the Real: USA 1948– 1968, which had introduced French audiences to a motley mix of American color field and minimalist work.7 Integral to this argument was a strong claim about the liquidation of composition, a concept presented as but an idealist remnant of the rationalist humanist tradition. It was just here that Hantaï was taken to have shown the way. Of the painter’s turn to pliage, Clair writes:

What disappears in particular is the notion of a composition, which is to say of a linear unfolding, of a discursive utterance, that melodic and continuous movement that postulates an origin and an end (a subject, a center of discourse) by which the tyranny of Western logos has exerted itself since its origins. For, once unfolded and hung on the wall, the canvas no longer appears so much as discourse, the fallacious continuity of a written representation, as dis-course [hyphenated in original], a speech indefinitely broken, shattered, not so much unwound as wound up infinitely around the whites left inscribed on the surface of the cloth by the folds.8 Elsewhere in the text, Clair acknowledges the debt this description owes to contemporary structuralist thought and particularly to the idea of the “death of the subject,” as it had by then emerged in the context of writings by Roland Barthes and others.9 Structuralist references are germane to French art-critical discourse throughout the late 1960s and 1970s: they underpin Buren’s written appeals to a “zero degree” of painting, as well as what he and various members of Supports/Surfaces would eventually mean in describing painting as an objet de connaissance (object of knowledge).10 Insofar as Clair sees pliage as undoing the “tyranny of Western logos,” he is convinced of a deep continuity between Hantaï’s concerns and those of his more theoretically verbose successors, “which explains why, even though he belongs to a completely different generation than the one in question here, it was indispensable that he figure in this essay: spiritually, his progress is that of this generation; not only does it accompany that generation, but what is more, it inaugurates it.”11

INTRODUCTION

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This reading of Hantaï’s art has real power, and versions of it recur in the writings of critics across an otherwise considerable spectrum. In particular, it does capture a widespread sense of epistemic shift, in which a new insistence on material practice is taken broadly to supplant a prior emphasis on authorial intention. The painter himself repeatedly drew attention to this aspect of pliage, as in the first monograph on his art, published just one year after Clair’s study. There the artist famously describes folding as an attempt to make painting “exceptionally banal”—less a matter of “the aesthetic privilege of talent, of art, etc.” and more deeply rooted in the literal stuff of paint and canvas.12 Importantly, this account actively enables the emergence of a seemingly antithetical but in fact structurally analogous reading of the artist’s practice in the later 1970s and 1980s. Closer in certain emphases to the writings of Clement Greenberg, a figure who was only then beginning to be read seriously in France, this explanation presents the artist as setting aside the self so as to more fully realize painting’s innate or, as it were, metaphysical drive toward “pure visuality.” Exemplary of the latter tendency is Yves Michaud’s text for the painter’s exhibition at the 1982 Venice Biennale, which casts Hantaï as seeking “an absolute detachment, so as to no longer put himself forward as a subject-painter.”13 Related claims continue to appear apace. In 2012, curator Marc Donnadieu described the painter as trying to “reduce all subjectivity and nearly remove himself from any intentionality”;14 while as recently as 2015, former MNAM director Alfred Pacquement described the painter’s gesture in pliage as “reduced to pure materiality.”15 Yet despite their enduring hold, such formulations also have their costs—as does the larger assimilation, which they have so often enabled, of Hantaï’s practice to the noncompositional, notionally 4

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impersonal strategies of the next generation. They have, for example, entailed a certain lack of specificity in the face of the very objects they identify as epochal: the flattening of Hantaï’s individual paintings into a generalized practice of pliage “as such” is a striking feature of much of the literature from Clair forward and one that makes it difficult to account for any number of features that exceed, undercut, or openly belie what can at times appear to be a too-hasty evacuation of the subject. Foremost among these elements, of course, is the sheer fact of change. Unlike his most prominent inheritors, Hantaï notably refuses to standardize any aspect of his practice—whether folding procedure, palette, paint type, or format—eschewing strict repetition and visual constants in favor of endlessly variable results. Nor does he abandon the paintbrush with the move to pliage; on the contrary, as we shall see, folding actually facilitates the return of that implement after a long period in Hantaï’s work of deliberate avoidance, and the preponderance of completed canvases reveal clear traces of the author’s hand. Nor, finally, does he discard the stretcher, preferring (with very few exceptions) to maintain this conventional link to the deep past of painting. Both singly and collectively, in the unique instance as in the overall development of the oeuvre, Hantaï’s paintings bear witness to a more complicated intermingling of intentionality and contingency, decision and dissemination, than the prevailing narratives acknowledge. This book aims to make sense of that entanglement. It does so in part by exploring the deep context for Hantaï’s signature practice in his volatile, decidedly heterogeneous, and notably understudied work and thought of the 1950s, when he was in his late twenties and thirties. Surveying the painter’s first full decade in France, commentators have consistently emphasized the onset of his

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sustained reckoning with Pollock’s achievement, as manifest in his move to an abstract, gestural style. Typically left out of account, however—and long downplayed by the artist himself—are the ways in which that reception was conditioned by the young Hungarian’s contemporaneous and in many respects catalytic experience of surrealism, the movement to which he belonged in the years 1952– 55. Between the winter of 1955 and the spring of 1958, the painter, who was later renowned for his self-imposed silence, published a suite of surprisingly vehement manifestos. Not only did he coauthor one of the more ambitious theoretical tracts produced in André Breton’s postwar circle, he also marked his two most important solo exhibitions with elaborate invitational brochures comprising extended statements. Suffused with what can often appear to be the mysticism of art and criticism in France in the years immediately following World War II and marked both by a dizzying array of references and at least one apparent ideological about-face, Hantaï’s texts are at times cited by his commentators but have rarely been read in depth.16 I will nonetheless suggest that they bear witness to the sustained unfolding— and no less complex refolding—of one surprisingly consistent, continually self-complicating set of concerns. Central to these writings is a deep and abiding question about community. With increasing degrees of explicitness, all of his texts circle incessantly around what Hantaï frames as the worrying subjectivism or indeed psychologism of contemporary art, a problem intricately interwoven with such matters as the commodification of the work of art, its perceived loss of any genuinely collective dimension, and its corresponding descent into so much literary dabbling. By the painter’s third and final polemic, the “Notes confusionelles

accélérantes et autres pour une avant-garde ‘réactionnaire’ non réductible” (Notes, deliberately confounding, accelerating, and the like for a “reactionary,” nonreducible avant-garde) of March 1958, these diagnoses culminate in a scathing indictment of secular modernity—an era construed as almost entirely under the sway of supposedly progressive but in fact stultifying regimes of rationalization, a “somber order of technical efficiency” inhospitable to any authentic sense of sacrifice and therefore, Hantaï suggests, any true communion.17 (That the later texts occur in the context of invitational brochures—documents implicated by definition in the imperative to gather an audience—is by no means an incidental fact about them: it speaks to a fundamental feature of the situation this artist bemoans.) The sense that communication has become problematic is not simply a theme in Hantaï’s writing, much less one among others. It finds expression in a range of formal effects: in the painter’s rhetorical excesses and vertiginous swings; in his twisting, increasingly knotted language and syntax; and even, as we shall see, in the literally manifold supports with which that writing comes to be identified. Yet the very density of Hantaï’s early texts also suggests a deep ambivalence about his actual willingness to be read. Indeed, throughout his first decade in France, the artist seems to have conceived community as necessarily removed from society. Hantaï’s first published effort reaffirms Breton’s 1930 call for the “deep occultation of Surrealism,”18 while the later “Notes confusionelles” announce themselves as an “introduction to the atmosphere that led to these works”—that is, as something like an initiation for those few readers willing to endure the “obscure night of the soul” through which Hantaï presents his practice as having passed.19 This tension—between a professed INTRODUCTION

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FIg. 2 simon Hantaï, Pliage, 1950. oil on canvas. Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris. gift of the artist, 1998.

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desire for communion and a no less marked emphasis on the necessity of withdrawal—is basic to the painter’s thinking in the 1950s. In retrospect, it is tempting to see Hantaï’s manifestos, their problematic readability, and their eventual fate as uneasily implicated in a broader, midcentury passage from the group as the ideological basis of the avant-garde to a new emphasis on individual accomplishment borne along in part by the rise of gestural abstraction and its affiliated discourses.20 For many adherents and observers alike, surrealism had long been the collective par excellence, what Maurice Blanchot would later call “the loved or hated prototype” for all groups.21 Yet for the prominent critic Michel Tapié, whose effusive championing of the extraordinarily heterogeneous category that he called the informel (later rebaptized as art autre) provided one of the earliest openings in France for postwar American abstraction and Pollock’s work in particular, the primary revelation of the new painting just was the contemporary impossibility of the movement (dismissed damningly as a “herd”) and the ascendancy of the Individual (almost always with a capital I).22 Indelibly marked by Tapié’s many texts and curatorial initiatives, yet suspicious of the more general privatization of experience in which he took such rhetoric to participate, Hantaï asks some large and notably difficult questions in his work of the 1950s. What would it mean to see gestural painting as something other than the manifestation of a unique personality? Might it yet serve as a vehicle for a new, heretofore unimagined form of community—and if so, how? Conversely, how might one rethink longstanding motivations within surrealism itself, in light of these new pictorial possibilities? Emerging on the far side of the historical group and the manifesto form, pliage provides a distinctly “post-surrealist” response to

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precisely this investigation: an individual achievement that is nonetheless wholly in and of painting. An unassuming abstraction from 1950 suggests that Hantaï’s early work might matter in this way (fig. 2). Bound in the intense, wide-ranging experimentation that characterizes the artist’s early, self-imposed exile, the modestly sized canvas is one of several paintings that Hantaï produced through folding around that time and then set aside for many years. In fact this work was never seen publicly prior to its being given by the painter in 1997 to the Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris (MAM). In a brief note written to accompany the donation, Hantaï had this to say: “Everything is already there, but neither seen nor thought through. Canvas folded, painted green, then unfolded and brushed with black. The hole is filled, not accepted; it designates by denegation the question to come. It was necessary that I step to one side, that I work through the ’20s and ’30s on my own terms, confronting the impurities outside the frame of the contemporary aesthetic, for there to appear the possibility of setting pliage in motion as the ‘method’ capable of responding to the limit situation, which arrived as thought by painting.”23 These lines turn upon an implicit distinction between folding as a mere technique—a mode of picture making that might be deployed alongside, or in combination with, any number of other operations (as when, for example, the young Hantaï used the rough relief of certain still-crumpled canvases as a basis for surrealist-inspired experiments with grattage or frottage)—and pliage as a fully generative procedure, answerable to the deepest issues and questions in painting as a whole. Folding in the latter, as it were, “strong,” sense is not simply or indifferently available across time; rather, it can become legible only within particular circumstances, on the far side of a certain traversal.

Especially intriguing is the painter’s insistence on “impurities outside the frame of the contemporary aesthetic,” a phrase that points to painting’s embeddedness within a larger social and historical field—even as his emphasis on the interwar period suggests a determined retrieval of the recent past. Read in this light, Hantaï’s way of speaking of folding as a method can seem to border on thoughts often carried in the United States by the notion of medium, particularly as developed by the philosopher Stanley Cavell in his celebrated reflections on modernist painting. First published in 1971, shortly before Clair’s Art en France, Cavell’s pages reveal important debts to Greenberg, whose now-canonical 1960 essay “Modernist Painting” appeared in the same year as Hantaï’s turn to pliage. Equally importantly, Cavell’s writings also stem from his sustained exchanges with Michael Fried—and even more precisely, from the struggle of both men to move beyond what they saw as the limitations of Greenbergian positivism, as manifest in the older critic’s tendency to identify the essence of an artistic medium with its literal physical constituents. For Cavell, “modernism” names a situation in which “an art has lost its natural relation to its history”: that is, one in which the established conventions of a medium no longer allow for communication or seem actively to block it.24 This state of affairs compels an artist to find new means of practicing that art, to discover or invent procedures capable of bearing the weight and force of its tradition—“unheard-of structures that define themselves and their history against one another.”25 Cavell’s account focuses primarily on those painters central to Fried’s criticism— Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, and Frank Stella—whom we would have to consider Hantaï’s American peers, insofar as they, like he, actively assume the distinctive task of reconceiving INTRODUCTION

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painting in the wake of Pollock’s work. These artists, Cavell suggests, proceed by developing new “automatisms.”26 Unlike a simple invention or novelty, an automatism in this context is defined by its fecundity, its ability to engender multiple instances—an idea he links to the importance attributed to the series in modernist painting.27 That is, an automatism is never visible as such in its emergence; it can only appear in retrospect, as having been generative and, to some extent, elastic. Invention proves a way of moving forward precisely by gathering up the past anew, thereby illuminating or, as Cavell prefers, “acknowledging” previously unremarked capacities within a medium that can never be hypostatized once and for all.28 The following explores Hantaï’s appropriation of the pliage “method” in roughly these terms (although we will also attend to the historical and philosophical specificity of the painter’s preferred designation). Doing so involves looking both at what it takes for folding to become visible in the strong sense laid out by the artist—that is, as a potential motor for his practice as a whole—and at what is required for him to secure that possibility, to go on with it. This book is organized into two parts. The first, entitled “Writing and Painting,” focuses on Hantaï’s work in the years leading up to his systematic adoption of folding techniques. Following a fairly tight chronological arc from 1954 to 1959, it explores the intense interplay between textual production and painterly experimentation in the artist’s practice. Writing, I suggest, is not simply separable from Hantaï’s activity in the studio but integrally informs his sense of the aims and stakes of modern painting. By the same token, as will become clear, that Hantaï eventually stops writing is a no less important fact for this study. 8

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The first chapter, “Unfolding Automatism,” picks up this story from the perspective of Hantaï’s post–World War II engagement with French surrealism. Critics have tended to frame this seemingly anachronistic apprenticeship as a youthful misunderstanding, passing over it quickly or in silence. Yet for Hantaï as for other artists of his generation, Breton’s famously long-lived group, returned from wartime exile in New York, could still appear to be a powerful—if decidedly imperfect—avatar of the avant-garde aspiration to collective action, coexisting uneasily alongside a broad array of practices and tendencies all too often imagined as superseding it without remainder. My account focuses on the painter’s first published statement (and the only one written during his surrealist sojourn), the 1955 “Une démolition au platane” (A plantaneous demolition). Coauthored with Jean Schuster, this text shows the two authors grappling with the surrealists’ founding concept of psychic automatism and sharply criticizing its historical betrayals. Emphatically repudiating what they characterize as Breton’s psychologism, the two men insist on the radical exteriority, indeed the absolute heterogeneity, of the surrealist message, suggesting that a genuinely revolutionary community depends upon precisely this opening to radical otherness. As the remaining chapters in part 1 make clear, all of Hantaï’s work up to pliage pursues this “exit from ordinary experience,” even as it also shows him seeking more compelling visions of excess beyond the official surrealist pantheon. Chapters 2 and 3, “Excessive Gestures 1” and “Excessive Gestures 2,” track the painter’s two chief attempts—both of them centered on major solo exhibitions and each given impetus by his encounters with Pollock’s work—to move beyond surrealist psychologism. Sexe-Prime: Hommage à Jean-Pierre Brisset et autres peintures de Simon

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Hantaï (Sexe-Prime: Homage to Jean-Pierre Brisset and other paintings by Simon Hantaï), 1956, shows him turning to the sacred eroticism of Georges Bataille; while the openly polemical Peintures récentes. Souvenir de l’avenir (Recent paintings. Memory of the future) of 1958 appeals to considerably older models of mystical illumination. In each instance, I draw substantially upon Hantaï’s elaborate, manifesto-like invitational dépliants, or folded brochures—artifacts that I consider both in terms of their express themes and arguments and as carefully constructed, surprisingly complicated objects in their own right. My interest throughout concerns the complex relations between painting, writing, and a certain thought of folding that I read as steeped in a searching investigation not just of the challenges and imperatives of post-surrealist painting but indeed of the very place of art within broader conceptions of human action and historicity. Extending Hantaï’s critique of the multiple failures of surrealist community—now including the group’s continued Marxist commitments in the wake of the Soviets’ brutal repression of the 1956 uprising in his native Budapest—the painter promulgates the deliberately paradoxical notion of “une avant-garde ‘réactionnaire’ non réductible” (a “reactionary,” nonreducible avant-garde), an idea I present as pointing toward a more sweeping rejection of progressivist models of human history. In the last years of the decade, Hantaï covered a number of stretched supports with text copied from various liturgical and biblical sources, a moment addressed in my fourth chapter, “Ordinary Painting.” Focusing primarily on the most consequential canvas from this period, the MNAM’s Peinture (Écriture rose) (Painting [The rose-colored writing work]) of 1958–59, I show how this corpus takes over and definitively transforms the artist’s earlier fantasy of surrealist automatism as

something like pure transmission, resulting in a radically new conception both of painting as a medium and of such community as it might hope to gather. In so doing, the work establishes the conditions of possibility for the immediately subsequent emergence of the folding method. The second main section, “Folding and Cutting,” then provides in-depth readings of the major pliage—and indeed, post-pliage—series. Each chapter is built around an important painting group, reaching backward and forward as necessary to make sense of the painter’s driving preoccupations. Returning to Cavell’s ruminations on the modernist imperative to invent new mediums and deploying a further range of critical voices, I suggest that folding registers a deep shift in Hantaï’s relationship to the religious tradition conjured by the immediately preceding palimpsests—that it effectively shows him reconfiguring his work “beyond,” or more precisely “after,” Christian communion. Through pliage, Hantaï seeks to acknowledge painting’s insuperable contingency and exposure. Chapter 5, “The Passage to Pliage,” addresses the first phase of Hantaï’s folded and unfolded work, as seen through the lens of his landmark 1967 exhibition Peintures 1960–1967, an occasion distinguished in part by the painter’s first public reference to pliage as a method. Focusing primarily on the inaugural Mariales, with some attention to the immediately subsequent Catamurons (1962– 65) and Panses (1963–66), I show how this body of work reinvents painting in the wake of Écriture rose. Emerging against the backdrop of Hantaï’s painting and writing of the 1950s, pliage matters in part as it assumes—allegorizes—a highly particular understanding of community, one explicitly staked on the inevitability of reserve: a constitutive opacity or caesura at the heart of our dealings with others. INTRODUCTION

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The remaining chapters in part 2 explore the most consequential reorganizations of Hantaï’s work within the folding medium, with a particular emphasis on his continued attempts to figure the finitude of both self and painting. Chapters 6 and 7 trace the artist’s early resistance to, and ultimate acceptance of, the increasingly prominent areas of blank or unpainted canvas produced through folding. Each chapter reaches back to previously unrecognized predecessor-canvases from earlier moments in Hantaï’s art, suggesting that pliage allows the painter to retrieve and work through unresolved issues from all stages of his oeuvre to date. “Figuring Finitude 1” focuses on the notably Matissean Meuns, paintings I read as casting back to the hyperbolic and at times oppressive sexuality of the artist’s figurative work prior to his writing of “Démolition au platane.” Noting the painter’s lifelong fascination with psychoanalysis and turning in particular to Jacques Lacan’s writings on feminine sexuality, I present Hantaï’s negotiations with the unpainted as crucially embedded within a larger reckoning with matters of sexual difference and the limits of painterly agency. “Figuring Finitude 2” then returns to the perennial question of the group or collective, as manifest in the late, long-running Tabulas. I argue that Hantaï’s visible engagement with American minimalism—a relationship this book is the first to address in detail—ultimately amounts to a powerful attempt to portray relationality as something other than the literal copresence

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or sheer order implied by the minimalist series or set. Turning to Jean-Luc Nancy’s writings on community, I read these paintings as sites of a sustained “rewriting” or repetition-with-difference of Écriture rose. Chapter 8, “Abandoned Painting,” considers Hantaï’s final canvases of the later 1980s and 1990s, entitled Laissées, in the long wake of his 1982 withdrawal from exhibiting his work; attention is also paid to his post-pliage experiments with digital scanning and printing. Against readings that have tended to see the latter works in particular as constituting a largely dispensable aftermath to the artist’s folded and unfolded oeuvre, I reframe canvases and prints alike as integral expressions of the painter’s mature conception of his medium. Fundamental to this understanding, I argue, is Hantaï’s insistence on painting’s finitude: its openness to repetition and displacement is of a piece with its vulnerability to abandonment, contingency, and loss. These analyses bring into view the larger entanglement of painting, photography, and a certain thought of exposure across the painter’s practice as a whole. A brief envoi, “A Politics of ‘With,’” then brings the manuscript to a close, at once gathering a number of threads that have emerged over the course of the study and further clarifying the deep and driving relationship in Hantaï’s art between formal innovation and social imagination.

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unfolding automatism

CHAPTER 1

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Hantaï’s first published text in French—the only one from his official surrealist tenure—bears the title “Une démolition au platane” (A plantaneous demolition). The essay was the fruit of collaboration with Jean Schuster, a writer and editor who was, with Hantaï, one of the younger members of Breton’s circle.1 Cowritten by the two men between May and September 1954, read to the group upon completion, and published in the January 1955 issue of the movement’s then-official journal, Médium: Communication surréaliste (Medium: Surrealist communication),2 “Démolition au platane” suggests a sustained assessment of surrealist practices and premises. Dry in tone, twisty in syntax, and openly polemical in intent, it appears to have aimed—as both men would later claim and as Schuster would write—to “provoke an internal debate (not to say, a crisis).”3 It did not attain that end. By Schuster’s own account, the surrealists’ response was one of studied silence: “The least one can say is that the welcome was rather chilly, not that there was much discussion.”4 Hantaï, having already ceased to attend the group’s daily meetings, took official leave from Breton in March of that same year. “Démolition au platane” nonetheless set the painter on the path that culminated in pliage. Simply getting on that path had been the work of several years. Hantaï had arrived in Paris from his native Hungary in the fall of 1948, at the age of twenty-five. Born in a village near the capital (Bia, now Biatorbágy), raised in a family of mixed peasant-artisan standing, and trained at the Budapest Academy of Fine Arts, he brought with him an intellectual, philosophical, and political culture uneasily torn between the Catholicism of his youth and the communism of his student days. Artistically, he had a limited familiarity with French modernism, based primarily upon Pablo Picasso’s neoclassical work of the 1920s, some Matisse, and especially Pierre Bonnard, a painter with whom Hantaï appears continuously

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engaged in his later Hungarian canvases. Scholars have often expressed astonishment at his choice for surrealism, taking this as a sign of the young artist’s confusion.5 Why not go straight to Jean Dubuffet or Jean Fautrier, the reigning stars of the immediate postwar years; or to Wols, already championed by Jean-Paul Sartre; or indeed, to any of the emphatically gestural tendencies increasingly aligned under the expansive umbrella of Tapié’s informel? In fact, Hantaï attended closely to these artists and currents, even as he looked equally hard at much earlier developments, from cubism through Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee, among other antecedents. He became an avid visitor of the city’s major museums, including the Musée de l’Homme and the recently founded MNAM; he frequented key galleries, such as La Hune on the boulevard Saint-Germain, the Galerie René Drouin in the place Vendôme, and the Galerie Nina Dausset in the rue du Dragon; and he read voraciously in the art press of the present and past alike, buying old periodicals and books from the second-hand stalls along the Seine. A plethora of early works on paper attest to this wide-ranging apprenticeship, deploying a vast array of technical procedures (collage, frottage, grattage, assemblage, overpainting, decalcomania . . .) and frequently confronting discordant or even antithetical modes—for example, the gestural and the geometric (figs. 3–4). Hantaï also read broadly in philosophy and related fields, as he would throughout his life, particularly steeping himself in the post-Hegelian ferment that effectively dominated intellectual life in post– World War II France: Bataille, Lacan, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty all leave their traces on Hantaï’s work of that decade and beyond, especially in what emerges as the painter’s increasingly uneasy relationship to Marxist thought.

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Yet this encyclopedic research, far from steering Hantaï away from Breton’s movement, seems to have led him inexorably toward it. Looked at from another angle, surrealism was in many ways an obvious choice for an ambitious younger artist, keenly aware of his condition of personal, art-historical, and indeed geopolitical décalage from current developments in Paris and hungry to establish a deeper context for the seemingly disparate tendencies then on view. Integral to this appeal, as the artist’s subsequent writings will make clear, was the fact that the questions raised by the group had never been strictly formal but had always aimed, rather, at what Maurice Nadeau in his 1944 history of the movement summed up memorably as “the total transformation of life,” demanding “not only man’s right to subsist, but also to dream, to love, to enjoy.”6 Pledged to the “value” of desire as precisely “common to all men,”7 surrealism could thus appear to be an attractive counterweight both to the newly powerful French Communist Party (and to the French variants of socialist realism it then championed) and—at what might seem the opposite end of the ideological spectrum—to the emerging emphasis on “Individuals” in Tapié’s discourse. Once drawn into the group, Hantaï appears to have been held above all by its founding concept. In the “Surrealist Manifesto” of 1924, Breton identifies the movement with “psychic automatism in its pure state,” defined as “the dictation of thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from all aesthetic and moral concerns.”8 To practice that technique was to reveal “the actual

FIg. 3 simon Hantaï, Untitled, 1949. oil on paper. Private

collection.

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FIg. 4 simon Hantaï, Untitled, 1951. oil on printed image

mounted on cardboard. Private collection.

functioning of thought”—an exposure Breton’s writings repeatedly figure as a kind of absolute transparency, of each to himself and to all.9 This was what would count as poetry in surrealist community, and much of the group’s early activity aimed at collective exposure of this sort. Nonetheless, as any scholar of the movement knows, the very idea of automatism is notoriously unstable, and the postwar years only exacerbated 16

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long-simmering debates about its uses and abuses— and indeed, its inheritance in the present.10 Already in 1946, prefacing an important exhibition of Dubuffet’s most recent paintings at René Drouin, Tapié stressed a new kind of “chance,” rooted in “the consonance of the human gesture with the laws proper to the material deployed”;11 three years later, writing in French in the journal Cobra, the Danish painter Asger Jorn challenged Breton’s prior emphasis on “pure thought,” underscoring the constitutive role of “man’s body.”12 The broad displacement of automatism from a notionally psychic register to practices more perspicuously rooted in the contingencies of matter and embodiment continued apace in the 1950s. Caught in a shifting landscape—and encouraged in part by the critic Charles Estienne, whose formulations on tachisme proposed a specifically surrealist filiation for a limited number of gestural tendencies13—Breton himself, having previously declared automatism’s history one of “repeated failure,” appeared at least cautiously willing to revisit the concept.14 Hantaï seems to have spent much of his surrealist tenure testing the limits of this opening. “Démolition au platane” establishes the general terms of this confrontation, as well as the intellectual universe in which it takes shape. Hantaï and Schuster engage deeply with surrealist tradition, quoting extensively from the movement’s texts. Indeed, their commitment to rereading the past is given already in the essay’s title, a partial citation from the ur-example of surrealist automatic writing (as well as another coauthored manuscript), Breton and Philippe Soupault’s 1919 The Magnetic Fields. But “Démolition au platane” also shows the two authors rotating those writings—and that history— toward other vistas and emerging discourses. In so doing, “Démolition au platane” sets up a series of problems and puts in play a number of terms of

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which Hantaï was by no means fully in control but upon which he would continue to work for many years. In this sense, I wish to suggest, “Démolition au platane” is most important for what it leaves unresolved—for the rocky, discontinuous, and yet fecund terrain it may be seen to cultivate. In many respects, the opening procedures of “Démolition au platane” come straight out of Hantaï’s concerted retracing of the recent past of painting. The two authors begin by hailing the “specifically surrealist opinion” regarding art and poetry as “autonomous means of interpretation and transformation of the world”—a phrase that immediately distinguishes the movement from its otherwise unnamed rival, socialist realism.15 Yet they also present surrealism itself as an increasingly conservative doctrine mired in its own faded glory: a mostly stalled movement that Hantaï and Schuster would like to see moving anew. In keeping with what proves to be one of the dominant rhetorical strategies throughout “Démolition au platane,” they set out from a Bretonian premise, only to push it beyond the limits established by surrealist practice to date. Their point of departure is a famous remark by Breton in Surrealism and Painting concerning the inability of certain works of past art to engage him fundamentally: I do not mean to suggest that no emotion can be aroused by a painting of Leda, or that a sun setting behind a scene of “Roman palaces” may not be heart-rending, or even that it would be impossible to ascribe some semblance of eternal morality to the illustration of a fable as ridiculous as Death and the Woodcutter. I simply mean that genius has nothing to gain by following these beaten tracks and taking these circuitous paths. . . .

But beyond this aspect of emotion for emotion’s sake, let us not forget that for us, in this era, it is reality itself that is at stake.16 In 1928, these lines were of a piece with a larger appeal to the historically repressed powers of the imagination—the liberation of which, Breton believed, could fundamentally transform a society stifled by the weight of all-powerful yet increasingly ungraspable logical processes. This is the society indicted at length in the “Surrealist Manifesto”: We are still living under the reign of logic . . . But in this day and age, logical methods are applicable only to solving problems of secondary interest. The absolute rationalism that is still in vogue allows us to consider only facts relating directly to our experience. Logical ends, on the contrary, escape us. It is pointless to add that experience itself has found itself increasingly circumscribed. It paces back and forth in a cage from which it is more and more difficult to make it emerge. It too leans for support on what is most immediately expedient, and it is protected by the sentinels of common sense.17 Twenty-six years later, “Démolition au platane” calls upon the surrealists to reexamine the question of poetic actuality. “The relations between art and poetry, on the one hand, and philosophy and science, on the other, are regulated by a dynamic economy,” Hantaï and Schuster write, before outlining a complex dialectic of rationalization they claim poetry must resist.18 The two authors activate a number of terms, some of which depend upon a distinction between rational and irrational and some upon a distinction between things that unFoldIng autoMatIsM

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become and things that do not become. One term— the “unreal”—is mentioned only to be set aside: “It is not nothingness, it is what the mind has never conceived and never will conceive except in fear of itself: it is God, outside the dialectic.”19 The imaginary, for its part, names a ground of poetic possibility from which the irrational is “prospect[ed].”20 The irrational takes the lead throughout the following, for it—unlike the unreal—is subject to a constant play of becoming: “No sooner is the irrational actualized by poetic vision than it, under the impulsion of philosophic intelligence, becomes rational. This dynamic economy of knowledge implies a perpetual overcoming of poetry by itself. Yesterday’s irrational is today’s rational.”21 As the imaginary and the irrational tend toward the rational and the real, it falls to the surrealist poet to keep reality “at stake” by continually introducing excess into this dialectic.22 Only in so doing, the two authors argue, can the poet offer resistance to the progressive rationalization of the world. Hantaï and Schuster’s remarks take on a sharply critical edge when they charge surrealism with having forgotten this dialectic—a failing that has led not just to stagnation but rather to actual regression. In the first “Surrealist Manifesto,” Breton famously brushes off worries about the hypostatization of a surrealist “type”—“I do not believe in the establishment of a conventional Surrealist pattern any time in the near future”— on the grounds that the shared characteristics of the movement’s products to date (such as the suggestion of a “return to childhood” or the “spontaneous” apparition of images) “do not preclude a certain evolution of surrealist prose in time.”23 In any event, professing his indifference to the question of “future Surrealist techniques,” Breton calls for the multiplication and extension of the available means of expression, from papiers collés in 18

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the manner of Picasso and Georges Braque to the random assemblage of advertising slogans: “Everything is valid when it comes to obtaining the desired suddenness from certain associations.”24 Writing in full awareness of this backdrop, Hantaï and Schuster call upon Breton and his group to acknowledge the present as a radically different historical moment. Where the interwar period had seen a vast efflorescence of inventive new techniques of engagement with the painterly surface (as manifest in exemplary fashion in the endlessly exploratory work of Max Ernst, among others), the years following Breton’s return to Paris had been marked less by a comparable expansion of means than by a concerted return to those earlier practices. “Démolition au platane” takes explicit issue with what its two authors frame as the endless recycling of processes increasingly construed as guarantors of a kind of surefire surreality: “What we question in the persistence of certain procedures is not their continuing ability to move us but their ability to move us beyond emotion. . . . Reality ceases to be at stake as soon as the inevitable process of rationalization arrives at its term.”25 Once again, this critique takes over Breton’s belief in the transformative powers of the imagination, in their ability to act directly upon the real; yet in so doing, “Démolition au platane” insists that such powers are historically finite. However radical the processes in question may have been at one time, Hantaï and Schuster suggest, they are no longer capable of unleashing the excess that surrealism is supposed to release. Exhausted through repetition, they appeal now to emotion alone. Yet what appears at first as a relentlessly historical vision nonetheless leaves room for—or indeed, turns out to presuppose—something beyond history. This dependency emerges only later in

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the essay, when the two authors go on to suggest that what has been lost, forgotten, is the revolutionary promise of automatism itself. “Démolition au platane” frames the problem in terms of a confusion of automatism proper with the various processes invented in its name: “Automatism, whether pictorial or poetic, is the essential principle of surrealism because it is plugged in—as one says in electricity—to the very shores we hope to reach. It is a colossal aberration to reduce it to the level of the procedures that happen to have sustained surrealism at various stages of its historical development. One does not class automatism between collage and paranoia-critique. These procedures are perishable and suffer the effects of rationalization. . . . Not automatism, which is not a traversal of the mirror but already the other side.”26 This is a tough passage. The dangerously mixed metaphors at work here, though to some extent typical of Hantaï and Schuster’s writing throughout, suggest at least two contradictory articulations of the animating thought of automatism. Initially, the electrical metaphor appears to establish automatism as a kind of conduit: it transmits a charge from, but is not itself localizable upon, distant shores. Yet the end of the passage would seem to negate this reading, insofar as automatism no longer figures as a vehicle but, as it were, the shore itself—“the other side” of a historically circumscribed reality to which the technical processes are taken to belong. The second metaphor presents automatism as somehow outside of time: this, presumably, is the force of the claim that it alone does not “suffer the effects of rationalization.” In so doing, it appears to relegate automatism to the unreal position of things that, like God, do not themselves become. The relation of automatism to the historical becoming of art is one of the most difficult

and recurrent questions begged by “Démolition au platane,” and much of Hantaï’s subsequent work turns upon precisely this problem. For the moment, the relegation of automatism to the “other side” of the mirror has immediate implications for its presumed interpretability—or more precisely, its lack thereof. The two authors refuse to attribute any particular substance to the automatic message, denying that this can have any sense “but for he who transmits it and only for the duration of the transmission.”27 The implication is that the search for meaning would necessarily collapse the distinction they wish to draw between automatism and reality this side of the looking glass (they refer ominously to a “shattering of the mirror”).28 On this account, the automatic “message” communicates nothing: there is nothing to interpret, no secret to unlock, just the absolute otherness of automatism as such. The absoluteness of automatism figures centrally in another intervention: Hantaï and Schuster’s attempted correction of the relation between visual art and language. This affiliation had always been fraught in surrealist theory, though the tension was rarely acknowledged. In a pivotal passage at the heart of “Démolition au platane,” the two authors cast automatism as a mode of apprehension distinctly different from the mediate knowledge of modern rationality: Against Hegel, still captive of a sensory psychology that precluded immediate knowledge, surrealism proposed automatism, a method of immediate knowledge insofar as it breaks with the traditional hall of mirrors of the senses. Eye, ear, nose, skin, tongue: all false witnesses. Thanks to them, man assembles a dossier and conceives the pathetic ambition to express unFoldIng autoMatIsM

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himself. As early as 1871, Rimbaud writes: “The poet becomes a seer by a long, immense, and reasoned derangement of all the senses.” Fifty years later, surrealism will dialectically overcome the phase of the derangement of the senses to attain that of their reasoned negation through automatism.29 The notion of automatism as “immediate knowledge” goes back to the first “Surrealist Manifesto,” where Breton refers to automatism as langage sans réserve—literally, “language without reserve” or “unrestricted language”—and the persistent identification, or dreamed-of identification, of language and thought remains vital throughout the history of the group.30 Hantaï and Schuster’s account of automatism takes this rhetoric to an extreme, culminating in an essentialist vision of poetic language as a signifying system stripped of all temporal attributes, “logical structure and sacred essence of the mental, its univocal hieroglyph.”31 This conception comes as something of a surprise in an essay everywhere engaged with questions of excess. Within the polemical logic of “Démolition au platane,” it functions primarily as a foil to the derogatory picture Hantaï and Schuster wish to draw of much would-be surrealist painting to date. The indictment is complex and turns in part upon the assumption that painterly figuration is marked by an “internal-external duality” in a way that poetic language is not.32 The key passage is the following: “The monumental error is to believe that the image, which continues to be the poetic vehicle par excellence, can, by simple transposition, pass from verbal message to graphic message. There is a fundamental difference between naming an object and reproducing it: it amounts, in the one case, to poetic arbitrariness because the word that 20

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designates the object is generally an invention, a pure creation of the spirit; in the other, to sensory arbitrariness because [reproduction is] founded solely on physical perception.”33 The distinction between poetic and merely sensory arbitrariness turns upon the relation of each to the presumed real: where the first is held up as totally denaturalized—“pure creation of the spirit”—the second is presented as all too mired in the sensuous order of existing things, the events of which it simply reproduces. The claim is not without difficulty. Are not the names of things themselves ensnared in the already-there? “Démolition au platane” follows Breton in emphasizing a notion of image-as-rendezvous, as in Lautréamont’s “encounter of an umbrella and a sewing machine,” or Pierre Reverdy’s definition of the poetic image as “the coming-together of two more or less distant realities”—as if the internal articulation of the image were itself a kind of higher naming: “If the act of naming an object is no longer today a poetic phenomenon, the genesis of the image still rests on this ancestral intellectual function, and the poetic spark bursts forth from the encounter of two named objects.”34 (The figure of the spark derives from the “Surrealist Manifesto,” as we shall see.) The problem comes when the painter attempts to transpose the play of words set free from reference into plastic form, translating poetic names into iconic signs. Insofar as the latter remain answerable to resemblance, painting appears to be an inadequate vehicle for automatism. Hantaï and Schuster’s solution is not to deny the possibility of a productive relationship between painting and language but to cast it at a different level. Where, “in the pictorial register, it is illusory to hope to save the object from its duality by the rigid application of slogans from Lautréamont and Reverdy,” the two authors call instead for “a

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transmutation of the base material: the abstractivizing [abstractivante] recreation of the object corresponds rigorously to the act of abstraction that, in language, constitutes the designation of a thing by a word.”35 Here, it is the abstraction of language as a system of signs and not the content of any verbal figure as such that emerges as a potential model for surrealist practice. This poetry would run directly counter to Hegelian dialectic: “Hegel, with reference to philosophy, wrote that it rendered concrete, and the ‘great minds’ of the day cried paradox. Poetry—plastic or verbal—renders abstract.”36 On this account, figuration appears merely to check the “abstractivizing” function of true poetry, and with the return to preeminence of figurative practices, “one participates, in effect, in the reactualization of Cartesian-Kantian characteristics with a modern décor.”37 The pejorative reference to “Cartesian-Kantian characteristics” is integral to another core critique, bearing on what Hantaï and Schuster would have us see as the deep subjectivism or indeed psychologism of substantial swathes of surrealist practice. Already in its opening paragraphs, “Démolition au platane” decries as “literary” all art and poetry constrained by two closely related notions: “supposed subjective reality controlled by the ‘ego’ and supposed objective reality derived from a rationalistic interpretation of physical laws.”38 Each term in this presumed duality, the essay suggests, is a misguided and ultimately oppressive construct; together, they constitute a “double yoke” with which surrealism must have done.39 The two authors make their case primarily through recourse to Gestalt theory, though the language and emphases in “Démolition au platane” suggest that they took substantial cues from another text: Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s 1945 Phenomenology of Perception.40

In his now famous “preface” to that work, Merleau-Ponty attempts to characterize the philosophical enterprise he inherits from Husserl in part through an overview of his predecessor’s quarrels with René Descartes and Immanuel Kant. At stake here is what Merleau-Ponty diagnoses as analytical reflection’s forgetting of the priority of perception: Descartes and particularly Kant detached the subject, or consciousness, by showing that I could not possibly apprehend anything as existing unless I first of all experienced myself as existing in the act of apprehending it. They presented consciousness, the absolute certainty of my existence for myself, as the condition of there being anything at all; and the act of relating as the basis of relatedness. . . . Analytical reflection starts from our experience of the world and goes back to the subject as to a condition of possibility distinct from that experience, revealing the all-embracing synthesis as that without which there would be no world. To this extent it ceases to remain part of our experience and offers, in place of an account, a reconstruction.41 Gestalt theory enters into this precisely by way of returning the emphasis to perception, as the only place in which the world does in fact appear—not as something of the subject’s own making nor as an instrument of that subject but as always already there before him, in excess of him, “before any possible analysis of mine.”42 To insist upon this priority, as Merleau-Ponty also makes clear, is to deny the notion of the “inner man” implicit in analytical reflection, insofar as it “believes that it can trace back the course followed by a prior constituting act and arrive . . . at a constituting power which has always unFoldIng autoMatIsM

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been identical with that inner self. Thus reflection is carried off by itself and installs itself in an impregnable subjectivity.”43 “Démolition au platane” hews closely to Merleau-Ponty’s maneuvers. Immediately after charging surrealism with a return to “ultra-reactionary philosophical elements”; under the capitalized, Breton-derived subheading “enough diversions of objects along beaten tracks”; Hantaï and Schuster write: Just as alchemy denies the symbol all virtue of significance because, in the formula H²O, for example, no account is taken of the spark that, after the addition of two volumes of hydrogen and one of oxygen, is in fact indispensable to the production of water, Gestalt theory—in accord on this point with modern phenomenology—opposes the “elementary reality” of associationist psychology with a “structural reality.” More precisely, Gestalt theory shows that every form, determined though it may be by its autonomous characteristics, is overdetermined by its potential for integration in a structure and that the real is not an association of composite elements but the internal logic (the spark) that organizes these elements in accordance with the so-called law of “good form.”44 The “spark” recalls the two authors’ earlier remarks on the poetic image (it was bursting forth from “the encounter of two named objects”), even as the turn to Gestalt theory reorients the discussion. Here it is a question of just how that image appears to the surrealist poet: what one might call the phenomenology of automatism. Hantaï and Schuster clearly mean to conjure a central passage in the “Surrealist Manifesto” in which Breton, 22

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following Reverdy, is at pains to characterize the image as it reveals itself in surrealist practice: It is true of surrealist images as it is of opium images that man does not evoke them; rather they “offer themselves to him spontaneously, despotically. He cannot chase them away; for the will is powerless now and no longer controls the faculties.” It remains to be seen whether images have ever been “evoked.” If one accepts, as I do, Reverdy’s definition, it does not seem possible to bring together, voluntarily, what he calls “two distant realities.” The association is made or not made, and that is the long and the short of it.45 Breton then provides three examples of images drawn from Reverdy: “In the brook, there is a song that flows”; “Day unfolded like a white tablecloth”; and “The world goes back into a sack”—of which, he writes: Personally, I absolutely refuse to believe that, in Reverdy’s work, such images . . . reveal the slightest degree of premeditation. In my opinion, it is erroneous to claim that “the mind has grasped the relationship” of two realities in the presence of each other. First of all, it has seized nothing consciously. It is, as it were, from the fortuitous juxtaposition of the two terms that a particular light has leapt, the light of the image, to which we are infinitely sensitive. The value of the image depends upon the beauty of the spark obtained. . . . Now, it is not within man’s power, as far as I can tell, to effect the juxtaposition of two realities so far apart. . . . We are therefore obliged to admit that the two terms of the image are not deduced one from the other by the mind for the specific purpose of

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producing the spark, that they are the simultaneous products of the activity I call surrealist, reason’s role being limited to taking note of, and appreciating, the luminous phenomenon.46 By Breton’s own account, the poet is powerless. He cannot forge but can only register an image that would, so to speak, offer itself. That “luminous phenomenon” can, of course, go unremarked; the true surrealists are those who thrill to its summons (as opposed, say, to the “instruments too full of pride” previously discussed and dismissed in the “Surrealist Manifesto”47). Hantaï and Schuster’s rewriting insists on this point: like the Gestaltist structure, the automatic transmission presents itself whole to those who are prepared to receive it. And yet, the two authors go on to make clear, artists had not ceased to betray surrealism’s fundamental insight into “the actual functioning of thought.”48 One obvious way they did so was by continuing to compose, whether through the part-by-part balancing of elements supposedly “freed up by perception”—a reference to contemporary forms of geometric abstraction—or, closer to home, through the “trompe-l’œil fixation of dream imagery,” a practice Hantaï and Schuster dismiss as but a “rationalizing interpretation (no better or worse than another) of the dream”—in other words, “a counterpoetic demonstration.”49 But contemporary creators also refused the surrealist revelation through a more general penchant for received forms and themes, or what “Démolition au platane” dubs “the sickly glow of the already-seen.”50 (One might compare a well-known remark by Merleau-Ponty: “To perceive is not to remember.”51) Of the present moment, the two authors conclude, “Never in human memory have there been so many artists, so many poets, content to hold back from those shores that would make

them lose (forget) their familiar little bazaar.”52 And yet: “A door swings in us, opening onto the memoryless spaces of a metahuman condition.”53 With this, Hantaï and Schuster have moved well beyond the explicit terms of Merleau-Ponty’s text. Their formulations continue in the vein of their earlier reference to the “other side” of reality’s mirror—as if automatism offered an exit from the bounds and constraints of human history. Hantaï and Schuster actively encourage this understanding, casting surrealist practice as “a matter of exalting as much as possible that obscure part that, in the human [l’homme], begins to be human no more.”54 This framing appears pitted against a recurrent tendency within Breton’s own writing. Time and again, the surrealist leader presents automatism as a quasi-spiritual exercise aimed at the capturing—and eventual integration—of one’s higher truth.55 One notes, for example, the formulations in “The Automatic Message” (1933): The term “automatic writing,” as it is used in surrealism, is (as we have seen) subject to debate. If I can be held partly responsible for that impropriety, it’s because “automatic” writing . . . has always seemed to me the limit toward which the Surrealist poet must strive, while not losing sight of the fact that, contrary to what spiritualism aims to do—dissociate the psychological personality from the medium— Surrealism proposes nothing less than to unify that personality. It is obvious that, for us, the question of the exteriority of (let’s say, for simplicity’s sake) one’s “voice” could not even be posed.56 For Hantaï and Schuster, by contrast, the automatic message comes not from an individual psyche but from an altogether foreign and unFoldIng autoMatIsM

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seemingly future realm: “a region without vestiges of the sociobiological complex that determines the human condition.”57 On this account, the poet or painter is at best a conduit, exercised by something wholly other: “These considerations lead us to believe that the painter and the poet are, in a strict sense, haunted, that a luminous parasite has profited from the separation of the conscious and the unconscious to take up lodging in their unconscious and ‘whisper’ to them the message that forms itself outside of all human control.”58 These formulations draw upon an impulse already active within surrealism, and the two authors bolster their appeal with an abundance of citations from figures within the movement’s pantheon: Arthur Rimbaud (“I is an other”), Lautréamont (“I have been told that I am the son of man and woman. That astounds me. I believed myself more than that”), Tristan Corbière (“I speak beneath myself”), and Giorgio de Chirico (“For a work of art to be really immortal, it must completely exit the limits of the human”), among others.59 All these writers, we are meant to grasp, resist the reduction of the automatic message to a report on one’s personal desires, an instrument of self-understanding. Instead, they speak of an unassimilable exteriority—indeed, a kind of absolute heterogeneity—at the very heart of the poetic enterprise. The clear implication is that a truly revolutionary community depends upon precisely this opening to radical otherness. The preponderance of “Démolition au platane” scrupulously avoids naming names, placing the accent firmly on tendencies rather than individuals. Toward the end of the essay, however, the two authors turn their attention to picking out a few phares (lighthouses) capable of showing the way to a properly surrealist practice. Here, 24

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interestingly, “Démolition au platane” accords “a place of the highest importance” to the work of Marcel Duchamp.60 The choice may seem surprising: despite recent and growing interest in Hantaï’s debts to that forerunner in his pliage painting of the 1960s,61 Duchamp has largely been read out of the painter’s development in the preceding decade. His presence in this pivotal essay suggests the genealogy of Hantaï’s abstraction is more complex than has thus far been acknowledged. Hantaï and Schuster’s remarks focus primarily on Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (or Large Glass), a work widely admired in surrealist circles from the mid-1930s forward (fig. 5). Begun in New York in 1915, “incompleted” in 1923, and now in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Large Glass was received in France principally through the intermediary of the ninety-three unbound documents—including photographs, drawings, and manuscript notes spanning the years 1911–15—contained in the so-called “Green Box.”62 First published in October 1934, in a run of three hundred exemplars bearing the imprint “Édition Rrose Selavy,” that assortment constitutes an essential appendix to the Large Glass, and Hantaï and Schuster make frequent reference to its contents.63 But their account of this œuvre-phare also alludes to at least one other key text by the leader of surrealism: Breton’s own “Phare de la mariée” (Lighthouse of the bride) of 1934.64 This account was one of the earliest and most important essays to address Duchamp’s canonical work, and “Démolition au platane”

FIg. 5 Marcel duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her

Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), 1915–23. oil, varnish, lead foil, lead wire, and dust on two glass panels. Philadelphia Museum of art. Bequest of katherine s. dreier, 1952.

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appears to have been conceived in part as a corrective to its landmark framing. Breton’s essay was the first of what would prove numerous attempts to explain the Large Glass’s “intricate amatory iconography”65—a task stimulated by the arcane nature of Duchamp’s notations, which identify among the work’s components a “Bride” or “Pendu femelle” (literally: a female hanged thing); “Nine Malic Molds” (also described as “Eros’s Matrix”); and “Oculist Witnesses,” among other items. Though he professes his admiration for the work from the outset, the surrealist leader yearns for “a kind of Ariadne’s clew,” a reference to the ball of thread that the mythological Ariadne gave Theseus to prevent him from losing his way in the Minotaur’s labyrinth.66 Duchamp, Breton notes, provides nothing of the sort. In order to better enable recognition of the work’s “objective value,” Breton therefore takes it upon himself to trace a path.67 His remarks approach the work “from an erotic point of view”: The fact is that we are in the presence here of a mechanistic, cynical interpretation of the phenomenon of love: the passage of woman from the state of virginity to the state of nonvirginity adopted as the theme of a basically nonsentimental speculation which would almost seem to have been engaged in by a visitor from outer space making a conscientious effort to visualize this kind of operation. The permissible and strict come to terms quite naturally with the arbitrary and the gratuitous. And one very soon abandons oneself to the charm of a kind of great modern legend where everything is unified by lyricism.68 Breton aims in the ensuing pages to offer the reader a “very brief summary of the affective life” 26

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animating the whole. In practice, this means linking the thirteen elements named by Duchamp in the “Green Box” in a fluid narrative sequence: “The Bride passes her commands to the bachelor machine through the three upper nets (draught pistons), these commands being supported and guided by the milky way. In reply, the nine malic molds . . .”69—and so on, throughout the list, until every feature has in fact been swept into one continuous tale.70 Like the surrealist leader, Hantaï and Schuster present Duchamp’s masterwork as an exemplary instance of eroticized art making. Unlike Breton, however, the pair explicitly bracket the question of interpretation—a critical gesture consistent with the antihermeneutical thrust of the essay generally. Instead, the two authors write that they aim less to “understand” Duchamp’s oeuvre than “to admit it as an anticipation of the sublime point”—that is, as a harbinger of something that exceeds understanding.71 They nonetheless offer a description of the object’s elusive workings, of the ways in which it both offers itself to and withholds itself from sustained reflection. Building upon the major theoretical maneuvers in “Démolition au platane” up to this point—the historicization of artistic technique, the recasting of plastic and verbal poetry as parallel practices of abstractivizing, the critique of subjectivism in all its guises—the entire section on Duchamp registers as a sustained case study. It shows us how one might depsychologize surrealist desire. In their account, the experience of the beholder before the Large Glass is fundamentally one of disorientation. Yet they are notably uninterested in dispelling that perplexity. Rather than hunt for an Ariadne’s clew, Hantaï and Schuster suggest that what matters is the maze itself. Their reference to a “sublime point” draws the reader back to the essay’s opening pages, where, in a long footnote to their

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formulations on the dialectic of rationalization, the two authors write: “It is reality itself that is at stake”—and we will permit ourselves to add, passionately or not at all. For surrealism, everything has depended and still depends upon the decisive passage of the knowledge-pleasure opposition from a formal, logical plane to a dialectical one. Knowledge for the sake of knowledge is worth no more or less than pleasure for the sake of pleasure. It’s libertinism in one case as in the other. The relation of reciprocal and ascending exaltation that it introduces between knowledge and pleasure defines the surrealist attitude. The negation of pleasure by knowledge provokes a negation of knowledge by a new and superior pleasure, etc., up to the sublime point that can only be the end of this diastolic-systolic play and the taking hold of reality by passion, a third term resulting from the ultimate opposition between pleasure and knowledge brought one and the other and one by the other to their paroxysm.72 “Passion,” then, would be the name for the peculiar experience—vertiginous, excessive—of which the Large Glass appears to provide an intimation (though not, it is important to add, the consummation). Interestingly, Hantaï and Schuster’s remarks frame this judgment as itself inexplicable in rational terms, and the ensuing discussion is notable in part for the explicit appeal to faith on which it is predicated: “That such an affirmation is in fact an act of faith is indifferent to us; everyone commits acts of faith all day long, even if only in crossing a street. On the basis of this one, we are sufficiently free to glimpse man’s final aspect [dernier visage]. And what a rather dry dialectic invited us to imagine as

the ultimate term of an opposition between knowledge and pleasure is confirmed, here, by what we believe to be the integral fusion of the mental and the sexual. Afterward. . . . in the game of the Bride, love is perhaps reinvented.”73 This language of faith, passion, and paroxysm appears decidedly at odds with the Bretonian theme of cynicism. A second difference: where the surrealist leader focuses primarily on establishing a narrative capable of linking together the work’s disparate components, the authors of “Démolition au platane” concentrate their attentions on the kind of space in which those elements appear. If there is an “integral fusion of the mental and the sexual,” it is to be found everywhere in the Large Glass, in its very disposition, “on a purely plastic plane”—not as the moral of a story but as the structure of a thing.74 From the outset, the authors frame that space as defined by “previously unknown dynamic laws,” and in order to point up the newness of the overall effect, they contrast Duchamp’s work with that of Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico: “Contrary to de Chirico’s tableaux, which provoke a psychological disorientation, Duchamp’s pictorial oeuvre invites us to a logical disorientation. It gives a specific consistency to ‘the possible reality (obtained) by slightly distending physical and chemical laws.’”75 No more is said about de Chirico, no grounds for this distinction are explicitly adduced, yet in diagnosing that artist’s work as essentially psychological, the two authors appear to accept the then-prevalent surrealist reading of the 1914–18 paintings under the sign of “the conscious manipulation of the dream.”76 Though not a disparagement in the Bretonian text in which that summary phrase first appears, it becomes one within the framework of “Démolition au platane”: virtually everything in the essay militates against that endeavor. unFoldIng autoMatIsM

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But it remains to be seen how and to what extent Duchamp’s work articulates an alternative. The two authors focus on the particular perspective manifest in the Large Glass, which they present as distended by an erotic pulse. Their starting point is a key indication within the “Green Box” regarding the appearance of the title form: “‘Le pendu femelle,’ Duchamp explains, ‘is the form in ordinary perspective of a pendu femelle, of which one could try to find the real form. This follows from the fact that any form at all is the perspective of another, according to a certain vanishing point and a certain distance.’”77 Duchamp’s description of the Large Glass takes over the terminology of Renaissance perspective as predicated upon Euclidean geometry, yet the particular use he makes of this system is not, finally, Euclidean at all. Hantaï and Schuster’s gloss recasts the resulting space as everywhere saturated by the “mental”—a term intended to capture the implication and, as it were, genesis of the spatial constellation within an extraspatial dimension that exceeds it: “But if Duchamp leans here on the perspectival laws defined within the framework of Euclidean geometry, it is only to better transgress them in determining his vanishing point by nonspatial coordinates. There can be no doubt that the generative vanishing point of the pendu femelle is to be found on a purely mental line—more exactly, on a line mental in essence—whatever the eventual geometric existence of that line.”78 Mental in that it is imaginary, this line is at the same time thoroughly invested by desire; for Hantaï and Schuster, following Duchamp, it is in fact a “line of sex” projected from the malic molds, “the pendu femelle being the synthetic projection of the individual desires, the distance obtained by the (imaginary) line resulting from the conjugated action of the nine (imaginary) vectors proportional to the intensity 28

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of each desire.”79 Duchampian perspective would therefore capture the ways in which the bachelors’ ardor binds them not only to the Bride but also to one another, as they yearn for her both individually and collectively. Understood in this way, the work effectively figures the disruption of geometry from within: “The Large Glass could pass for an irrational exploitation of geometry, which ceases to impose its properties on the object in order to fold itself [se plier] in accordance with the unforeseen twists and turns of desire.”80 Where geometry is completely invested by desire, bending itself—or indeed folding itself (a suggestive figure, to say the least, in view of Hantaï’s greater trajectory)—to its impetus, that armature appears profoundly implicated in its contents, not simply distorted but positively generated by these constitutive opacities. Significantly, the perspective in question exceeds any one suitor, suggesting the individual bachelors are themselves caught up in a logic that escapes them, an “Eros’s matrix” not limited to the bachelor machine depicted within the Large Glass but, rather, coterminous with the work in its entirety (an inference not expressly stated within the text but made available by it). In the larger context of “Démolition au platane,” that allover matrix now appears as a figure for the metahuman condition already held up as a foil to the personal unconscious of Bretonian surrealism. And indeed, Hantaï and Schuster present the entire Large Glass as a kind of desiring-machine, the workings of which “indistinctly codify and ultimately reduce to a single principle the organic and the inorganic”—an operation everywhere conditioned by the intricate coupling and mutual “paroxysm” of knowledge and jouissance, intuition and delirium.81 This, then, would be the fundamental contribution of the Large Glass, the crux of its exemplarity for surrealist practice:

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If automatism manifests a throwing into reverse in that it is the language of the psychic unconscious, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even expresses an analogous reversal and constitutes the first word of what we will permit ourselves to name, elliptically, the physical unconscious. By automatism and by Marcel Duchamp, a mental disposition has been emancipated. In painting today, nothing could possibly count but those dizzying swings of the glider that will uncover it.82 The subsequent development of Hantaï’s art suggests that several aspects of this reading deserve special emphasis. First, Duchamp’s production is not itself described as an instance of automatism: rather, his achievement is taken to manifest a movement analogous or complementary to that of automatism. Its constitutive displacements are specifically coded as simultaneously erotic and logical—a significant coupling, presented as directly counter to surrealist psychologism. Another key point concerns the perhaps surprising emphasis placed on painting. This orientation is confirmed, in the lines that follow, by a brief excursus on the Chilean painter Roberto Matta, whom the two authors present as taking up a Duchampian inheritance. Nowhere does “Démolition au platane”

suggest that serious engagement with Duchamp’s achievement has led or ought to lead beyond the medium; rather, Hantaï and Schuster seem to construe the Large Glass as an essential crux by which painting must pass. “Démolition au platane” sets out the fundamental stakes of Hantaï’s practice and theory in the years leading up to the advent of the folding method. At the heart of this endeavor is what the two authors would have us see as the enduring promise of surrealist automatism: its radical opening to an ultimately impersonal, “metahuman” dimension capable of leveraging an otherwise inexorable process of rationalization. All of Hantaï’s work in the immediate aftermath of his break with Breton shows him pursuing the implications of that admittedly obscure thought. Yet where “Démolition au platane” advances its claims in uncompromising, often peremptory terms perfectly adapted to the manifesto form, Hantaï’s defining statements of the later 1950s reveal a painter profoundly at grips with the comparatively messy realities of practice. These contingencies gradually dissolve his understanding of automatism into something else—ultimately, I want to say, into a certain thought of medium. It is to that continually self-complicating story that we now turn.

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excessive gestures 1

CHAPTER 2

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In the summer of 1955, Hantaï developed a process of painting—one might even say, “negative painting”—predicated upon acts of scraping or raclage. Work began with a tautly stretched canvas onto which he dripped and flicked pigment in a variety of high-keyed colors. These areas, if not the surface as a whole, he then covered with a layer of quick-drying industrial oil paint, typically in brown, grey, or black. The choice required that he work quickly, and so he did, using a metal ring removed from an old-fashioned alarm clock to strip off swathes of the darker overlying matter and thus reveal the brilliant underpainting. Additional veils of paint or brown- or black-tinged varnish might be applied at this point, and portions of the canvas scraped anew. During May and June 1956, Hantaï exhibited an exemplary suite of new works produced in this manner at Jean Fournier’s Galerie Kléber.1 Entitled Sexe-Prime: Hommage à Jean-Pierre Brisset et autres peintures de Simon Hantaï—in honor of an obscure nineteenth-century grammarian esteemed by the surrealists for the unintentional hilarity of his elaborate puns2—the show prominently featured a monumental work of September 1955 that was, at 7'10.5" × 17'5", by far the largest and most ambitious canvas the artist had produced to date (fig. 6). An exhibition of a relatively unknown painter at a fledgling gallery, the event received scant attention in the contemporary press, and there is little archival evidence for the show itself.3 Since the 1970s, however, Sexe-Prime has acquired near-legendary status in the Hantaï literature. The title painting is one of very few works from the artist’s first decade in France consistently mentioned by his critics, and the exhibition is routinely cited as a defining moment in his oeuvre. Sexe-Prime’s current reputation rests upon one chief claim: that it marks the effective beginning of Hantaï’s decades-long engagement with the work of Jackson

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FIg. 6 simon Hantaï, Sexe-Prime: Hommage à Jean-Pierre Brisset, 1955. oil on canvas. Musée national d’art moderne—Centre georges Pompidou, Paris. Purchase by the state, 1968.

Pollock. The early date makes this a fact of some significance. By 1956, the most avid art seeker in Paris could have seen a total of sixteen paintings by the American artist; the first comprehensive retrospective, organized by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, would not arrive there for another three years. Those canvases that had been shown to date—a mixed bag including The She-Wolf (1943), a handful of dripped and poured pictures from the years 1948–51, and three black-and-white paintings from 1952—had appeared on scattered occasions, in a succession of group and individual shows at the Galerie Nina Dausset (Véhémences confrontées [Opposing forces], 1951), the Galerie de France (Regards sur la peinture américaine [Views of American painting], 32

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1952), the Studio Facchetti (Jackson Pollock, 1952), and the MNAM (12 peintres et sculpteurs américains [Twelve American painters and sculptors], 1953, and 50 ans d’art aux États-Unis [Fifty years of art in the United States], 1955). The fragmented nature of these exhibitions made it exceedingly difficult for even the most sympathetic beholder to gauge either the depth or breadth of Pollock’s oeuvre.4 That Hantaï was looking at Pollock’s work and taking it seriously is no small matter, and indeed it is crucial to the narrative of epistemic change in which he would serve both as a conduit for the reception of postwar abstraction from the United States and as a major predecessor for the avant-gardes of the later 1960s and 1970s. Curiously effaced in this account, however, is any sense of the specificity of Hantaï’s response to his American peer. To date, almost all of the artist’s commentators have tended to treat the terms of his abstraction as it emerged in this moment as

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essentially self-evident, placing that shift under the sign of a rejection of surrealist “literature” or metaphor tout court.5 That is, while Hantaï’s raclage has been recognized as a major precursor to pliage, it also has been subject to the same reduction to a technique “as such.” Further enabling that contraction is the relative inaccessibility of much of the work in question: many paintings from the moment of Sexe-Prime entered private collections at or shortly after the time of the exhibition while untold others were destroyed by their author in subsequent years. Those that do belong to major museums— such as Sexe-Prime itself, now in the collection of the MNAM—are rarely shown publicly. Examined closely, however, the extant canvases offer indexes for a more nuanced view of Hantaï’s early gestural style, one in which the artist’s burgeoning interest in Pollock appears at once crucially mediated by more local interlocutors and, by virtue of those entanglements, inextricable from his continued reckoning with the perceived promises and failures of surrealist community. Most important, the scraped canvases show him working through his experience of Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even. “Démolition au platane” had suggested that exemplary work might still bear progeny in painting, and the Sexe-Prime invitational brochure reproduces two of Duchamp’s best-known notes, “Faire un tableau malade” (Make a sick painting) and “Élever de la poussière” (Dust breeding): both are from the “Green Box” and have to do with the Large Glass.6 Seen in this connection, Hantaï’s new works appear to be a concerted response to that prior model of eroticized art making. Yet they equally turn a certain interpretation of Pollock against Duchamp, effectively marshaling new resources from contemporary painting that the elder artist famously did not embrace.7 As such, this work

amounts to an important, inaugural, but highly volatile attempt to depsychologize surrealist desire. Of all the painters in Paris looking at Pollock’s work in the 1950s, Georges Mathieu was among the earliest and most celebrated. An ideologically unattractive figure for many critics—he declared himself royalist and Catholic and was a member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts from 1976 until his death in 2012—the artist has been largely excluded from the dominant narrative of Hantaï’s work.8 The two men nonetheless knew one another in the years immediately following Hantaï’s departure from Breton’s group. Hantaï singled Mathieu out for special praise at the moment of Sexe-Prime, describing this exact contemporary as the author of “the most significant gesture since the war.”9 The two painters later collaborated on a controversial Happening of sorts, about which there will be more to say in chapter 3. Brief though it was—Hantaï broke contact after March 1957—their association was determining for the young Hungarian. Born in Boulogne-sur-Mer in 1921, Mathieu began painting in 1942, came to Paris in 1947, and edited United States Lines Paris Review, an important journal of art, architecture, and literature distributed on transatlantic luxury liners, from 1953.10 He discovered postwar American abstraction over the course of frequent travels to New York and, back in France, became one of the first in that country to promote it actively. From 1948, he sought to include paintings by Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Ad Reinhardt, and Mark Tobey in exhibitions of artists from both sides of the Atlantic, and in 1951, he partnered with Tapié to organize Véhémences confrontées, the first exhibition in Paris to include a canvas by Pollock. (The title, Tapié’s preface makes clear, was meant to reflect a curatorial principle of pure juxtaposition, exC essIVe gestures 1

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associating “individuals of absolutely disparate races, milieu [sic], cultures, and experiences; this is the best chance for a ‘confrontation’ which refuses to make up or become a group.”11) Throughout the same period and beyond, he also authored a number of texts either defending contemporary abstraction in the States or directly addressing its makers. Mathieu’s writings on his American peers frame their work as essentially of a piece with a much larger, international movement of which he would be a key instigator. His name for this was abstraction lyrique (lyrical abstraction). Similar to Tapié’s informel insofar as it would be an affair of exceptional individuals rather than groups, abstraction lyrique nonetheless aspired to a tighter framing, explicitly excluding figuration as a historically superseded practice and positively advancing three fundamental precepts. First and foremost was the esthétique de la vitesse (aesthetic of speed): the special privilege accorded rapidity of execution. This priority he linked intimately to a second tenet, the rejection of premeditated forms and gestures. Painting quickly, the artist would outrace the press of received ideas, references, and intentions, thereby increasing his “liberty” (an oft-repeated term in Mathieu’s lexicon). In his words: “The introduction of speed into Western aesthetics appears to me a capital phenomenon. It follows naturally from the growing liberation of painting vis-à-vis its references. I mean that figurative painting had that fatal reference to nature or to the exterior world, which served as a model. . . . Speed thus signifies the definitive abandonment of artisanal methods in painting in favor of methods of pure creation. And yet, isn’t that the artist’s mission: to create, not to recopy.”12 Mathieu’s third major maxim concerns the painter’s psychic disposition and insists upon the 34

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necessity of a “second state,” typically qualified as ecstatic. Professing to perform as if in a trance, “in the greatest possible state of emptiness,” the painter repeatedly cast this rapture in overtly sexual terms.13 A 1958 interview with French writer Alain Bosquet is particularly instructive in this regard. To the question, “Could you draw a parallel between sexual pleasure and the aesthetic pleasure experienced at the completion of a canvas?”14— Mathieu responds: I would not say: “at the moment when the canvas is complete,” I would say: “for the entire duration of the work of painting.” I believe I would even go much further; I would say that every act of creation, whether it consists of a poem or a bit of music—architecture, for its part, has too long a duration—is analogous to the sexual gesture. That is perhaps most exciting in music, because it’s more direct. For me—and I said it already in 1949—the painterly gesture can be associated to a spasm, a kind of orgasm. Anyhow, everything that counts in life seems to me to refer to the sexual act, in its preparation and in its culmination.15 I shall return to the question of duration, which—as Hantaï will help us to see—is far more complicated than Mathieu lets on. For the moment, let us focus on the deep, if repeatedly disavowed, continuity of the French painter’s discourse with critical aspects of surrealist thought. Time and again, Mathieu’s writings insist on modern art’s relentlessly teleological drive toward ever-greater abstraction, effectively banishing Breton’s movement to the margins, “outside the absolutely linear and univocal evolution of painting for the past eighty years.”16 That professed hostility notwithstanding, Mathieu’s esthétique de la vitesse is

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profoundly indebted to the surrealist discourse of psychic automatism.17 As early as 1924, Breton had included rapidity of execution among his “Secrets of Magic Surrealist Art”: “Put yourself in as passive, or receptive, a state of mind as you can. Forget about your genius, your talents, and the talents of everyone else. . . . Write quickly, without any preconceived subject, fast enough so that you will not remember what you’re writing and be tempted to reread what you have written.”18 Just as importantly, the movement’s painters developed cognate procedures. At roughly the same time that Breton was drafting the first “Surrealist Manifesto,” André Masson was experimenting with the potential of speed to unleash unconscious impulses in his fluid dessins automatiques, or “automatic drawings,” examples of which were reproduced frequently in La révolution surréaliste (fig. 7).19 Such works establish a deep linkage of psychic automatism and graphic improvisation, identifying the “actual functioning of thought” with the unforeseeable twists and turns of the quickly drawn trait. Further, both Masson and Breton correlate these outpourings with extreme, excessive, and trancelike states: highly eroticized, “Dionysian” ecstasy in the case of the former, a heightened receptivity or “state of grace” in that of the latter. Lyrical abstraction taps this vein of surrealist practice, and it is significant that Mathieu’s gestures routinely conjure various kinds of writerly marking, particularly ideograms and Eastern calligraphy. Far from refusing such associations, the painter positively encouraged them—with one caveat. Unlike ordinary writing, which he construes as the selection and arrangement of signs with preexisting meanings, lyrical abstraction announced a semantic revolution: “For the first time in history, the sign precedes its signification.”20 Mathieu consistently underscores the undivided action of creating

FIg. 7 andré Masson, Dessin automatique, 1924. Ink on paper. Museum of Modern art, new York.

signs ex nihilo, dating his canvases to single days and—from 1956—staging increasingly spectacular painting performances. The latter, he suggests, amount to ludic “rites,” allowing painter and public alike to “relive the full share of the Irrational that we have chased from ourselves.”21 Mathieu’s rhetoric constitutes a crucial part of the expanded context for “Démolition au platane.” Looking back on that essay, one might now be struck by a number of (intentional or unintentional) relays between its central criticisms and the flamboyant painter’s well-publicized positions. Particularly germane is Hantaï and Schuster’s condemnation of the “monumental error” of surrealist painting that would simply translate “verbal message to graphic message”: Mathieu’s notionally exC essIVe gestures 1

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FIg. 8 simon Hantaï, Peinture, 1955. oil on canvas. Private collection.

nonsignifying writing offers a ready response to their call for a truly denaturalized painting set free from all exterior models. Similarly, his emphasis on trancelike action evokes that polemic’s attempts to reframe automatism as less message than passage— the moment of gratuitous transmission to which the two authors refer. In one respect as in the other, “Démolition au platane” appears keyed to broader shifts in the contemporary discourse of painting in mid-1950s France. 36

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Hantaï’s paintings similarly suggest an at least partial appropriation of lyrical abstractionist ideas, as evinced above all by his increasingly perspicuous use of markings that resemble writing. Two works separated by roughly a year indicate this shift. The first canvas slightly predates the moment of Sexe-Prime. Produced in the late winter or early spring of 1955—that is, in the immediate aftermath of “Démolition au platane”—it comprises roughly a dozen scraped tracks surrounded by an amorphous cloud of black paint (fig. 8).22 The long, serpentine paths have an implicitly “writerly” quality, yet the primary effect is one of deliberate care: each

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FIg. 9 simon Hantaï, Peinture, 1956. oil on canvas. Private collection.

trait appears unbroken, as if the gesture were the result of one continuous passage of the hand, and each largely follows the contour of the one above it. These traces read slowly, as the work of protracted, even plodding processes. By contrast, a larger painting from 1956 shows Hantaï at once increasing his dimensions and picking up speed (fig. 9).23 The overall structure of the scraped area is roughly homologous to that in the first example, in that it, too, is distinguished by a gradual diminution of masses,

culminating in—and prolonged through—the downward-arcing motion of the rightmost clump. That tic, repeated across numerous canvases by Hantaï in this moment, produces a strong impression of left-to-right movement, while the rapid-fire play of grave and acute accents across the bottom edge contributes to an overall sense of acceleration. Further, the gestures themselves have changed: longer and bristling around the perimeter of the scraped zone, the markings become suggestively cursive toward the interior. As a result, the painting takes on a quasi-graphic quality that, while not entirely lacking in the first example, is far more striking here. exC essIVe gestures 1

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FIg. 10 simon Hantaï, Peinture, 1955. oil on canvas. Musée d’art moderne de saint-Étienne Métropole.

A turn toward writing-like traces is even more palpable in a third canvas from roughly the same moment, now in the collection of the Musée d’art moderne de Saint-Étienne Métropole (fig. 10). Two more or less distinct “lines” of abstract script register as launching the painting from the left. Toward the center, these trajectories merge with a larger mass of sinuous marks, the whole of which tips perceptibly downward toward the right. One notes the repetition or recombination of certain “characters”: figure eights; variously downward- and upward-thrusting slashes; distended S-curves; and long, looping knots resembling lower case e’s. The 38

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dense interlacing of negative gestures conjures the fluid liaisons of cursive script while the asymmetrical structure again suggests the left-to-right orientation of Western writing. Here as elsewhere, Hantaï takes from Mathieu the notion of a kind of abstract écriture that is no longer communicative in any traditional sense but is indexed, rather, to supposedly unpremeditated painterly action: the nimble athleticism of a body construed as sheer conduit, plugged into impulses beyond its control.24 With this, it seems, Hantaï has arrived at the possibility of a “physical unconscious” very different from Duchamp’s. Yet this is already to take Mathieu’s work and thought against their grain.

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FIg. 11 georges Mathieu, La bataille de Bouvines, 1954. oil on canvas. Musée national d’art moderne—Centre georges Pompidou, Paris.

The Frenchman, for his part, never ceased to ground his painting in self-expression—or what “Démolition au platane” had already denounced as “the pathetic ambition to express [one]self.”25 This commitment comes through clearly in the artist’s interview with Bosquet: a.b.: What is painting? g.m.: Painting remains a means of expression, even in 1958. a.b.: Nothing more? g.m.: No, but in the most total sense. a.b.: That is to say, the projection of the total personality? g.m.: Yes. Personality presupposes a conception of the world.26

On the level of practice, too, Mathieu favored “projective” techniques, as becomes clear before La bataille de Bouvines (The battle of Bouvines), one of the painter’s best-known canvases of the early 1950s (fig. 11).27 Dated April 25, 1954, and exhibited at that year’s Salon de Mai (May salon), the work measures 8'4" × 20'—unusually large for an abstract work in Paris at the time. The majority of the ropey skeins of predominantly red, white, and black paint emblazoning the broad beige field appear to have been squeezed directly from the tube, a technique for which Mathieu claimed credit: the procedure was, he averred, a major precursor to Pollock’s use of “direct means” in his abstractions of the later 1940s.28 Elsewhere, as among the bank of energetic splotches in the upper right, Mathieu seems to have thrown the pigment with a baton or brush while the spindly, doodling traits in the lower middle and right-ofcenter suggest a rapid, even casual passage of the hand. Such immediacy effects help to frame exC essIVe gestures 1

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FIg. 12 Mathieu, viewed from behind, beginning La bataille de

Bouvines, april 25, 1954.

Bataille as the result of an unpremeditated and unfiltered outpouring: “the projection of the total personality.” This effusion admits another coding, given the artist’s remarks on the fundamentally sexual nature of painterly creation. Where Mathieu could imagine the painterly gesture as “a spasm, a kind of orgasm,” his exuberant sprays and splashes take on less than subtle associations with a distinctly masculine enjoyment, the painter’s extralong brushes appearing not just as manual but as decidedly phallic prostheses.29 This side of his practice is particularly marked in a suite of photographs by 40

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filmmaker Robert Descharnes, showing the artist at work on Bataille. Mathieu appears in a characteristically fantastic get-up, attacking the canvas with outsize implements that amplify his every gesture and, in one telling shot, seem to project directly from his groin (figs. 12–13).30 For Hantaï, this emphasis on the “total personality,” as well as the obvious alignment of gesture and jouissance, imaginary projection and phallic ejaculation, could only appear as a psychologistic betrayal or domestication of precisely those aspects of the esthétique de la vitesse that interested him the most— and therefore, as akin to Breton’s earlier forgetting of the radical promise of surrealist automatism. And once again, Duchamp provided a powerful countermodel of eroticized creation. To return to

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“Démolition au platane,” one might now recall that what Hantaï and Schuster present as the paradigmatic force of the Large Glass turns upon a vision of desire unconsummated: the “sublime point” they glimpsed in that work was precisely not immediate jouissance but a mutual “paroxysm” of pleasure and knowledge. Painting must aspire to this particular experience—or more precisely, this passionate vertige—if it were to produce the poetic excess that Hantaï and Schuster identify as the sole object of surrealist practice, over and against the dialectic of rationalization to which all discoveries are subject in time. Duchamp had approached this dizzying extremity through an erotic distortion of Euclidean geometry, the laws of which the Large Glass made fold to the unforeseeable workings of desire.31 Drawing impetus from that example, Hantaï’s scraped paintings show him working toward a comparable distension that is also, importantly, a pointed correction of one of the weakest aspects of Mathieu’s enterprise—and a different opening toward Pollock’s. This pursuit takes place through what one might call an “irrational exploitation” of the traditional distinction between figure and ground. Mathieu uses “figuration” in a relatively reduced sense to designate the deployment of recognizable subject matter or, to invert the formula for lyrical abstraction, the production of signs that succeed their signifieds. He does not address the ways in which even nominally abstract marks might detach themselves visually from their grounds, as they do in Bataille de Bouvines and, indeed, throughout his work. Yoked to a fundamentally cubist scaffolding and largely trued to the framing edges, his pseudoideogrammatic signs typically avoid the corners of the canvas, clustering instead in the middle zone. That his fields tend to be uniformly colored only exacerbates the traditional hierarchy of figure and ground.

FIg. 13 Mathieu, seen from above, his pigments on the ground,

april 25, 1954.

Hantaï’s practice operates otherwise. Consider a canvas of 1956 whose blond expanse, though much smaller than that of Mathieu’s painting, suggests an implicit rivalry with Bataille (fig. 14). As in the earlier work, the painter has confined his gestures to a roughly central area, here surrounded by viscous black paint. The latter element contributes crucially to the striking quality of the whole: the canvas derives its dramatic tension as much from the graphic contrast between the dark traces exC essIVe gestures 1

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FIg. 14 simon Hantaï, Peinture, 1956. oil on canvas. Private collection. FIg. 15 simon Hantaï, Peinture, 1956. oil on canvas. Musée Cantini, Marseille. Purchase, 1986.

and the exposed, paint-dragged cloth as from the barely contained kineticism of Hantaï’s tightly coiled traits. Yet it is just here that the painting puts tremendous pressure on descriptive language and the oppositional pairs on which it depends. Conventional habits of beholding lead one initially to see the dark paint as “behind” the gestures, as 42

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if marking out a deeper space or ground, but then the long black drips call attention to this pigment’s superficiality—to its being, in a sense, “over” the exposed areas one is inclined to read as so many figures. But neither does it make sense to describe these latter elements as “under” the black paint, as if they were buried in or by it. The traditional dichotomies simply do not hold, ceding instead to an unresolvable oscillation. Equally disorienting effects define a second painting from 1956, now in the Musée Cantini in Marseilles (fig. 15). The work reveals a similar disposition of scraped gestures, here rotated

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ninety degrees. And it, too, evinces a powerful graphic contrast—in this instance, between the coal-colored paint surrounding the negative marks and the milky pigment seeping from the central area. Significantly, each of these chromatic antipodes sends a different spatial cue: the longer black drips run off toward either side while the white medium streams down toward the bottom edge. What therefore transpires is an unstable alternation not just between figure and ground but also, no less importantly, between vertical and horizontal axes of address. Read as erect, the tangle of scraped traits is implicitly anthropomorphic (note, in particular, the head-like massing of rounded gestures in the upper register); construed as recumbent, by contrast, it evokes an open gash in the canvas itself. Of course, the two possibilities are also subject to more gendered codings, a recognition that invests the field as a whole with an undecidably erotic charge. The negative gestures, meanwhile, display the full spectrum in high-keyed hues. The searing color provides a counterpunch to the dove-gray field, thus activating another dialectic that one reads—or should I say, “feels”?— as a flaring and cooling of bodily warmth. These effects speak to the beholder as an embodied being, and yet they rely equally upon a range of conceptual oppositions that Hantaï at once invokes and unmoors. Both works show Hantaï leaning on a traditional figure/ground dichotomy only to transgress it more effectively.32 The results are without precedent or parallel in Mathieu’s practice. Rather, they all turn upon what one might qualify as Hantaï’s willfully nonprojective use of the raclage technique, which remains importantly rooted in surrealist precedents, from Ernstian frottage and grattage to decalcomania. Unlike the Frenchman’s exaggerated brushes, which permit the 44

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flicking and flinging of paint at a surface, Hantaï’s hollow ring can only push and pull paint across the support—a gesture that thereby necessitates closer and more intimate proximity to the canvas. At the same time, this implement forecloses the impression of personal, expressive touch, producing sharp contours and blunt or pointed traits that clearly bespeak an antithetical distancing. (One recalls the claim in “Démolition au platane” that Duchamp’s Large Glass confounds the distinctions between the organic and the inorganic.) Then, too, the very act of scraping the canvas turns upon a constitutive opacity. Between the initial spattering of the support and the rediscovery of that inevitably altered ground, the intervening dark layer will have functioned as a screen, interrupting the relation between eye and hand. In this way as well, raclage short-circuits the immediate jouissance pursued by Mathieu and points to the more complicated vision of deferred and self-deferring desire exemplified in “Démolition au platane” by the Large Glass. No less importantly, however, the scraped canvases also “correct” Duchamp in key respects. Let us turn back briefly to Breton’s 1934 essay “Lighthouse of the Bride,” a text I have claimed stood in the background of Hantaï and Schuster’s reading of the Large Glass. One of the most striking aspects of that essay is the ethical rigor it attributes to Duchamp, whose “policy of absolute negation” Breton applauds.33 The surrealist leader is thinking in the first instance of Duchamp’s rejection of cubism, a pictorial tendency Breton associates with “pedantic statements,” “scientific claims,” and “‘constructive’ value”34—in short, with delusions of intellectual and artistic mastery. Duchamp, the poet claims, helps to sweep away all of this. But Breton is also interested in what he sees as Duchamp’s larger refusal to “repeat,” an operation

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the former considers regrettably central to nearly all art making. This unwillingness is manifest in a general way in the overall sparseness of Duchamp’s oeuvre, which Breton, following his subject’s lead, takes to number “around thirty-five” interventions to date.35 The surrealist nonetheless places special emphasis on his friend’s apparent abandonment of painting, an abdication he dates to 1912. That mode of expression as a whole, Breton claims, “began to seem vitiated to him”: The practice of drawing and painting gave him the impression of being a confidence trick aiming at the stupid glorification of the hand and nothing else. And if the hand is the main culprit how could one agree to be the slave of one’s own hand? It is preposterous that drawing and painting should still stand today at the point where writing stood before Gutenberg. The delight in colour, based upon olfactive pleasure, is as wretched as the delight in line, based upon manual pleasure. The only solution, in these circumstances, is to unlearn how to paint and draw, and since that moment Duchamp has never swerved from his purpose.36 Something of this view lives on in Hantaï’s practice. Yet it makes itself felt primarily as the younger man’s determination to acknowledge and reactivate Duchamp’s refusals within painting. Consider, once again, the raclage method. In addition to making a strategy of delay integral to the painting process, Hantaï’s scraping technique involves the manipulation of a hard-to-hold implement. The metal alarm-clock ring requires the hand to remain flexed, the fingers curved around the circumference of the object for the duration of the painterly act. The continuous gripping is very different from the kind of hold demanded

by a paintbrush. Indeed, this disparity appears to have been no small part of the tool’s appeal: in an interview with Swedish critic Ingemar Gustafson published that same year, Hantaï insists upon the need for the painter to throw away his brushes and seek other means of applying paint.37 His professed aversion to the traditional prosthesis suggests a quasi-Duchampian desire to “unlearn” painting. No less significantly, however, it implies a lesson of another sort, one at least equally attuned to Pollock’s paint stick. As a further mark of difference, effectively reversing what Breton presents as Duchamp’s priorities, Hantaï’s modifications clearly privilege making over ideation. The contents of the “Green Box” bear witness to the tremendous labor of premeditation poured into the Large Glass, a work that Duchamp himself later described as “willed, voluntarily established according to exact plan” over the course of some eight years.38 Hantaï, by contrast, seeks effects unknowable in advance: each alteration of the painting procedure, each willful act of authorial dispossession, calls for testing and experimentation in the studio. Put another way, it demands repetition. And indeed, from the early winter of 1955 through 1956, Hantaï’s work reveals a ceaseless reshaping of motifs— whether through acts of rotation; shifts in size and scale; or the introduction of new materials, such as varnishes, strings, or coagulated paint skins. And then there is the repetition within works: in a painting such as the one now in Saint-Étienne, writing-likeness is itself an effect of the near recurrence of certain gestures. Far from the eternal parroting bemoaned by Breton, however, this determined reiteration appears to be a means of opening up differences—a way of letting emerge something that would not simply be “willed,” “voluntarily established,” or “according to exact exC essIVe gestures 1

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plan.” In so doing, it looks beyond the author of the Large Glass to the serial drift of contemporary abstraction. For Hantaï, then, Mathieu’s esthétique de la vitesse provided a major and in many ways determining context for his transformation of surrealist automatic writing into writing-like gesture. From Duchamp, he nonetheless retained a powerful vision of the mutual entanglement of the erotic and the logical. The painter interrogated both men’s achievements simultaneously, fusing and redirecting what he took to be the most powerful possibilities within their at times openly contradictory bodies of work. In so doing, he began moving toward a highly specific response to Pollock, one that drew less upon the actual look and procedures of American painting than upon aspects of a particular stance it might be taken to imply: the relative foregrounding of bodily and material processes over notionally psychic events, the priority of making over theoretical projection, an emphasis on manual unlearning as against acquired facility, and a recognition of the transformative potential of repetition over the Bretonian association of rarity and artistic originality. Let us turn at last to the central early statement of that engagement, the monumental canvas Sexe-Prime: Hommage à Jean-Pierre Brisset (see fig. 6). Nearly twice as long as it is high, the painting reveals a variegated, golden-beige field marked by an extraordinary variety of events, from the scattered areas of coagulated paint skins applied directly to the support, to variously coiled and extended lengths of string, to the multiple veils of highly reflective varnish that lend the work its distinctly layered quality. Spanning that surface are knot-like clusters of tightly cursive gestures illuminated by flashes of high-keyed color, the bright 46

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hues dragged and blurred by the passage of the scraping implement. Generally lighter than the surrounding field, these negative traits are limned by darker contours: the residual paint and varnish pushed up by the passage of the metal ring. Toward the lower right, the painter has signed, dated, and titled the work in ink: “Sexe-Prime / Hommage à Jean-Pierre Brisset / 18 septembre 1955 Simon Hantaï.” More than any other work by Hantaï, SexePrime suggests a matchup with Mathieu. This contest is partly an affair of sheer size: of the various painters in France then working in a gestural style, only Mathieu had worked this large. Hantaï therefore challenges his peer on terrain the latter was rapidly appropriating as his own. The canvas’s exceptionally precise dating confirms this relation. Although unusual for the Hungarian artist— Sexe-Prime appears to be the only instance among his works on canvas39—the practice of dating a painting to a single day is one of Mathieu’s privileged gestures. Finally, there is the work’s title. The latter part points beyond Bouvines and any number of additional Batailles to Mathieu’s other major picture type, the Hommage; earlier examples include his Hommage à Louis XI (1950), Hommage à la mort (1950), Hommage à Philippe III le Hardi (1952), and most importantly perhaps, Hommage au Maréchal de Turenne (1952)—a 6'7" × 13'1.5" canvas dated to January 19, 1952, and painted on-site at the Studio Facchetti “in less than forty-five minutes,” according to its author.40 All of these borrowings suggest that Hantaï’s own Hommage is importantly indebted to Mathieu’s work. But the first part of Sexe-Prime’s suggestive appellation—a bit of wordplay especially beloved of Brisset—is more complicated, at once conjuring and defeating the Frenchman’s emphasis on self-expression (what “Démolition au platane” calls

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the “pathetic ambition” to s’exprimer) in favor of a rather different goal: the aspiration to let sexe prime, to allow desire itself to take the lead. Here, as throughout the Sexe-Prime suite, that attempt turns crucially upon the implicit anthropomorphism of the gestural marking. From a normal viewing distance, Hantaï’s scraped traces evoke a succession of quasi-figural clumps of which the most prominent is an over-life-size specimen at the painting’s center. Rounded, head-like snarls punctuate the painting’s upper and middle registers while sharper, downward-pointing traces appear concentrated throughout the lower half. Further encouraging the sense of depicted bodies are the somber areas of congealed paint and black-tinged runoff that appear “under” and around the scraped forms: for example, the bust-like area of coagulated medium applied just to the right of the central figure’s scraped “head” and “neck,” or the oblong patch between lower limb and . . . sex? Darker than the dun-colored field, these zones suggest cast shadows—a reading decidedly at odds with their insistent materiality but in every way consistent with this painter’s predilection for seemingly contradictory effects poised between surface and depth, push and pull, corporeal volume and spatial compression. And like shadows, such events are also, to some extent, indexical effects, produced by the effluvia from neighboring gestures. That they by no means imply a single, rational light source helps prevent the work from settling into some more stable illusionism. Indeed, even this decidedly uncertain coherence proves fleeting. For the quasi-figures, too, remain curiously implicated in their “ground.” The extremely subtle gradations of brown-beige pigment around the scraped forms contribute to the generalized air of insecurity, creating a kind of

visual blur where contour gives way to field. This ambiguity entices the beholder to step closer— as do, differently, the minutely dappled areas of high-keyed underpainting and the elaborately wrinkled textures of the congealed paint skins. Yet to approach the canvas is to see the uneasy masses melt into a seemingly formless proliferation of frenzied traits. The effect is akin to finding oneself immersed in the Bacchanalian whirl, figuratively engulfed by it. Just as importantly, however, the work also compels movement in the opposite direction— not least, through the presence of that overlarge (indeed, overwhelming) central form. From a position of relative remove, Sexe-Prime reveals a strong sense of lateral rush, thereby complicating what might otherwise appear its strictly frontal, bodily address. And although the cursive clumps taper toward each of the two ends, the work is by no means symmetrical; instead, it is marked by several major structural tics common to Hantaï’s paintings in this moment. These broadly shared features include a seeming entry midway up the painting’s left edge, as well as an equally strongly implied exit in the lower right, where the painter’s characteristically downward-hooking gestures have become sharply pointed slashes. Such effects contribute to the overall impression of left-to-right movement that is one of the defining hallmarks of Hantaï’s middecade style. Reinforcing this apparent momentum is the artist’s inclusion of actual writing in the form of that extended inscription in the lower right quadrant. The scrawled title and date are perceptible even from a distance, visually underscoring the quasi-graphic quality of the gestural area as a whole. This writing-likeness dissolves the figures in another way. It is not only that the scraped forms never detach themselves fully from the exC essIVe gestures 1

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surrounding field; no one form ever disengages cleanly from any other. Rather, the complex interlacing of gestures draws the different clusters into a larger, more continuous rhythm. Whether one moves toward the work or away from it, then, the enticing figure-likeness of Sexe-Prime gives way to something else—either a seemingly unbounded orgy of gestures or a monumental pseudoinscription. In one case as in the other, the slippage is further complicated by what might now appear to be the generalized carnality (one might even say the “metahuman condition”) of the painting as a whole: witness the evocatively epidermal veils of brown- and black-tinged varnish, the suggestions of scarring or scabbing encouraged by the coagulated paint areas, and even the hairlike qualities of the multiple drips, strings, and ridges of trickles of varying lengths. The result is a dizzying fluctuation between individuation and dissolution—a veritable passion of figuration that Sexe-Prime asks us to imagine in erotic terms. That paroxysm is the painting’s great subject, and it is a drama attuned to the ardent stripping of raclage itself.

FIg. 16 simon Hantaï, dépliant for the exhibition Sexe-Prime: Hommage à Jean-Pierre Brisset et autres peintures, May–June 1956, galerie kléber, Paris, detail of the front cover.

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Sexe-Prime’s privileged status among Hantaï’s works of the 1950s is due in large part to the elaborate invitational dépliant, or folded leaflet, that Hantaï designed and financed in the run-up to the painting’s public debut (fig. 16). Distributed in a heavy brown-paper folder bearing a reproduction of the painter’s handwritten signature—Hantaï—and the typewritten words “Hommage à Jean-Pierre Brisset,” the document consists of a single sheet of glossy white paper folded in quarters, itself comprising four main elements: two quarter-sized faces, of which one (the “frontispiece”) bears a black-on-white drawing, and the other (the “end page”) a “chronophotograph” of Hantaï’s hands (in reality, a composite spliced together from multiple

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FIg. 17 simon Hantaï, dépliant for the exhibition Sexe-Prime, May–June 1956, galerie kléber, Paris, detail of the end page and frontispiece.

single-frame photographs); a one-half-sheet spread or centerfold with photographs; and, finally, taking up one entire face of the fully unfolded sheet, a manifesto-like text combining red typewritten quotations and black writing in Hantaï’s hand. This was the first of two important brochures the artist published in the aftermath of his break with Breton, and like its successor, produced for the exhibition Peintures récentes. Souvenir de l’avenir (to be discussed in chapter 3), it performs two tasks simultaneously. First and most obviously, it

offers a highly active framing of the title canvas, at once prolonging and transforming the impetus put in motion by that crucial work. Precisely in so doing, however, it also reprises and reformulates the central premises of the preceding manifesto, “Démolition au platane.” Among the more consequential displacements, the results reveal the gravitational pull for Hantaï of a new, “Pollockian” ideal of alloverness that emerges here as a specifically pictorial analogue to the prior essay’s “metahuman condition.” Alloverness is the most striking quality of the first element in the folder, one of very few extant drawings by the artist (fig. 17). A dense field of scribbled marks appears cropped by all four edges, exC essIVe gestures 1

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as if continuing indefinitely in every direction. Under closer scrutiny, this tightly woven mesh turns out to contain actual writing: the word “sexe” appears throughout, and the repeated phrase “sexe est bien” (sex is all right) traverses the page in every sense; “sexe à la main” (literally, sex in [or, by] hand) and “Je me examine [sic]” (I examine myself) each occur at least once. (These sequences are all drawn from the work of Jean-Pierre Brisset, Sexe-Prime’s dedicatee.) Once the beholder has located those more or less buried vocables, the entire page assumes a new visual suggestiveness, as if burgeoning with significance. And yet, struggle as one might to disentangle the layers of real or imagined inscriptions, the individual threads and their promise of sense sink back, time and again, into the larger field, overcome by the sheer excess of marking. Echoing but also dramatically intensifying the visual transgression of figuration in the title painting, the page leaves us with the impression of a seething, almost swarming profusion of traits. Turning the page, one then encounters the second-largest element in the Sexe-Prime brochure: the double-page spread with black-and-white photographs (fig. 18). On the left side, three smaller pictures depict one painting apiece,41 whereas the fourth image, by far the largest, encompasses more than half the spread. Taken by photographer Étienne Sved, this imposing photograph shows Hantaï surrounded by recent canvases in his studio at the Cité des Fleurs. Sexe-Prime stretches out horizontally while other paintings are partially visible around its periphery. A block of red manuscript to the lower left of this photograph reads: “Sexe-prime. Hommage à Jean-Pierre Brisset. painting [sic] executed during an afternoon of erotic fascinations (the act of love fusing with the act of painting) by arbitrary orgiastic acts in a magical-erotic climate.”42 50

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Commentators have tended to focus on the largest image, the staging of which has been taken to reflect Hantaï’s awareness of Hans Namuth’s famous photographs of Pollock painting, pictures he might well have seen in the French journal Art d’aujourd’hui.43 While the comparison rings true, the horizontality of Sexe-Prime nonetheless raises special problems. As the painting’s long drips make clear, the canvas was produced in an upright position. What is more, it clearly is stretched already in the studio shot, as indeed it would have had to have been throughout the scraping process: witness the tautness of the surface, as well as the way the far corner of the work blocks our view of the lower half of Hantaï’s hand, presumably resting on the floor. This placement appears another way of taking up or recasting the notion of alloverness at work in the frontispiece—but here, in terms of an immersive context of making. To look closer: apart from a few thin slivers of floor, the only surfaces visible are painted canvases. Indeed it is not clear how the artist himself, shown crouching in the far corner, can occupy this space; clad in somber clothing, his lower body appears almost to merge with the dark lower register of the painting behind him.44 In this situation, individual artworks appear less important than a certain commitment to making as such, an activity that Sexe-Prime’s provocative caption asks us to conceive in terms of a trancelike state of “erotic fascinations” and “orgiastic” action. As with the frontispiece, the cropping of the photograph is integral to that effect. Although one can make out three distinct canvases around the edge of the studio, not one of these is shown in its entirety. The phenomenon is even more pronounced in the case of the title work, which extends to no less than three framing edges: the elevated point of view plunges the eye directly into the painting’s swirling field of gestures. The dominant effect is

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FIg. 18 simon Hantaï, dépliant for the exhibition Sexe-Prime, May–

June 1956, galerie kléber, Paris, detail of the central double-page spread.

of a tremendous forward rush, as if the scraped whorls were on the verge of overflowing into the reader-beholder’s space. In this sense, the horizontality of Sexe-Prime, as mediated by the photograph, exacerbates the excessive, oceanic nature of that painting.45 Further underscoring the encompassing, “magical-erotic climate” of making is the near-comic contrast between the outsize studio photograph and the comparatively minute views of individual works, suspended without touching in the stark white space to the left of the spread.

Lifting this centerfold, one arrives at the largest element in the brochure, the folio page that I shall call the manifesto (fig. 19). Red arrows, bars, and typewritten quotations in a variety of fonts are suspended throughout the field, providing the page quasi-cubist scaffolding. Significantly—as in “Démolition au platane” before it—a number of these citations are drawn from past and present surrealists and fellow travelers. In addition to the two relays to Duchamp, three of the most visible quotations—“Il est bien entendu qu’aucune vérité ne mérite de demeurer exemplaire” (It is well understood that no truth deserves to remain exemplary), “L’approbation du public est à fuir par-dessus tout” (Public approval is to exC essIVe gestures 1

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be avoided above all else), and the unattributed “Explosante-fixe” (Exploding-fixed)—are from Breton himself. Likewise, a quote from de Chirico (“Pour qu’une œuvre d’art soit vraiment immortelle . . .” [For a work of art to be truly immortal . . .]), already included in the essay with Schuster, appears again in the brochure. But the sheet also refers to a number of figures beyond that movement, from the Gestalt theorists Koffka and Köhler, discussed in “Démolition au platane,” to some of the group’s more prominent critics and dissidents, Mathieu included. The effect is of the manifold propagation of surrealism beyond its official pantheon—and thus of a set of relations conceived more in terms of transformation and displacement than simple rupture. Altogether, the quotes engage in a dramatic push-pull with an allover field of black writing in Hantaï’s hand. The collage armature admits different yet importantly related readings. Seen against the backdrop of Breton’s writing on Duchamp, the grid-like array conjures the surrealist leader’s earlier condemnation of cubist pretensions to “construct,” suggesting that the idiom’s signature compositional strategies might equally enable a more complex logic of polyvalent proliferation. At the same time, the striking juxtaposition of rectilinear quotes and writerly gesture can appear to register the birth of a new space—the Pollockian allover—from within the fundamentally cubist structure of avant-garde painting to date, surrealist and lyrical abstractionist painting included. One feels this particularly in two areas where Hantaï’s writing passes over zones of gridded collage elements. In one instance, in the upper left, the painter has taken special care to fit the words “à l’antipode de l’extrême sérieux” (the opposite of extreme seriousness) over the irregularly cropped graph; in the other example, just above center, two 52

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words—“l’inconnu” (the unknown) and “l’informe” (the formless) overlay another grid. This superimposition of elements emphasizes the absurdity, obscenity, and gratuitousness of gesture over and against the Bretonian association of cubist structure and scientism. As for the black writing, it works on multiple levels too. Thematically, it insists upon the destabilizing potential of eroticism. Hantaï again describes the act of painting as “orgiastic,” a manifestation of “delirious desire close / to a burst of laughter.”46 Sexuality itself appears inherently excessive: “a vital force, gratuitous / and without limit” by means of which one might “exit ordinary experience.”47 Such egress is an affair of intense states and dizzying swings: “Extreme tension / without hesitation / passage toward ecstasy; To pass from anguish to ecstasy / losing the human measure; Painful fascination / . . . Imagino-erotic state.”48 Throughout, Hantaï’s prose persistently links sexuality, excess, and irrationality. Where “the canvas reacts / sexually to sexual gestures of the hand,” the execution of the painting can only be, in his words, an “Operation consummated in absurdity.”49 Characteristically for Sexe-Prime, the majority of verbs are unconjugated, the states described as if apart from any experiencing subjectivity, the language rich in gerunds, infinitives, and substantives. One might also note the predominance of the passive voice, operations being “consummated” without consummating subjects. At work here is a grammatical effacement of personhood analogous in its operations to the frontispiece’s near obliteration through excess of individual words and phrases within the immersive logic of its tangled traits. In

FIg. 19 simon Hantaï, dépliant for the exhibition Sexe-Prime, May– June 1956, galerie kléber, Paris, detail of the manifesto.

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keeping with the prior emphases in “Démolition au platane,” the very movement of the language counters Mathieu’s stress on self-expression, implicitly associating eroticism with dispossession and dispropriation. Just as importantly, however, the black writing constitutes a visual phenomenon in its own right. One might think initially of Duchamp’s similarly handwritten notes regarding the Large Glass, facsimiles of which had been included in the “Green Box,” and that precedent doubtless retained its exemplary force.50 Yet as suggested above, this writing, far more than Duchamp’s earlier script, works in the register of excessive visual gesture. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the upper left corner, where Hantaï’s screed commences with several lines of incantatory italic print: “Exaltation de l’action spontanée / Tentative absurde pour transgresser les limites / L’acte de peindre passionnément et / totalement vécue [sic]. Visée plus qu’humaine / Passage à fond, sans désir du résultat / Concentration de force par noces / rituellement consommée [sic] . . .” (Exaltation of spontaneous action / Absurd tentative to transgress limits / The act of painting passionately and totally lived. / More-than-human aim / Passage to the depths, without desire for results / Concentration of force by festivities / ritually consummated . . .).51 Initially at least, the content of these fragmentary phrases—with their emphasis on spontaneity, transgression, and passion (an effect to which even Hantaï’s errors might be said to contribute)—seems curiously at odds with the considered filigree of their form. By contrast, the next few lines evince increasingly violent cursive script: “Opération consommée dans l’absurde / L’accent mis sur le pouvoir de dépassement . . .” (Operation consummated in absurdity / Accent placed on the power of overcoming . . .). This development changes the way one reads the 54

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opening words. Where the labored penmanship might now be taken to dramatize the “concentration of force” building up to the act, the emergence of this new hand figures dépassement on the level of the script itself, its angular, distended characters implying acceleration and the loosening of manual constraint. (Thinking back to “Démolition au platane,” one might also take it to materialize the jaillissement or “sparking” of new thought occasioned by precisely this gathering of distinct realities—that is, the heterogeneous red quotes.) Also at this point, the flow of Hantaï’s text becomes difficult to follow: columns divide, and new tributaries veer off in all directions while a panoply of spontaneity effects—notably Pollockian ink spatters, energetic dashes, and strikes—punctuate and further enliven the whole. One could almost forget that the text itself is clearly premeditated. To arrive at the last element of the brochure, one must refold the manifesto and, in so doing, pass once more through the photographic spread—a redoubling that emphasizes anew the primacy of making over theoretical projection.52 The central tract does not simply follow but unfolds from—and folds back into—the act of painting. Looked at anew, the second-largest layout appears similarly to emphasize the mutual slippage between writing and painting established by the overall sequencing. Note in particular the placement of the bright red legend: just a few millimeters separate the end of the first line of scrawled text from the photographic representation of the painting to which it refers. But the transaction is not seamless. Over and above the chromatic disjunction, the flow is also interrupted from within the picture by the dark triangle cutting across the lower left corner, its summit falling just slightly lower than the apex of the t to the immediate left. This somewhat blurred shape—perhaps the

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partial silhouette of another canvas viewed from behind—functions as a visual caesura, reintroducing a slight gap into the relation between painting and caption, gestural writing and writing-like gesture. The staging of Sexe-Prime does not collapse the differences between these registers; rather, it works off the tension between them. Finally, there is the brochure’s quarter-sized end page (see fig. 17). By far the most striking element is the horizontal pseudochronophotograph, which shows Hantaï’s hands clutching the metal alarm-clock ring used to scrape the paintings of the Sexe-Prime suite. Above and below this are two different “captions,” of which the first, in typewritten red majuscules, is an unattributed quotation from Breton’s early friend, Jacques Vaché: “vous savez l’horrible vie du réveille matin . . .” (You know the horrible life of an alarm clock . . .).53 The second legend, in black, is in Hantaï’s handwriting: “Interrogation d’un réveille-matin hors d’usage” (Interrogation of an out-of-use alarm clock). Affixed to the space below is a smaller rectangular flap containing basic information about the show, including times, dates, and location. Of all the elements in the Sexe-Prime brochure, the chronophotograph registers as most directly distilling and interpreting the title canvas. Like that work, this element is much longer than it is tall, and also like Sexe-Prime, it reveals a writing-like, left-to-right directionality, an aspect that Hantaï’s manuscript, erratically sloping caption helps to underscore. Nor does the resemblance stop there: notice the formal rhyme between the artist’s downward-pointing hands and the similarly oriented, precipitously thrusting traits of the painting’s lower reaches. Yet precisely insofar as the syncopated illumination of the photograph exaggerates the linear, spaced-out mode of the painting, this closing layout can appear opposed to the more

allover tendencies that have seemed to dominate the brochure thus far. In fact, it shows Hantaï taking up related ideas with respect to an increasingly central issue: the uneasy entanglement of the painterly and the temporal. Numerous aspects of the end page emphasize the fact of time. An alarm clock is an instrument for keeping time; a “chrono-photograph,” a means of tracking it. (The real-life recording devices at Mathieu’s events are not far off.) But just as surely, the page also registers a certain inability to master time. The chronophotograph is defined by intermittency, the blurring of Hantaï’s hands a sign of imperfect capture; the alarm clock is disassembled and “out of use.”54 Even the informational flap, glued on after the printing of the brochure, suggests early uncertainty about when the show might take place. All of these features index another kind of time: not the minutes and hours that tick by on the working clock, but the time that might be imagined to escape that measure—the expenditure proper to the exceptional, altered, and excessive states to which Sexe-Prime returns again and again. That these two times depend mutually upon one another—that they cannot, strictly speaking, be separated—was a problem with which Hantaï struggled throughout the later 1950s, and one to which I shall return. My aim so far has been to characterize Sexe-Prime from the inside, articulating what I take to have been Hantaï’s driving preoccupations at the moment of this pivotal show. Now, in closing this chapter, I want to set this relatively hermetic world within a larger intellectual context. Fundamentally at stake here are Hantaï’s middecade dealings with one more, in many ways determining, figure: surrealism’s self-professed “old enemy from within,” French writer Georges Bataille.55 exC essIVe gestures 1

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The Sexe-Prime manifesto contains little by way of overt reference to Bataille—just one quote, in the upper right: “L’essentiel est l’aberration. Le comique le plus pure [sic] . . .” (The aberration is the main thing. The purest comedy . . .). But in another sense, Bataille is everywhere: Hantaï’s text is suffused with his language, and its dominant themes—transgression, excess, eroticism—recur throughout the writer’s literary practice and theory. These are the same terms that underwrite Hantaï’s dealings with Mathieu and Duchamp, but what sets Bataille apart is his ability to do, in particularly consequential ways, what each of those figures does partially. In his capacity to gather up these different strands, the writer has perhaps no equal in importance to Sexe-Prime except for Pollock himself, and it is Bataille who most deeply, if least obviously, conditions Hantaï’s heavily eroticized reading of the American painter’s work. The mid-1950s were marked by the appearance—or in one case, reappearance—of two major works by Bataille in which eroticism plays a central role. The first of these was Madame Edwarda, a major exemplar of Bataille’s literary practice. Initially published in 1941 and 1945 under the pseudonym Pierre Angélique in clandestine runs of fifty editions apiece, this text became available in bookstores in 1956—at which point it was also given an important theoretical preface, the only part of the book actually signed by the author. The following year, 1957, saw the publication of L’érotisme, a collection of texts written since World War II. Although published the year after Sexe-Prime, this volume provides a systematic exposition of problems that had occupied Bataille in his writings since the later 1920s. And of course Hantaï could have had access to earlier work by Bataille on the subject, from the early pornographic “novella” Story of the Eye (1928) to the passages on eroticism 56

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threading throughout the wartime Atheological Summa. For Bataille, eroticism is that which, in “human consciousness . . . calls his being in question.”56 Like the Hegelian negative, it appears first and foremost as a means of setting man outside himself: “The whole business of eroticism is to destroy the self-contained character of the participators as they are in their normal lives.”57 But the event that interests Bataille and that he calls “inner experience” is precisely not the sublation of an object by a subject that he sees as driving the Hegelian dialectic. Rather, he pursues the possibility of an ecstatic loss of self; or as he will also say, “exit from self” (sortie de soi)—a thought Hantaï appropriates in the Sexe-Prime manifesto. Communication, in this context, is to be understood not as the passing of a message from one subject to another but as the opening of the self to an unassimilable exteriority. Bataille often describes this opening as a kind of déchirement (tearing apart), but he also, at times, imagines it as a fusion of subject and object, “being as subject nonknowledge, as object the unknown.”58 A second major difference from Hegelian dialectic: because this communication admits no dialectical resolution—inner experience, Bataille is clear, “reveals nothing”59—it can never be “accomplished” once and for all. Rather, it can only be repeated: “I can only, I suppose, reach the extreme limit in repetition, for this reason, that I am never sure of having attained it, that I will never be sure. And even supposing the extreme limit, it would still not be the extreme limit, if I ‘fell asleep.’”60 (Already multivalent, Sexe-Prime’s réveille-matin takes on darkly humorous added significance against the backdrop of these and similar statements.) Many of Bataille’s terms have clear figurative purchase for the Sexe-Prime paintings: such

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is the case of déchirement in particular, relative to raclage’s apparent tearing or laceration of the pictorial surface. That Hantaï’s suggestively epidermal fields so often beg associations with torn, flayed, or otherwise violated flesh only heightens the sense of meaningful proximity between the painter’s attempts to transgress figuration and Bataille’s privileged themes and motifs. But those same painterly effects—in their own way, a kind of naturalism— could not have satisfied for long the author of “Démolition au platane,” and as we shall see, Hantaï banishes them from his next major body of work. More enduringly important are some key overlaps between Bataille’s emphasis on repetition and what I have presented as Hantaï’s own commitment to that notion in his studio practice. To paraphrase Bataille, one can never be sure, one never will be sure, of having let sexe primer. Instead, as Hantaï’s punning title suggests (and Mathieu’s discourse confirms), that pursuit is always haunted by the specter of its own betrayal, in and as “the pathetic ambition to express oneself.” For the painter as for the writer, repetition is structural to the work itself: less a means of mastering a situation than a way of remaining exposed to it, of staying open to the unknown. Read in this connection, the brochure’s closing chronophotograph can appear to refigure a crucial line of thought in “Démolition au platane,” substituting a more complicated temporal model for the earlier vision of the automatic transmission—one in which plugging in alternates interminably with disconnection or breaking off. Throughout the paintings in question, those interruptions or suspensions follow inescapably from the constraints of the scraping method, as from the limits of Hantaï’s own body; they are intrinsic to the shift from an automatism conceived as psychic to a technique bound in the finitude and contingency of materials and making.

Most suggestively, however, Bataille’s meditations on inner experience shed new light on perhaps the central feature of the Sexe-Prime suite and its accompanying dépliant: the persistent mutual entanglement of painting and writing. Traversing the whole of Bataille’s unclassifiable oeuvre is the idea that inner experience is in some strong sense inseparable from the writing of that experience—or rather, that ecstasy is an experience of writing, an effect of being inhabited by discourse and thereby exposed to otherness: The third, the companion, the reader who acts upon me is discourse. Or yet still: the reader is discourse—it is he who speaks in me, who maintains in me the discourse intended for him. And no doubt, discourse is project, but even more than this it is that other, the reader, who loves me and who already forgets me (kills me), without whose present insistence I could do nothing, would have no inner experience. Not that in moments of violence—of misfortune—I don’t forget him, as he himself forgets me—but I tolerate in me the action of project in that it is a link with this obscure other sharing my anguish, my torment, desiring my torment as much as I desire his.61 Bataille’s formulations realize something of the impersonal force of automatism, cast by Hantaï and Schuster as an attempt to “[exalt] as much as possible that obscure part that, in the human, begins to be human no more”—just as his sense of being acted upon by discourse recalls that essay’s reference to automatism as a “luminous parasite,” whispering messages to the poet.62 What the author of Inner Experience nonetheless makes explicit, in a way that Hantaï and Schuster’s earlier formulations did not quite do, is the enmeshment of his pursuit exC essIVe gestures 1

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in the fact of other minds: its exposure to, and indeed structural dependence upon, a reader who might also be said to inhabit it from the first. That reader desires his torment, and Bataille his, but this is not a struggle he believes can—or should—be resolved once and for all; rather, it is the condition of possibility for his writing at all. Seen in this light, the interest of the Sexe-Prime dépliant goes well beyond its stated themes, however important the latter. Indeed, the document’s very creation might itself appear to be a desperate attempt to overcome limits. Effectively operating as a supplication—indeed, a literal invitation—to the inconnu of the third person, that “obscure reader” without whom the experience would remain closed in upon itself (and thus no experience at all, in the sense Bataille intends), the brochure takes up and transforms an appeal at least implicit in the paintings and their increasing writing-likeness. In so doing, it underscores the inherent openness of those canvases to further acts of repetition and displacement. Yet Bataille constitutes an ambiguous resource for Hantaï in this moment. For even as Sexe-Prime shows the painter moving toward a more complicated thought of exposure than has been expressly available to him thus far—one bound in the exigencies of discourse and the fact of reading—the artist’s rhetoric remains largely on the side of what Bataille called “sacred eroticism,” one major pole of ecstasy associated with scenes of orgiastic delirium: In the orgy the celebration progresses with the overwhelming force that usually brushes all bonds aside . . . The total personality is involved, reeling blindly towards annihilation. . . . All this occurs within the framework of man’s secondary assent in the measureless proliferation of 58

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life. The refusal implied by taboos confines the individual within a miserly isolation compared with the vast disorder of creatures lost in each other, whose very violence lays them open to the violence of death. From another standpoint the suspension of taboos sets free the exuberant surge of life and favours the unbounded orgiastic fusion of those individuals. This fusion could in no way be limited to that attendant on the plethora of the genital organs. It is a religious effusion first and foremost; it is essentially the disorder of lost beings who oppose no further resistance to the frantic proliferation of life.63 This is, to some extent, the language of Sexe-Prime, and Bataille’s “religious effusion” surfaces throughout the manifesto, as when Hantaï appeals to “Excess destroyer of Nothingness” or writes that the orgy “puts vital and sacred energy in motion.”64 Read in this context, Bataille’s descriptions gesture toward the darker side of alloverness. For as the writer also makes clear, the orgy is the place where finite being gives way to unfettered blending. This mental leap—from communication to fusion—represents one of the most dramatic ways in which what appeared initially as a thought of exposure might betray itself, and it is one of the major temptations Hantaï found himself compelled to confront as he pursued his quest for impersonality. Initially at least, he attempted to move forward in part by turning against Bataille, as demonstrated by a seemingly antithetical but in some ways structurally analogous profession of religious zeal. That development is at the center of chapter 3.

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excessive gestures 2

CHAPTER 3

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During the month of March 1958, Hantaï’s second solo exhibition at the Galerie Kléber took place under the title Peintures récentes. Souvenir de l’avenir. The structure of the event largely repeated that of Sexe-Prime two years earlier: like that show, Souvenir foregrounded a major painting (fig. 20), and also like the prior presentation, it was accompanied by an important invitational brochure in which the title work featured prominently. In addition, the two exhibitions appear to have been comparable in size, with Souvenir comprising nineteen new paintings in all— though again, as with Sexe-Prime, it has proved impossible to identify all but a few of the canvases on view. Technically, these, too, were peintures raclées, or scraped paintings, produced for the most part over a one-year period beginning in the late winter or early spring of 1957. Critics paid more attention to Hantaï’s sophomore showing with Fournier than they had to his inaugural effort, though they had little to say about the featured works. Instead, commentary focused almost exclusively on the accompanying dépliant—or rather, one major part of it: an explosive text entitled “Notes confusionelles [sic] accélérantes et autres pour une avant-garde ‘réactionnaire’ non réductible” (Notes, deliberately confounding, accelerating, and the like for a ‘reactionary,’ nonreducible avant-garde) (fig. 21). Hantaï’s third and final manifesto-like statement, this text occupies a format roughly the same size as the central element in the Sexe-Prime brochure, but the two documents differ considerably in other respects. Formally, a major shift is apparent both in the painter’s use of small, red capital letters and in the printing of the spread in five justified columns: both features depart sharply from the gestural excesses of Sexe-Prime. The visual intransigence of the later layout corresponds to a certain hardening of tone within the text itself, which includes Hantaï’s sharpest attacks to date on Breton and the

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FIg. 20 simon Hantaï, Souvenir de l’avenir, 1957. oil on canvas.

Musée national d’art moderne—Centre georges Pompidou, Paris. Purchase, 1994.

surrealist group. Turning away from that movement’s “literary devilries” and roundly blasting its Marxist sentiments, the “Notes confusionelles” declare art “religious in essence” and identify the central problem of painting as the Incarnation, the “central knot of the revelation of Christ.”1 Contemporary critics were appalled by this seeming ideological swerve, and the surrealists, in particular, did not hesitate to condemn text and author alike in the strongest possible terms. 62

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Subsequent admirers of Hantaï’s work have largely tended to take the opposite tack, passing over the “Notes confusionelles” quickly or in silence.2 When addressed at all, the appearance of the text has generally been ascribed to a supposed spiritual reawakening or crisis at this point in the painter’s life. Such, for example, is the evaluation of the Swedish art historian Hans-Gunnar Sjölin, the author of an important article on Hantaï’s work in the years 1953–59. Commenting on Souvenir de l’avenir, Sjölin describes the entire project as “all permeated and united by one single object: to herald the fact that Hantaï has re-embraced the Catholicism of his early years and also to declare

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FIg. 21 simon Hantaï, dépliant for the exhibition Peintures récentes. Souvenir de l’avenir, March 3–30, 1958, galerie kléber, Paris, detail of the “notes confusionelles accélérantes et autres pour une avant-garde ‘réactionnaire’ non-réductible.”

his will to dedicate his work solely to religious purposes.”3 This view is not obviously false. The last years of the 1950s certainly appear to have been a period of extreme difficulty in Hantaï’s life and art—a time when, by the painter’s own recollection, he

felt that he might cease to work. And in conversation as in his correspondence, the artist returned frequently to the spiritual and intellectual climate of his upbringing in Bia (now Biatorbágy), the Hungarian village of his birth and the home of Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish populations.4 His own family belonged to a small but vibrant enclave of descendants of mostly seventeenth-century immigrants of German or, more precisely, Swabian Catholic heritage that had preserved a strong religious and linguistic identity. In an environment exC essIVe gestures 2

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that provided very little exposure to painting, Hantaï’s first culture was that of the Church, with its music and liturgy.5 Yet Hantaï’s background by no means explains the precise forms and modalities such involvement assumes in the painter’s work nor its emergence at this particular juncture in his art—nor its consequence for the broader history of postwar art. On the contrary, strictly biographical explanations have the effect of personalizing Hantaï’s appeals to religious sources, rendering their interest individual and eccentric. Another reading is nonetheless possible. We have seen the importance of Mathieu for Hantaï’s early reception of Pollock. The French painter’s presence made itself felt in many different ways, including articles, conferences, exhibitions, films, and—beginning in May 1956—increasingly spectacular painting performances. Up until the moment of Sexe-Prime, however, the two men seem to have had little, if any, personal contact—perhaps, at most, a few chance encounters in various exhibitions, whether Mathieu’s own or those of the Frenchman’s then-close friend, poet-painter Henri Michaux.6 But Hantaï and Mathieu moved closer together in the months immediately following Sexe-Prime,7 and they appear to have spent much of the winter of 1956–57 on a collaborative project. Entitled Les cérémonies commémoratives de la deuxième condamnation de Siger de Brabant (Ceremonies commemorating the second condemnation of Siger of Brabant) and focused nominally on an obscure thirteenth-century theologian condemned for heresy by the Inquisition, this enterprise took the form of a sprawling series of “cultural manifestations” centered on the Galerie Kléber during the three-week period March 7–27, 1957. For many years neglected in the scholarly literature, the 64

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project nonetheless was a chief catalyst for Souvenir and the “Notes confusionelles.”8 To be clear: the Cérémonies commémoratives were very much Mathieu’s project. According to the artist’s recollection and as confirmed by Hantaï, Mathieu was already preparing the event when the Hungarian contacted him, declared his intention to “take leave of Breton,” and asked if they might do something together.9 In addition, Mathieu handled all publicity for the event and financed it in its entirety. Hantaï’s role appears to have consisted largely of researching sundry events for the final program, though his relationship with Fournier doubtless facilitated the choice of venue. Initiated by Mathieu, the project subsequently became a central point of reference both for his personal narrative and for his writing about art and culture generally. Indeed, there is today very little information about this undertaking that did not come from Mathieu himself or that does not bear the mark of his formidable flair for publicity. By contrast, Hantaï until late in life had little to say about the Cérémonies commémoratives, though he never disavowed his role in them: the event was routinely included in chronologies of the painter’s life while the “Notes confusionelles” appeared in his bibliographies. In 2004, however, the artist returned to this material, in the context of a special dossier on his work assembled by the Belgian review La part de l’œil. Composed largely of a reprint of the “Notes confusionelles,” this portfolio also includes a brief introduction by philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, in which he quotes Hantaï extensively about the Cérémonies commémoratives and their aftermath. Drawn from Nancy’s personal correspondence with the painter, these citations illuminate Hantaï’s later thinking about this period of his work.10 The artist’s remarks are of two main types. First and foremost, he tends to stress his continuing

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frustration with the surrealist group and, accordingly, the polemical force of participating in manifestations it was sure to condemn. These comments underline the well-known hostility of Breton’s group to Christianity, effectively framing the Cérémonies commémoratives as the deliberate breaking of a prohibition—the “brutal, almost pornographic introduction, at that time and before those milieus, despite the taboo, because of the taboo, of the question—to speak quickly—of religion.”11 Elsewhere, the painter adds: “I needed that impossible situation, the flight ahead, indefensible, compromising, irreparable; the obscene excess, the red cloth shaken before the eyes of the surrealists and the others after the boredom and the naïve effort to change the life of the group.”12 Other remarks nonetheless move in a slightly different direction to suggest the collaboration with Mathieu was also driven, at least in part, by a more personal—if less readily identifiable—investment in the material in question. This additional dimension comes across in a 2001 letter to French curator Daniel Abadie, also quoted by Nancy. There the artist writes: “For me, they [these manifestations] were just the visible tip of much larger, more subterranean and obscure preoccupations.”13 Or again: “For me: desire to be compromised, marginalized in an extreme manner. Great leap behind and outside. . . . Needed to work through (externally) that excess in myself.”14 It must be said that Hantaï is more reticent about this second aspect— about, that is, the precise nature of the excess that needed to be processed. Insofar as the Cérémonies commémoratives followed closely on the heels of Sexe-Prime, however, this comment can appear to be an allusion to the latent religiosity of the 1956 suite, as apparent in the painter’s preferred metaphors of ritual activity, transgression, and orgiastic proliferation. On this reading, the “religious turn”

would be located within Sexe-Prime rather than after it. Let us hold off momentarily on the “larger, more subterranean and obscure preoccupations,” which continue well into Souvenir and indeed beyond. Contemporary reaction to the Cérémonies commémoratives suggests that Hantaï decisively attained his first objective: definitive rupture with Breton and his followers. Yet even as the activities with Mathieu targeted surrealist sensibilities, they remained importantly indebted to them. To some extent, as with Sexe-Prime before it, Hantaï’s attempted schism amounts less to a simple break than to a sustained détournement of the movement’s strategies. I have suggested that Mathieu’s lyrical abstraction is best understood as a kind of disavowed surrealism, at once unthinkable without that precedent and unwilling or unable to acknowledge it. Already discernible in the deep indebtedness of his aesthetic of speed to earlier models of psychic automatism, that partial, problematic continuity also shows through his ruminations on the modern fading of “the sacred.” The painter returned repeatedly to this theme in his many interviews and conferences, as in the 1958 discussion with Alain Bosquet: “What I regret in our present civilization is that we have lost almost all relation to the notions of the sacred and of play. . . . The act of painting inevitably has a very intimate relation to the sacred, because it tries to go beyond the everyday act. The activity of the painter is a sacred activity.”15 It was the desire to retrieve this dimension, Mathieu claimed, that motivated his public performances, beginning with his celebrated showing of May 28, 1956, at the Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt. There, with the aid of rolling stepladders and brushes measuring up to a yard or more, he exC essIVe gestures 2

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painted a 13'4" × 40' canvas in less than half an hour. The artist tells Bosquet, “There is a different notion of the sacred when I paint in public . . . a notion of ritual that is nearly magic, that takes place at the same time.”16 (This language might now appear as a source for Hantaï’s own appeals to a “magical-erotic climate” in the Sexe-Prime dépliant.) Or again: “Few have understood that, for me, painting produced publicly represents true communion with my fellow man.”17 But Mathieu’s preoccupation with the sacred was by no means medium-specific; he also cited that orientation as a driving factor for extrapainterly performances such as his 1956 film with Robert Descharnes, Le Couronnement de Charlemagne (The coronation of Charlemagne), in which he interpreted the title emperor. And the same concern for ritual and play is evident as well in Mathieu’s hyperbolic descriptions of the Cérémonies commémoratives, an event that fits comfortably within his overall drift from quasi-magical painterly rites to some more general notion of the ceremonial.18 On the surface, these appeals to the sacred appear quite foreign to the secular cast of the surrealist movement. Breton and his friends professed themselves strict atheists. What they nonetheless shared with Mathieu—or passed down to Mathieu—was a marked repugnance for the “absolute rationalism” constraining present-day experience; they, too, sought to transcend this rationalism through extraordinary means.19 This aspiration emerges most clearly in the discourse around automatism, which is rife from the first with religious tropes. Automatism is described as a “mode of revelation” or “spiritual exercise”; absorption in the same could be a kind of “beatitude,” in the words of Francis Gérard, or “state of grace,” in those of Breton.20 The list can be extended to include Louis Aragon’s discussion of “miracles” 66

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in his landmark 1930 essay on collage, “La Peinture au défi” (Challenge to painting), in which that idea is linked to the major surrealist category of the “marvelous” and identified with an exceptional break from or disruption of the ordinary laws of causality.21 The essential surrealist qualification, of course, was that the mode of revelation they sought was not divine but of man by and for himself. These elements are present from the first “Manifesto,” but they take a highly specific twist after World War II, when the movement found itself confronting a newly prominent French Communist Party (PCF). During the summer of 1947, following Breton’s return to Paris after his New York exile, the group tried to reestablish itself on the cultural scene while also marking a distance from the contemporary state of organized politics. In June, the surrealists published a pamphlet, “Rupture inaugurale” (Inaugural break), declaring their “preliminary attitude with respect to all partisan politics” and announcing, in particular, their refusal to follow the PCF “down the road of class collaboration on which it has embarked”— that is, toward capitulation to bourgeois interests.22 One month later, the first surrealist exhibition in Paris since Breton’s return opened at the Galerie Maeght. Entitled Le Surréalisme en 1947 (Surrealism in 1947), the show attempted to chart a new path apart from what the group saw as the communists’ fatally narrow emphasis on strictly economic liberation, one oriented, over and beyond that objective, toward the construction of new myths.23 This exhibition was among the most-discussed events at the time of Mathieu’s arrival in Paris, and it provided an important springboard for the Cérémonies commémoratives ten years later. In his preface to the lavish accompanying catalogue, Breton states his desire to establish an “‘initiatory’ framework,” effectively placing “the

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aspirant to all knowledge—in this case, the visitor—in front of a cycle of ordeals.”24 In so doing, the demonstration would lead that guest to contemplate various (and variously unsettling) “manners of individual and collective behavior” across time.25 Structured largely as a series of décors, Le Surréalisme en 1947 commenced with a “Superstitions Room” overseen by architect Frederick Kiesler. Egg-shaped and draped in green cloth, this room notably included Kiesler’s own Totem for All Religions, a wood-and-rope construction likened by surrealism scholar Alyce Mahon to a crucifix.26 The next area included a curtain of colored rain intended to spiritually cleanse visitors and so prepare them for the main event, a third and final room. This space was divided into alcoves, each devoted—according to Breton’s conception—to “a being, a category of beings, or an object susceptible of being endowed with mythical life, and to which an ‘altar’ was raised, on the model of pagan worship practices (Indian or Voodoo, for example).”27 Current members of the group oversaw the construction. In addition to Breton himself, altar raisers included the painters Victor Brauner, Wilfredo Lam, and Roberto Matta, each of whom addressed one of twelve possible myths drawn, for the most part, from the work of diverse authors long favored by the surrealist group (Alfred Jarry, Marcelle Ferry, Lautréamont, Rimbaud, and so on). Breton offered effusive praise to the “rousing nature” of the works on view, dwelling in particular on the “extreme ease, almost pre-ecstatic, with which they can at times fill us.”28 And he went on to insist that the point of the show was less to firmly entrench these specific fables than to “give an utterly external glimpse into what such a myth could be—in the manner of a spiritual ‘display.’”29 The Cérémonies commémoratives take off from Le Surréalisme en 1947 in important respects, as will

emerge below, yet they strikingly reject the most prominent aspect of that exhibition: the surrealists’ religious syncretism. Instead, Mathieu’s project is best understood as an attempt to emphasize the (to his mind) lost or forgotten irrationality in Western Christianity—perhaps the only religion Breton could not stomach and the one to which he arguably was closest. At the center of this expansive endeavor was Siger de Brabant, born in present-day Belgium but active at the University of Paris from around 1260. He was twice condemned as a follower of Averroes: once in 1270, after which he nonetheless continued to teach, and again, decisively, in 1277.30 A near precursor to Thomas Aquinas, Siger is remembered primarily as an advocate of Aristotelian philosophy and the doctrine of the “double truth” of reason and faith. His condemnation by the archbishop of Paris, Étienne Tempier, marks perhaps the final major attempt on the part of the Church to halt the revival of classical thought—or as Mathieu would have it, the last great stand of the Augustinian emphasis on faith alone against the beginnings of modern rationalism.31 In 1957, to celebrate Siger’s condemnation was necessarily to deplore the present age, and indeed, this relatively obscure historical episode appears to have been just one privileged point of departure for a much broader narrative of the relentless progress of intellectualism. These encyclopedic pretensions are apparent from the final program, which promises a dizzying array of activities and conferences under the grandiose sign of an “attempt at a theological, cosmogenic, aesthetic, epistemoligical, and eschatological maieutic” in four cycles: Sacerdotal (313–1277), Royal (1277–1713), Bourgeois (1713–1832), and Popular (1832–1944).32 Events listed include the “Launching of a contest in the Universities of Paris, Lille, Louvain, Sarrebruck, exC essIVe gestures 2

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FIg. 22 Invitation to Les cérémonies commémoratives de la deuxième condamnation de Siger de Brabant: Cycle Royale, March 7–27, 1957, galerie kléber, Paris.

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and Strasbourg” (Sacerdotal Cycle, subcategory “Homage to Denys The Areopagite / Homage to Gregory IX”);33 a “Japanese Day” complete with private tea ceremony and flower arranging (Royal Cycle);34 the “inauguration” of an “Esotericism Room” (Bourgeois Cycle);35 and, as part of an “Exhibition of Documents Relating to Techniques of Degradation,” a “Procession of Enterprises” (Popular Cycle).36 As these representative citations make clear, Mathieu reserved a certain space for the celebration of non-Western developments he saw as akin in spirit to the authentic (anticlassical) faith of pre-Thomist Catholicism, Zen philosophy foremost among them. In their final stages, the Cérémonies commémoratives also celebrated Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, “1912: Marcel Duchamp in New York,” and “The Dada movement, first categorical break with Classical thought” (a characterization dear to Tapié in his writings on the informel).37 Billed by Mathieu as both “the largest cultural exhibition of the century” and “the most reactionary in 700 years,” the project spanned some sixteen-hundred years’ worth of history,38 from the Edict of Milan to the inaugural decade of lyrical abstraction (among the last of the “Main Commemorated Moments,” one finds “1942: Mark Tobey: ‘White Writings’” [in English in the original]).39 Reinforcing the ceremonial aura, Mathieu issued formal invitations for each of the four major cycles, all of them marked “strictly personal” (fig. 22). It is unclear if any of these activities actually took place; none of the event’s contemporary critics detail affairs within the Galerie Kléber, and Hantaï described the preponderance of the program as a textbook blague on Mathieu’s part.40 What is clear, however, is that no paintings by either man were shown. Instead, as in Le Surréalisme en 1947, elaborate environments and the

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display of diverse props constituted the primary focus, effectively distinguishing the different eras under consideration. Photographs published in various sources show placards combining text and images propped against walls and plaster busts strung up by their necks. Fournier later recalled “a décor, with texts on the walls, . . . refrigerators, safes, a room covered with gold-leaf and other rooms with illuminated manuscripts, miniatures, King René.”41 Significantly, the inaugural installation turned upon a feature borrowed from the surrealist context: an altar in an alcove. Unlike the multiple, pagan pedestals of the 1947 display, however, the altar in the Cérémonies commémoratives was at once singular and recognizably Christian. Also unlike its surrealist precedents, it was explicitly associated with a particular historical past and withdrawn from display after a certain point in time. Indeed, a contemporary photo-essay in the Basel-based review Panderma: Revue de la fin du monde (Panderma: Magazine of the end of the world) documents its supersession by increasingly up-to-date objects of veneration. During the Sacerdotal Cycle, the captions state, the altar provided the center of gravity, yet subsequent phases saw it replaced successively by a throne, “a safe in front of an enlarged Revolutionary banknote,” and, finally, a jukebox (figs. 23–25).42 Further driving home the point, the same feature notes the concomitant eclipse of a second object identified as a “three-and-one-half-meter Christ.”43 Prominently displayed—we are told—on walls covered with black velvet and fully exposed throughout the first three cycles, this effigy was draped by a nylon curtain for the entirety of the fourth.44 Breton’s group, meanwhile, appears uniquely on a list of “themes eventually treated” in that concluding phase (“Surrealism and the Triumph of Anti-Hierarchy”), its self-professed revolution

reduced to merely symptomatic interest within a sweeping survey of spiritual decline.45 The Cérémonies commémoratives, in other words, appear to be a double game, at once appropriating surrealist modes of display and turning them against the present-day group and its agenda. (That Thomas Aquinas also numbered among Breton’s recurrent bêtes noires only serves to underscore the uncomfortable proximity: as Mathieu’s program makes clear, the manifestations were timed to begin on March 7, “Anniversary of the Death of Saint Thomas Aquinas,” and the “Cycle Sacerdotal” lists sections devoted to “Thomas Aquinas and the Fate of Thomism” and “Condemnations of Specifically Thomist Theses.”46) Reaction was swift. According to Fournier, members of the movement tossed leaflets and heckled the proceedings at the gallery;47 Hantaï recalled a surrealist “march,” “protesting and spitting on a crucifix placed at the entrance to the rooms” (presumably, a reference to the representation of Christ described in Panderma).48 On March 25, 1957, the group responded formally with a collective tract entitled “Coup de semonce” (Warning shot). Signed by virtually all the current members at the time, including Hantaï’s former collaborator Jean Schuster, this text shows that the surrealists understood themselves to be directly targeted:49 “Even where the organizers have been clever enough to dedicate study cycles to Descartes and Voltaire, taken as the ‘bourgeois’ and rationalist prototypes of the French Revolution, of the Freemason politics and popular ‘degradation’ of the twentieth century, it is clear that the entire operation is mounted against Surrealism. One does not attack a certain restricted, outdated conception of intellectualism against which Surrealism has never ceased to fight, if not to strike all the better, through the calculated sowing of confusion, at the exC essIVe gestures 2

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FIgs. 23–25 unattributed photographs of Cérémonies commémoratives, published in Panderma: Revue de la fin du monde 2 (1958).

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atheist and revolutionary impulse that Surrealism is honored to call its own.”50 Nor did the surrealist authors hesitate to reclaim the initiative for the two artists’ altar: “To crown this series of impostures, the organizers have copied the Surrealist exhibition of 1947 while denaturing its project. We built purely mythical altars with neither cult nor dogma; with ill-intentioned ambiguity, they have built altars sometimes of celebration, sometimes of denigration: the Christian altar before which they kneeled has ceded the place to banking powers and to the technology they feign to mock. (But for us, they all bear witness to the same quality of servitude.)”51 There is no reason to believe Hantaï disagreed fundamentally with this assessment nor that the protests came as any surprise. On the contrary, his retrospective remarks to Nancy suggest that he sought precisely this reaction. But what was for him most deeply at stake? Was his driving motivation a simple desire to shock or provoke— to “take leave of Breton” definitively, no matter the pretext? Was it a craving for publicity on the part of a painter “in search of the most profitable self-inflation,” as the surrealists would have it?52 Or “just the visible tip of much larger, more subterranean and obscure preoccupations,” as the artist himself later suggested? These questions cannot be answered on the evidence of the Cérémonies commémoratives alone. Let us therefore turn to Hantaï’s “Notes confusionelles, accélérantes, et autres pour une avant-garde ‘réactionnare’ non réductible,” which do, I think, bring some answers into focus. The Cérémonies commémoratives marked the end of the painter’s dealings with Mathieu: after the closure of the exhibition on March 27, the two men never met again. But the “Notes confusionelles”

show clearly that Hantaï continued thinking about this material well after the manifestations had arrived at their term. Published almost exactly one year after the painters’ collaboration at the Galerie Kléber—Souvenir de l’avenir opened its doors at the same locale on March 3, 1958—this new polemic refers explicitly to that prior event. Yet it also moves aspects of their putative program onto distinctly different terrain. As with Hantaï’s larger negotiations with the aesthetic of speed, Mathieu serves essentially as a catalyst and conduit, exposing problems and formulating propositions from which the Hungarian draws at times significantly disparate consequences. Like Sexe-Prime before it but even more thoroughly, Hantaï’s third and final text of the 1950s reworks and recasts the core themes of “Démolition au platane.” In so doing, it actively militates against a linear reading—a point to which it will be necessary to return. Indeed, even on the level of the individual phrase or sentence, the painter’s willfully self-interrupting syntax compels the reader to double back on her tracks, returning to prior points and clauses in light of chronologically later ones. Rather than picking up Hantaï’s claims from the beginning, then, I want to jump in at what was for many contemporary readers the most blasphemous aspect of the “Notes confusionelles”: the author’s diatribe against Marxist thought, described as the superficial musings of a narrow mind. As will become clear, this vituperation is central to Hantaï’s argument with the “revolutionary” avant-garde to which he had so recently belonged. The artist’s quarrel with Marx had been brewing for some time. Already in the Sexe-Prime manifesto, amid the feverish appeals to “erotic fascinations” and “orgiastic acts,” Hantaï had fired a warning shot of his own, describing Soviet influence as a “cretinizing wind” and charging it with exC essIVe gestures 2

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the debilitation of the “greatest number.”53 The 1956 text does not develop the claim, though a pointed rhetorical question—“How much longer for socialist realism?”—suggests Hantaï was thinking at least in part about the Stalinist aesthetic still enforced in his native Hungary and other Sovietized lands.54 This doctrine could only appear to him a reactionary throwback to precisely the order of rationalized experience that Sexe-Prime explicitly aimed to transgress.55 But despite otherwise deep aesthetic and philosophical differences, Hantaï’s opposition would not have been out of place within the surrealist group. One need only consider the views expressed by Breton earlier in the decade when, in the context of a highly publicized quarrel with Louis Aragon, he famously declared socialist realism a “means of mental extermination.”56 The attacks on Marxism in the “Notes confusionelles” are of an altogether different order, so something had clearly changed for Hantaï in the interim. For the painter’s French critics, reading his manifesto largely through the lens of Mathieu’s well-known monarchist tendencies and in the immediate aftermath of the French bombing of Sakhiet,57 the primary context for this document was the war in Algeria.58 But the upheaval in North Africa is nowhere evoked in Hantaï’s text. On the contrary, there is reason to believe he was thinking about another event altogether, one of far more immediate import for a Hungarian-born former Marxist: the Budapest uprising of 1956. One of the most devastating episodes in modern Hungarian history began on October 23, 1956, as a student demonstration in Budapest’s Parliament Square.59 At issue were demands ranging from basic reforms (primarily of an agrarian and industrial order) to major changes, including prosecution of the country’s ultra-Stalinist former prime minister, Mátyás Rákosi; the replacement of 72

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the current Stalinist prime minister, Erno˝ Gero˝, by the comparatively reform-minded Imre Nagy; and the withdrawal of Soviet troops from the country. Following a series of violent clashes and the toppling of the statue of Stalin in Heroes’ Square by the protestors, some of these entreaties were met in the short-term—including, most notably, the installation of Nagy. But despite the new prime minister’s best attempts to restore order, in part through the imposition of martial law, the situation remained highly volatile, with Nagy conceding more and more gains to continued and increasingly heterogeneous agitation on the part of a vast array of new and emerging organizations: amnesty to all those involved in the violence, the dissolution of the secret police; the promised departure of Soviet troops, and the eventual formation of a multiparty government (on October 30) with unilateral withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact (on October 31). Upon these last announcements, Soviet leader Nikolai Kruschev set in motion arrangements to replace Nagy by János Kádár, then first secretary of the Hungarian Workers’ Party. On the evening of November 3, Nagy was arrested by Soviet military authorities, and Soviet tanks and troops were sent into the Hungarian capital. There ensued several days’ worth of intense street fighting that left some twenty-seven hundred Hungarians dead and precipitated the worst period of reprisals in that nation’s history, lasting well into 1963, when a general amnesty was declared at last.60 Hantaï’s text does not mention the Budapest uprising by name. Instead, the “Notes confusionelles” offer a withering but largely implicit rebuttal to the surrealists’ public stance on that event. In November 1956, shortly after the arrival of Soviet tanks in the Hungarian capital, Breton’s group published a pamphlet boldly emblazoned “Hongrie, Soleil levant” (Hungary, rising

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sun)—one of the rare occasions since “Rupture inaugurale” that the surrealists had declared themselves on a contemporary political event. That collectively authored document inscribes the revolt within a long line of uprisings stretching back to the French Revolution and all oriented, in the signatories’ estimation, toward an identical goal: “As for us, we proclaim that Thermidor, June 1848, May 1871, August 1946, January 1937 and March 1938 in Moscow, April 1939 in Spain, and November 1956 in Budapest, all feed into the same river of blood that, without any possible equivocation, divides the world into masters and slaves.”61 The central irony registered in the text, however, is that the masters now include those who proclaim most vehemently to be defending socialist and democratic values—that is, the Soviets.62 They are denounced as pitiless aggressors: “the fascists are those who fire on the people.”63 Nonetheless, the pamphlet cleanly separates the Soviet response from the fundamental tenets of Marxist thought and frames the uprising itself as a clear repetition—or attempted repetition—of earlier manifestations of revolutionary momentum: “The defeat of the Hungarian people is that of the international proletariat. Whatever the nationalist turn taken by the Polish resistance or the Hungarian revolution, it consists of a circumstantial aspect, determined above all by the colossal and maniacal pressure of the ultranationalist state that is Russia. The internationalist principle of the proletarian revolution is not in doubt.”64 Nor did the surrealists admit any uncertainty as to the eventual triumph of this principle: “The working class as a whole was bled dry in 1871 by the French supporters of Versailles. In Budapest, faced with the Versailles of Moscow, the youth—rebellious beyond all hope in the face of the Stalinist opposition—infused that class with new blood that cannot fail to prescribe

its proper course to the transformation of the world.”65 In its coupling of strong criticism for the official agents of communism to exuberant professions of faith in the Marxist foundation, the tenor of “Hongrie, Soleil levant” is in keeping with a position the surrealists had more or less maintained since the mid-1930s. The “Notes confusionelles” would have us see it as irremediably naïve: According to a simplistic thesis, drawn from an upside-down view of history, it is possible to see a real convergence among diverse manifestations of revolt and attribute a unilateral meaning to them. This thesis would have the innovators spontaneously rejoin the revolutionary movement of their time and become the fellow travelers of the revolution. Such a view is not simply illusory; it has ceased to have any bearing on what is actually going on. The confusion regarding artistic and political left and right—left as renewal, right as conservation—is a pure fantasy but not an innocent one.66 For Hantaï, the very lack of renewal was palpable in what his text goes on to decry as the surrealists’ continuing reliance on positions developed before World War II and sustained by nineteenth-century ways of thinking—or at the very least, through “the indefinite repetition of slogans from another century.”67 At this point, we would do well to recall the central charge in “Démolition au platane”: that Breton’s group remained mired in a past that prevented it from coming to terms with the present, that it was somehow unwilling or unable to acknowledge the reality of historical change. Read against the backdrop of that earlier statement, the “Notes confusionelles” are best understood as exC essIVe gestures 2

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resuming and extending this critique of the multiple failures of surrealist community. They do so in large part, I wish now to propose, by deploying Catholicism’s Thomist turn as an allegorical figure for surrealism’s centuries-later integration of Marxist thought.68 Illegible apart from the larger context established by Hantaï’s written work to date, this maneuver is nonetheless manifest in a complex structure of textual rhymes lacing the present essay to its predecessor. Take, for example, the initial appearance of Siger de Brabant in the 1958 text, an event directly preceding the lines I have just claimed address Budapest 1956 (“According to a simplistic thesis . . .”). Presenting the “Notes confusionelles” as continuing the “maieutic” of the Cérémonies commémoratives, Hantaï recapitulates the story of the theologian’s condemnation by Tempier in 1277, and initially at least, he stays close to Mathieu’s rhetoric and overall framing.69 Like his French peer, Hantaï casts Tempier’s gesture as “the last great effort made to stop the development of a movement of thought that, under the influence of Aristotle and his interpreters, has opened the doors to the deadly fertility of the double truth and consequentially all humanist and other illusions.”70 And also like his erstwhile collaborator, Hantaï identifies the subsequent admission of Aristotelian thought as a grave turning point in the history of the West, leading to a protracted crisis of positivism. Things nonetheless take an unexpected turn in the immediately subsequent lines. Describing the “irruption of Scholasticism”—the Catholic assimilation of classical philosophy—Hantaï states: “What was obscured at that moment reappears now before eyes turned toward the future as the transfiguring sign of a Catholic universality to be accomplished. Our inquiry begins with this insurgence to find the final aspect [dernier visage] 74

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of the West.”71 This closing figure—that of a “final aspect”—has appeared already in the painter’s writings: specifically, in that section of “Démolition au platane” devoted to Duchamp’s Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even. Let us return to those pivotal pages one more time. Having claimed to glimpse in the Large Glass the possibility of a mutual “paroxysm” of pleasure and knowledge that also would be “the taking hold of reality by passion,” Hantaï and Schuster assert: That such an affirmation is in fact an act of faith is indifferent to us; everyone commits acts of faith all day long, even if only in crossing a street. On the basis of this one, we are sufficiently free to glimpse man’s final aspect [dernier visage]. And what a rather dry dialectic invited us to imagine as the ultimate term of an opposition between knowledge and pleasure is confirmed, here, by what we believe to be the integral fusion of the mental and the sexual. Afterward . . . in the game of the Bride, love is perhaps reinvented.72 This passage implicitly positions surrealist practice as, itself, a matter of keeping faith with excess. Of course, the two authors were writing precisely because they believed that fidelity had lapsed or had been eclipsed, and now, the partial repetition of this passage in the “Notes confusionelles” suggests that Hantaï has found a rough parallel in Catholicism’s loss of the authentic spirit of Augustinian faith. Compounding the echo, the notion of “a Catholic universality to be accomplished” now reads as taking off from the possibility that love itself might be “reinvented”: the latter prospect would have come into view with Duchamp, while the former would be coming back into view after long concealment. By pivoting abruptly from this

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forgetting to the “simplistic thesis” of “Hongrie, Soleil levant,” Hantaï implicitly frames surrealism’s tired Marxist analyses as turning away from the radical possibilities of community the group had once pursued.73 To suggest this is to say not just that Marxism had failed but that it was in some sense doomed to fail. Indeed, Hantaï appears to conceive of Marxist thought as but one technique of rationalism among others—and as such, bound in the larger progress of intellectualism that the “Notes confusionelles” decry. Although the text does at one point refer to the need to “reverse the trend begun in the thirteenth century,” it is for the most part clear that there can be no simple going back.74 Above all, it declares the need for new alternatives in the present: “Hegel’s historical providentialism having culminated in a somber order of technical efficiency, the trial of the temporal by and for the spiritual is the only question that deserves to be asked today.”75 With all of this in mind, we might now turn back to the extraordinarily complex opening maneuvers of the “Notes confusionelles, accélérantes, et autres pour une avant-garde ‘réactionnare’ non réductible,” beginning with the lengthy title. The concept of a reactionary avant-garde appears to be meant in part to evoke by negation the professedly revolutionary counterpart to which the text is clearly addressed. But it also constitutes an openly oxymoronic figure, something akin to a reactive advancing party. That double movement is similarly to be found in the exhibition title, Souvenir de l’avenir (Memory of the future). These headings place show and text alike under the sign of contradiction, a gesture amplified by the essay’s opening lines: “No polemics here, no desire even to persuade or explain,” Hantaï writes. “I affirm and negate categorically, with no concern for nuance, obscurity,

confusion, or contradiction. Apparently.”76 Professing to “affirm the absurd,” the painter then launches an attack on “what a limited conception divides simplistically into progressive avant-garde and reactionary rear-guard.”77 The critique gives new meaning to the manifesto’s peculiar title phrase, effectively pitting its willful combination of conflicting terms against the binary logic that Hantaï takes to have blocked both politics and poetics in the present. (“Every Manichean denunciation is blindly unilateral,” he goes on to write.78) It also helps establish perhaps the central target of the “Notes confusionelles”: the very notion of linear progress. “Whoever doubts humanity’s progress is considered reactionary,” the artist observes, thereby assuming that doubt along with the label.79 Christianity then figures in the text primarily as another mode of conceiving time. Nonlinear, nonprogressivist, this imagination appears as if essentially exceeding itself, doubling back through itself, and—most importantly—collecting itself in a new manner. Here, presumably, Hantaï is thinking about the ways in which, for the Christian, Christ’s appearance in the world compels a new understanding not just of the future but of the past as well, necessitating a complete rereading of the Old Testament. The double movement Hantaï associates with Christianity now appears as the source for his own earlier figures of contradiction:80 “Fidelity to the past means: rediscovering the past through a dynamic process oriented to the future, the distancing of revalorization being a restitution of return. Memory of the future. Apparentness of the permanent. Beyond the humanists’ ethic, in the Christian disqualification of history, a passion for contradiction seeks its signification by way of dynamic eschatology.”81 For all the explicit appeals to Christianity, it is important to see that these lines essentially exC essIVe gestures 2

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repeat—but “dynamically,” or with difference—the opening moves of “Démolition au platane.” In each case, we have to do with an at least loosely Hegelian vision of temporality that, the text suggests, we are obliged both to acknowledge and to interrupt (the dialectic of rationalization having culminated, now, in a “somber order of technical efficiency”). Here one might say either that Hantaï finds in Christianity a possibility for resistance or, equally, that he is recoding his earlier resistance as already implicitly Christian. In retrospect, the move would have been prepared by yet another aspect of that earlier essay, mentioned briefly in chapter 1: Hantaï and Schuster’s implicit relegation of automatism and God alike to the same domain beyond the dialectic. “Démolition au platane” had not addressed that unthought, subterranean linkage in 1955; three years later, the “Notes confusionelles” pursue it actively. At stake here is a conception of historicity capable of exceeding the psychologistic closure Hantaï identifies with humanist illusions (whether Siger’s or surrealism’s) and associates with static repetition. Once one grasps this, it becomes clear that the specific religiosity at stake in this essay—Catholic, dogmatic, and broadly liturgical—is another way of continuing or recasting the very notions of anonymity and impersonality at the heart of Hantaï’s thought since “Démolition au platane.” This emerges most powerfully around Hantaï’s insistence that what Catholicism provides (or rather, provided in the past) is some way of understanding what he once called “a metahuman condition” and now identifies, in provocatively regressive terms, as a “supraindividual state.”82 To follow the “Notes confusionelles,” surrealism fails because it offers no real alternative to this thought that does not collapse into a kind of personalism or—as the “Notes confusionelles” also say, taking 76

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over yet another set of terms from “Démolition au platane”—“libertinism of pleasure” (a judgment I have suggested Hantaï extends to Mathieu himself). But there is a further implication: in turning away from the Church, the surrealists, far from breaking with that institution’s hierarchy of values, have simply turned it on its head, effectively replacing “the absolute of dogma” with the notionally boundless “relativism of experience.”83 Hantaï has a name for the surrealists’ “inverted spirituality”; he calls it magic.84 As we have seen, this was a term that had figured previously in the painter’s framing of Sexe-Prime, and so the “Notes confusionelles” also suggest a moment of self-criticism on his part. The artist’s judgment is unremittingly negative: “Against Christianity, which demands the subordination of psychic powers to a spirituality of universal communion, magic resists by sacrilege, by a corrupting hostility that submits spirituality to the possessive impulse of desire, by empirical egoism, bringing it down to a Luciferian level.”85 Magic is firmly on the side of the psychological and the literary. Now we are ready for Hantaï’s core claim about Incarnation, identified in the text both as the “central knot of the revelation of Christ” and as the “crucial problem of painting.”86 Here, too, the painter might be said to at once borrow from and correct Mathieu. Already in 1951, the latter had used “incarnation” to name a state of intelligibility to which the lyrical abstractionist must aspire: “Until now, a thing being given, a sign was invented for it. Hereafter, a sign being given, it will not be viable and therefore truly a sign unless it finds its incarnation.”87 Signs that do not accede to significance in this way Mathieu presents as sinking back into sheer formlessness.88 (Here as elsewhere, the French painter is concerned in part to distinguish his aesthetic philosophy from

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Tapié’s formulations on the informel.) In later writings, incarnation comes to characterize one of six distinct, cyclical stages through which all art forms might be said to pass, the phase when the signs invented by a given painter are “at their maximum efficacy,” recognized by and communicating with others without yet falling into the mere conventionality of “formalism or academicism.”89 To the extent that Hantaï draws the term from Mathieu, his gloss nonetheless is consistent with the notion of dynamic eschatology outlined above: “The opening toward the future becomes a conscious acknowledgment of the past.”90 The temporal accent remains critical: Incarnation is alteration, effectuating a new awareness of time to come and time past. Those parts of the “Notes confusionelles” dealing most directly with painting draw an implicit analogy between the painterly surface and the body of Christ, suggesting that both are vehicles of an ongoing dialectic between formlessness and form, the universal and the particular. Once again, the drift of Hantaï’s remarks is at least loosely Hegelian, which is to say he posits art generally and painting in particular as active processes of reflection and displacement: “transformation of matter and oneself, the illumination of consciousness.”91 Defining art as “the historically determined exegesis of the ineffable,” he presents it as simultaneously conditioned by history and conceived against history, pledged to something wholly other.92 Here, as already in “Démolition au platane,” the animating thought appears to be that genuine community depends upon precisely this receptiveness to alterity. The question for Hantaï is whether painting can continue to provide such an opening, to conduct that kind of “message.” These considerations come to a head in the immediately ensuing lines, which identify the

modern condition as one in which there is no established community for painting and no place given over to it in advance. “This is an extremely serious situation for art,” Hantaï writes, “as for everything, in a contemporary civilization characterized by extremes in both directions. Never so well-known on the level of information; of such high, conscious aspirations; so stretched with yearning toward the essential, the incommunicable. And never so little integrated in life, in communion; so submerged in unconsciousness cut off from above; so blinded by the accidental; so reduced to sensibility.”93 Cut adrift in this way, artistic practice has seen a massive efflorescence of “parodies” of the spiritual, a rootless proliferation of religious and mystic references, kitsch revelations—“altars,” as the surrealist text “Coup de Semonce” would have it, “with neither cult nor dogma.”94 Throughout, the “Notes confusionelles” tend to imply that Christianity is, in a sense, the great repressed of an avant-garde doomed to repeat its rites and rhetoric in profane form; or to put the same point a slightly different way, to psychologize those rites.95 Here, then, is the other side of the surrealists’ humanist closure: homeless religiosity. But the problem, Hantaï seems to suggest, is that the only way out is through. The end of the “Notes confusionelles” shows him struggling to find the unthought excess within these tropes, the more-than-parodic potential buried within recent artistic discourse (in this, too, the text recalls “Démolition au platane,” with its criticism of surrealism from within). Against the surrealists’ “literary idolatry of the sensible and the imaginary,”96 Hantaï now picks up, in a new way, the refusal to attribute a substance to automatism expressed earlier in “Démolition au platane.” He does so by turning to that side of mystic experience oriented toward negative theology.97 Once again, exC essIVe gestures 2

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Hantaï puts his accent on the instant of transmission, and his remarks on the special state of active receptivity required of the painter read as a transformation of the surrealist “state of grace” as well as a further twisting of Mathieu’s aesthetic of speed: [Passive] activity; objective subjectivity; particular and universal; the correspondence of extremes in constant exchange; a vision nonadditive but structuring of the accidental and the essential, of the part and the whole by their integration in lived knowledge. Opening to a supraindividual state, beyond name and form; the freeing up of values without adding significance to them, significance being inherent to them; a sign manifesting, encompassing, and veiling all at once. The act of painting is the putting at stake of painting and, parallel to that, of man by himself. Upheaval of an extreme seriousness, the seriousness of the act implicating all of eternity, which, beyond all categories, opens onto the ineffable, enunciating propositions affirmative in form but negative in content, redeploying the spiritual procedures of negative theologies in the impossibilities we experience by, paradoxically, endowing intellectual speculation about the void with the transcendent intensity of the instant of ecstatic subjectivity. In these conditions the indefinable instant is the signification, thus the impossibility of predetermined significations and the importance of the notions: absence of predetermined gestures and form, of the speed of execution (it is illusory to take that speed in a strictly chronometric sense; its signification is outside of time; it is at once the lived duration, filled to a maximum of intensity, and the contemplation of the interior void, the suppression of time as a modality 78

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of the corporeal world, the accelerating panic of loss and of transmutation to a superior power of the illuminated state of the ecstasy that transfigures consciousness, the negation of all sense of the given, a state manifesting itself by open signs, the support of transfinite interpretations, sign-structure, the particular expression of the totality reflecting itself by integration in that expression, the visible aspect of the dizzying consciousness of all simultaneities).98 These lines are far from transparent, and the extreme distension of language and syntax is certainly a part of what we are meant to experience: not for nothing are these notes offered to the reader as “deliberately confounding, accelerating, and the like.” But precisely as such, they recall the “dizzying swings of the glider” associated since “Démolition au platane” with a depsychologization of desire. As in the earlier essay, Hantaï’s formulations point toward that passionate vertige he would have us imagine as the unstable, unsustainable, instantaneous taking hold of reality itself. The surrealists once declared that apprehension the “actual functioning of thought”; Hantaï reads his former colleagues faithfully when he casts it as the end of art: “After centuries of art idealizing sensible reality, after the complete internalization of the reproductive attitude, a path is open, a path toward the accomplishment and abolition of art.”99 That such ending can never be but a new departure; that to incarnate, the work must communicate; and that one does not know with whom—if anyone— one communicates are perhaps the most important implications of the “Notes confusionelles” and ones to which it will be necessary to return. Like the Sexe-Prime manifesto of two years prior, the 1958 text demands that we attend to its

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FIg. 26 simon Hantaï, dépliant for the exhibition Souvenir de l’avenir, March 3–30, 1958, galerie kléber, Paris, detail of the front and back covers and list of painting titles.

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FIg. 27 simon Hantaï, dépliant for the exhibition Souvenir de l’avenir, March 3–30, 1958, galerie kléber, Paris, detail of the “notes préparatoires pour les cérémonies de la condamnation de siger de Brabant et suites correctives non cérémonielles.”

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placement within a larger invitational brochure— the dépliant designed and financed by the painter in the wake of his break with Breton. Twice as large as his previous effort, the booklet for Souvenir de l’avenir consists of one single, octavo sheet measuring 3'10" × 1'8.5". It is composed of five main elements: two external faces, of which one bears a red enlargement of the painter’s signature and the other, a photograph of the title work; a list of titles of paintings shown; the infamous “Notes confusionelles”; and lastly, taking up one entire face of the fully unfolded support, a facsimile spread of graphic markings (figs. 26–27). As with the 1956 brochure, there is a great deal that might be written about this object. I will focus on one key point: the relation of the brochure to the knotted or self-interrupting temporality invoked in the “Notes confusionelles.” Again, my own reading will be nonlinear, jumping in where the painter’s dynamic eschatology is most in evidence—at the “end.” To fold back Hantaï’s third and final manifesto is to reveal another, rather different set of notes, handwritten as opposed to typed and overlaid with numerous circles, arrows, smudges, and crossed-out areas (fig. 27). A typewritten caption identifies the whole as “Notes préparatoires pour les cérémonies de la condamnation de Siger de Brabant et suites correctives non cérémonielles” (Preparatory notes for the ceremonies of the condemnation of Siger of Brabant and nonceremonial corrective follow-ups). With this information, various aspects of the sheet come into focus. Across the top, designated with roman numerals, are Mathieu’s four cycle headings, from the Sacerdotale to the Populaire by way of the Royale and the Bourgeois. Also reappearing are a few key dates (such as “7 mars 1277,” to the left of the Roman numeral II) and various headings scattered among long lists of names and themes such as Salle des Saints (Room of

saints) and Techniques d’avilissement (Techniques of degradation), which are familiar from the program of the Cérémonies commémoratives. Hantaï’s “corrections” nonetheless complicate the newly intelligible whole. Undermining the strict chronology implicit in the official curriculum, the graphic additions establish more complicated correspondences among and across all four cycles. Circles within circles suggest local developments working themselves out within larger ones while arrows and lines of force veer off in all directions, rearticulating manifold relations of significance among temporally dispersed phenomena. Otherwise put, the painter rewrites Mathieu’s program in an allover mode, turning it into a graphic palimpsest that no longer admits one uninterrupted reading. The result has less to do with the Frenchman’s linear narrative of spiritual decline than with Hantaï’s Sexe-Prime manifesto, with its polyvalent proliferation in all directions.100 (That this new sheet so notably lacks the visual punch of its 1956 predecessor suggests a further, highly deliberate movement of stripping bare, one that again produces—and is quite markedly traversed by—excess.) Such gestures reframe history less as a self-enclosed whole than as a text to be read— which is to say, reevaluated through the drawing of new connections. That linking is as much the subject of the “Notes préparatoires” as any of the contents spread across the page, and indeed, the artist’s caption already makes reference to at least two different moments of drafting and revisiting. At the same time, however, the page suggests that the “actual functioning of thought” is just this drawing of connections: an activity of rereading and reinscription that lets something new emerge. The result is a kind of “action writing,” as Hantaï returns to names and rubrics—circling, exC essIVe gestures 2

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underlining, or drawing boxes around some (Heidegger, Nicolas de Cuse, Jacob Böhme, la musique) while crossing out others (Hegel, André Breton, surrealism, Karl Marx, Georges Bataille). (The crossing out of Bataille’s name here might be read as further evidence that Hantaï has not yet come to terms fully with the ambiguities either in Bataille’s work or in his own.) At times Hantaï adds figures that did not make their way into Mathieu’s final program (Jean-Pierre Brisset) or jots down a sudden insight (“La religion est la clé de l’histoire” [Religion is the key to history]). Here, too, the impression is less of a seamless unfolding of thought than of some more complicated process of repetition and reappraisal—a transformative retrieval and not a static return. This layering of graphic elements visualizes Hantaï’s conception of time as nonlinear and self-interrupting. But so, too, does the placement of that document within the dépliant as a whole. Consider the structural relation of the “Notes préparatoires” to the “Notes confusionelles”: although the latter document postdates the former, it precedes it within the brochure. In folding back the manifesto to reveal the palimpsest, one exposes the charged, extraordinarily complex field of activity from which that text arises—and whose postulates it reworks in turn. Or to put the point another way, the “Notes préparatoires” constitute the complex prehistory of the “Notes confusionelles” but can only appear as such by virtue of their further unfolding in the later polemic. We move toward Hantaï’s past through the lens of his present. And then we move back toward his present through the lens of his past. For the “Notes préparatoires” also mark the point in the dépliant at which one can go no further without doubling back—beginning to refold the brochure and thus retracing one’s previous path or a new one through 82

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manifesto, painting titles, photograph, and signature. In this way, the entire brochure might be said to allegorize the knotted temporality thematized in the “Notes confusionelles” and taken up graphically in the “Notes préparatoires.” Indeed, almost from the first and far more than the Sexe-Prime brochure, the Souvenir dépliant complicates the notion of a simple, univocal unfolding. Unlike the previous document, the later invitation has no external folder. It is not clear, therefore, that either of the two outside faces is properly described as a front or a back, a beginning or an end, the Alpha or the Omega. Each face is in some sense both—and neither. At the same time, because the brochure is larger overall and numbers more internal folds, it fails to impose a single, clearly successive mode of handling. Instead, there are several different ways of negotiating the first three aspects, in particular, as one decides whether to unfold the brochure or simply flip it101—just as one might also make different choices on the return route and so discover new relations of significance among the composite elements. Nor does this document yield any final transparency. Even when fully unfolded, it is never “all there” for the reader-beholder but has at least one other face that does not appear at the moment. In this way, too, Hantaï’s folded support materializes his emerging understanding of the progress of thought as a complex interplay of advancing and redoubling, activity and passivity, blindness and lucidity. There is one other major way the brochure refuses to achieve closure: as an invitation, the document is bound up in particular paintings, whose exhibition at the Galerie Kléber it served to announce. The subtitle of the “Notes confusionelles” underscores this entanglement, casting the text as a whole as an introduction of sorts to “the atmosphere that led

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to these works.” Other elements in the brochure similarly reinforce that relationship, from the list of painting titles to the prominent photograph of Souvenir de l’avenir. A text to be read, the dépliant is also an invitation to look. As mentioned previously, the identity of the preponderance of paintings included in the Souvenir show is today unclear. Many of the designations listed in the brochure were added uniquely for the exhibition and removed in subsequent years. Nor does the dépliant include any dimensions that might help to clarify matters. But judging from Hantaï’s contemporary production, as from a few surviving photographs of the installation at the Galerie Kléber, his work oscillated between two main poles: on one hand, charged surfaces that recall the dense layering of traces in the “Notes préparatoires” (fig. 28); and, on the other, sparsely marked canvases more similar in spirit to the excessively lucid, typewritten majuscules of the “Notes confusionelles.” The title painting is of the latter type (see fig. 20). Like Sexe-Prime before it, Souvenir de l’avenir is to some extent a picture-polemic; indeed, it is the last such work to emerge from Hantaï’s public battles with surrealism. Between the two paintings, however, the distance is great. Far smaller than Sexe-Prime, Souvenir refuses that earlier work’s overwhelming scale: it does not seek to submerge or engulf the beholder. Additionally, the graphic contrast, minimal gestures, and thin, matte paint layer of the later canvas depart from the organic, suggestively epidermal register and seemingly frenzied scrapings of Sexe-Prime—and thus, from its overweening anthropomorphism and visceral bodily address. The result is a new extreme of denaturalization or “spiritualization,” a paring down of painting to basic dialectical oppositions: horizontal and vertical, black and white.

This asceticism appears attuned to Hantaï and Schuster’s earlier call for a poetic language stripped of all temporal attributes, reduced to the “logical structure and sacred essence of the mental, its univocal hieroglyph.”102 Even so, at the very moment that Hantaï moves away from the proliferative effects associated since Sexe-Prime with the exit from ordinary experience, another aspect of his practice appears invested with new, as it were, compensatory significance. Here the key point has to do with the philosophic centrality he now assigns to the color black. Since the emergence of the painter’s raclage technique, black has been the color adopted increasingly as overpainting— the pigment, one might say, that mediates all other hues, the one from or through which they emerge. This preference was partly a matter of practical expediency: no other option so effectively severed the link between hand and eye, the underpainting as applied to the canvas and the revelation effected through the scraping process. In the “Notes confusionelles,” however, it also appears to be a matter of mystical significance. There the color black— more precisely, the “luminous sense of black”—is explicitly aligned with the “pure potentiality of indistinctness” and the “unmanifested,” opening toward the “supraindividual state” at the very crux of the text.103 And that state, in turn, appears to be a new—if also, as everything else in that document leads us to understand, deliberately reactionary—avatar for the differently coded alloverness of Sexe-Prime, another extreme of self-abnegation that would also be the “negation of every limit.”104 Yet even as it points beyond the visible, Souvenir also presses toward a more difficult thought: finitude. For the painting’s spare white gestures are essentially double in implication. First and most obviously, these traits bear a heavy symbolic baggage, everywhere reinforced by Hantaï’s exC essIVe gestures 2

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contemporaneous writing. They form a universally recognized symbol of Christianity and, specifically, the Crucifixion. But as an intersection of horizontal and vertical axes, the cross is also perhaps the most basic sign of surface extension—and in that sense, a figure for the openness or exposedness of Hantaï’s painting to beholding. It is, I want to say, a counterfigure to the closed circle of a psychology.

These two possibilities are folded one into the other, one through the other, around the central figure of dynamic eschatology. For as the dépliant is there to remind us, such continued life as the work might have will depend largely upon future acts of reading and writing, transformation and reinscription. And that will be the work of others.

FIg. 28 simon Hantaï, Saint François Xavier aux Indes, 1958. oil on

canvas. Private collection.

exC essIVe gestures 2

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ordinary Painting

CHAPTER 4

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The months following Souvenir de l’avenir were a time of relative isolation at the end of Hantaï’s first decade in France. The rupture with the surrealists appeared irrevocable at last. Finished, too, were Hantaï’s dealings with Mathieu, though belated critiques of the Cérémonies commémoratives de la deuxième condamnation de Siger de Brabant and the “Notes confusionelles accélérantes et autres pour une avant-garde ‘réactionnaire’ non réductible” continued to appear in the surrealist press. Never again would Hantaï engage in the same level of public polemic. Instead, the paintings he began in the fall of 1958 suggest a new phase of sustained reflection on the road he had traveled—a systematic taking stock of the work he had produced and the range of issues it raised. The most important and complex canvas of this moment—entitled, simply, Peinture (Painting)—consists of oil paint and inks on two sewn-together pieces of very thin linen (fig. 29). At roughly 10'10" × 13'11", the work surpasses Sexe-Prime as the largest in Hantaï’s oeuvre to date, although its address to the beholder could not be more different. Seen from afar, the canvas displays an array of heterogeneous features: a gold cross, a stenciled Star of David, and a spray of black ink appear left of center while differently sized and shaped areas of gold leaf, grattage, and impasto touches appear variously scattered and clustered about a variegated, softly luminous field—an expanse that, upon closer examination, turns out to comprise innumerable layers of colored handwriting (figs. 30–31). This allover net is largely illegible, though a few isolated words and fragments yield to the attentive gaze. More immediately apparent are several different sets of Roman and Arabic numerals. Some of these are clearly dates, as in the central register, while others remain enigmatic. Still more numbers, concentrated in the lower left-hand corner, record the 365 days devoted to creating Peinture (fig. 32).

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FIg. 29 simon Hantaï, Peinture (Écriture rose), 1958–59. oil, inks,

and gold leaf on linen canvas. Musée national d’art moderne— Centre georges Pompidou, Paris. gift of the artist, 1985.

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FIg. 30 simon Hantaï, Peinture (Écriture rose), 1958–59, detail.

The canvas is the result of a unique process about which the painter told his interlocutors a great deal. Work began with several months’ worth of preparation, during the course of which Hantaï primed the machine-stitched and stretched cloth support, painted it with a thick coat of heavy, white industrial oil paint, and then, having allowed that base layer to dry, scraped the entirety

of the expanse with hand-held metal razor blades to render it smooth and matte for inscription. This systematic excoriation alone, he recalled, took several weeks.1 Then, beginning on November 30, 1958—the first Sunday of Advent—the painter committed to transcribing the complete annual cycle of the Catholic liturgy, as copied day after day from his bilingual French and Latin 1953 edition of the Roman daily missal. By the end of that year, Hantaï had covered the canvas with the designated sections of the Old and New Testaments of ordInarY PaIntIng

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FIg. 31 simon Hantaï, Peinture (Écriture rose), 1958–59, detail. FIg. 32 simon Hantaï, Peinture (Écriture rose), 1958–59, detail.

the Bible. But he also had folded into that script a vast anthology of passages by Hegel, Heidegger, Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Hölderlin, Sigmund Freud, Saint Augustine, and Saint Ignatius of Loyola, to cite a few key members of a much larger canon. All are copied in inks corresponding to the liturgical code, with the hue assigned each day’s Mass, and the citations therefore alternate among white, red, green, violet, and black. (These colors, Hantaï recalled, initially were quite violent; time has tempered them considerably, reducing entire swathes of writing to a narrow spectrum of reddish browns.2) No roseate ink figured into the making of the work. Yet because the painting, when viewed from afar, exudes a pinkish glow, it has come to be known as Écriture rose (The rose-colored writing work). 90

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Écriture rose occupies a singular position in Hantaï’s oeuvre. One of the last paintings he produced prior to his adoption of folding techniques, it is also his first major canvas to incorporate real writing, as distinct from broadly writing-like gestures. Indeed, it is tempting to see this work as absorbing the manifesto-writing activity that had accompanied Hantaï’s painting throughout the 1950s—as if those closely related practices could no longer be held apart but had necessarily to come together.3 Strengthening the association of Écriture rose with the earlier dépliants are both the scale of the writing, which remains firmly within the hand-wrist register of the brochures, and the extensive use of citations, a strategy for which Sexe-Prime provides the clearest precedent. Visually, the painting is perhaps closest

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to the sheet of “Notes préparatoires” included in the invitation to Souvenir, a complex graphic artifact that, as we have seen, shows Hantaï reflecting at length on the deep context of modern dialectical thought and resisting the latter’s humanist impasse. Yet Écriture rose turns away from the residually avant-gardist spirit that animates Hantaï’s earlier writings. For there is a further aspect that distinguishes this canvas from the great painting-manifesto pairings of Sexe-Prime and Souvenir de l’avenir: unlike his earlier statement pictures, which the artist exhibited within months of their making, Écriture rose was withheld from the public for many years. Seventeen years separated the canvas’s completion from its inclusion in the painter’s 1976 retrospective at the MNAM. Throughout that period, it remained in Hantaï’s studio—first in the Cité des Fleurs, then at Meun— unknown to all but the painter, his family, and a few intimates. Contrasted with the ostentatious framing accorded Sexe-Prime and Souvenir de l’avenir, Hantaï’s deferred revelation of the 1958–59 palimpsest suggests a fundamental reserve about the painting’s ability to show and be seen.4 The long withholding of Écriture rose from public view has not been without consequence for the work’s reception, though it is hard to pin down precisely the nature of that impact. By 1976, Hantaï was known primarily as the author of the pliage paintings, his work received largely within the perspective of Supports/Surfaces and other avant-gardes of the later 1960s and 1970s. Écriture rose, on the contrary, did not fit readily into the dominant narrative of his art then taking shape in France. At issue in particular—and perhaps unsurprisingly—was the work’s explicit engagement with religious tradition, an aspect of Hantaï’s art that had been all but effaced from his reception in the intervening years and appeared radically at odds

with the resolutely secular cast of his presumed heirs.5 The painting did have some early and enduring supporters, including Jean Fournier, familiar with the work since its creation; the poet Dominique Fourcade; and the prominent writer-critic Marcelin Pleynet, whose catalogue essay for the MNAM exhibition clearly positions Écriture rose as the veritable crux of the artist’s oeuvre: “It is impossible to understand, to experience, all that follows and refers back to it—specifically, the rest of the work of Simon Hantaï—if one has not read, or has poorly read, this tableau.”6 But Pleynet’s appears to have been a decidedly minority view in those days, for none of the contemporary reviews of the exhibition published in France so much as mention Écriture rose,7 and his own lucid but brief description raises far more questions than it answers, as he is the first to acknowledge.8 The painting’s present reputation has been slow to emerge. Since 1984, Écriture rose has been in the permanent collection of the MNAM, where it has occupied several different locations. Its entry came during a period in which the artist otherwise eschewed exhibiting his work publicly—a sustained caesura about which there will be more to say in chapter 8—and was followed by a stretch of near-total silence. The year 1992 marked the beginning of a relative thaw, as signaled by the appearance of Anne Baldassari’s important monograph on Hantaï. Focused primarily upon the MNAM’s holdings of the artist’s work, Baldassari’s book presented Écriture rose as the fulcrum of that collection and published important new information about its making, much of it gleaned from first-hand conversations with the painter.9 In subsequent years, the canvas also figured in a spate of additional texts, the majority of them coming from fields other than art history and nourished by epistolary or other exchanges with Hantaï. These ordInarY PaIntIng

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written works include a monograph by French art historian Georges Didi-Huberman;10 a volume of three-way correspondence between Hantaï and the philosophers Jean-Luc Nancy and Jacques Derrida;11 a “free interpretation” by French writer Hélène Cixous, also including letters to and from Hantaï;12 and a book-length poem by Fourcade, who would help curate the artist’s first posthumous retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in 2013, an exhibition in which the painting figured prominently.13 With this increased attention have come some important insights. In recent years, writers on Écriture rose have tended to stress those aspects that link the work most perspicuously to pliage: for example, Hantaï’s slowing down and relative routinization of gesture, the repetitive nature of the daily labor, and the “noncompositional” nature of a program given over in advance to quotidian copying.14 These accounts are illuminating, registering as they do a deep continuity between Écriture rose and the later paintings long privileged under the terms of the technique-based reading laid out in my introduction. But there remains the determining and largely unaddressed matter of the “religious question,” a perennially uneasy point for the artist’s interpreters to date. Baldassari’s monograph appears to have set the tone. One of the main interventions of her study is to underline the importance Hantaï attributed to particular sources copied on the surface of Écriture rose, Ignatius of Loyola foremost among them, and to suggest the relevance of some notion of “spiritual exercise” to its creation. By this she means primarily that the painting’s making—to some extent like the procedures elaborated by the saint in his sixteenth-century manual—required daily “practices of meditation and analysis, the effects of which are directly observed by the practitioner.”15 92

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In a further step, she suggests these practices were aimed not at “amendment” but at what she calls “a slowed-down deconstruction of painting.”16 But because Baldassari deals neither with Hantaï’s earlier appeals to religious tradition nor with the broader context I have attempted to map (the “Notes confusionelles” do not figure in her account, and the Cérémonies commémoratives are reduced to one sentence17), the reader is left with no clear understanding of the pertinence of this idea relative to Hantaï’s broader rethinking of artistic modernity. The same lacuna haunts subsequent studies of Hantaï’s work, from Didi-Huberman to Cixous, and is particularly striking in Fourcade’s catalogue essay for the 2013 retrospective.18 Yet Écriture rose is profoundly rooted in Hantaï’s writing and painting since “Une démolition au platane.” In particular, it marks the deep transformation and, in some sense, the liquidation of the adventure that I have suggested spans Hantaï’s later 1950s: his experience of the promise and failure of the surrealist practice of psychic automatism. As will become clear, I too consider a certain conception of spiritual exercise to be pertinent to this work. That examination nonetheless proves inseparable from Hantaï’s continued questioning of the very place (or nonplace) left to painting under secular modernity—that is, after the withering of the ritual and primarily Catholic context that, as he had come to see it, once secured art’s meaningful existence for a community. Intricately bound in the painter’s work to date, these negotiations nonetheless result in an altogether new conception of his medium; they are the indispensable context for his turn to folding. Écriture rose is a painting at a number of different crossroads—formally, materially, and procedurally. We might begin, therefore, by drawing out more

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fully its signal features. Here, as in every major phase of the artist’s production, formal, technical, and philosophical developments are mutually entangled. 1. Like Sexe-Prime before it, Écriture rose is part of a larger group of closely related paintings. All were produced during a roughly yearlong period that began in the late summer or fall of 1958 and continued into the following autumn or winter; they were worked on more or less simultaneously in the painter’s studio in the Cité des Fleurs. At the heart of this extended field of production is a monumental nucleus, itself multiple, within which Écriture rose appears as the most important of three large-scale works. Like that landmark canvas, both additional paintings were held in reserve for many years. The first to appear was a work never shown publicly prior to its being donated by the artist to the MAM in 1997 (fig. 33). Entitled À Galla Placidia at the time of the gift, the painting is executed in oil on canvas and measures 10'8" × 13'1.5", dimensions that both link and subordinate it to the just slightly larger Écriture rose. In a brief note Hantaï provided to help mark the work’s entry into the collection, he describes À Galla Placidia as the painting that occupied him every afternoon after mornings devoted to Écriture rose.19 The two thus form a pair, intimately linked in the painter’s daily rhythm. A third painting made its public debut in a 1999 exhibition at the MAM (fig. 34). At 7'10" × 10'10", this gold monochrome is the smallest of the three canvases and the only one still in a private collection, also in Paris.20 (Unlike Écriture rose and À Galla Placidia, the work does not appear to have been associated with a particular time of day.) Beyond these three core canvases, Hantaï also produced around twenty additional paintings in a variety of smaller formats, each of which similarly deploys a technique or combination of techniques manifest in the works of the

master triptych. The canvases with writing draw upon the same pool of liturgical and philosophical texts as Écriture rose. 2. This group of paintings marks the most searching renovation of Hantaï’s practice since his appropriation of an abstract raclage idiom three years earlier. As other writers have noted, the new processes are distinguished in part by their temporal protraction;21 one might equally note their distinctly awkward and laborious nature. At least some of the ungainliness has to do with Hantaï’s working instruments of choice, which include pen and ink, in the case of Écriture rose and the written paintings; small razor blades and other scraping instruments, which had to be grasped between thumb and forefinger; and the disassembled hull of the same alarm clock whose ring the painter had used previously to remove swathes of paint throughout the Sexe-Prime suite. He now used the metal bell to apply miniscule daubs of pigment of the sort he described as petites touches (little touches)—a procedure deployed to particularly striking effect in À Galla Placidia. As we have already established, Hantaï’s work of the later 1950s clearly privileges implements other than the traditional paintbrush. Yet in this moment, in particular, the artist’s preferred techniques also bear witness to a simultaneous shrinking, making discontinuous, and deacceleration of gesture that contrasts sharply with the seemingly rapid marking adopted for Sexe-Prime and for the most part maintained, across otherwise considerable rhetorical shifts, through Souvenir de l’avenir and related works. These self-imposed constraints are all the more striking in view of Hantaï’s at times dauntingly vast surfaces. A photograph of the painter standing with Écriture rose, probably taken some time in the winter of 1958, suggests he was only about half as tall as the largest of the works then underway ordInarY PaIntIng

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FIg. 33 simon Hantaï, À Galla Placidia, 1958–59. oil on canvas. Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris. gift of the artist, 1998.

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FIg. 34 simon Hantaï, Peinture, 1958–59. oil and gold leaf on canvas. Private collection, care of the Musée Fabre, Montpellier.

(fig. 35). Because these canvases were stretched and worked on in the upright position, each line of script, little touches, or leaves of gold entailed numerous, continual, and frequently uncomfortable, if not punishing, adjustments in the artist’s bodily relation to his canvas. One has to imagine Hantaï craning his neck, shifting his weight, and stretching his arm; work on the upper reaches of the canvases would have required that he repeatedly mount, descend, and relocate a ladder, while

labor on the lower registers would have compelled him to stoop over, crouch, and eventually lie on the ground. Additionally, his use of a traditional pen and ink meant that he was obliged to keep his wrist higher than the point of the pen at all times to prevent the ink from running back down his arm, even when this limb was extended above his head. The effect is a thoroughgoing negation of Mathieu’s aesthetic of speed, as if a concerted slowing down might itself be a source of resistance and renewal. 3. A closely related point concerns Hantaï’s predilection at this time for archaic materials, techniques, and effects. From 1955 through early 1958, ordInarY PaIntIng

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the artist had produced Sexe-Prime, Souvenir de l’avenir, and the rest of his scraped canvases using industrial and for the most part rapidly drying glues, varnishes, and oil paints. Those materials were consistent with Mathieu’s professed abandonment of “artisanal methods in painting.”22 By contrast, Écriture rose and related works show the painter deliberately retrieving a number of traditional, if not decidedly outmoded, means. This revival is already apparent in the manner of preparation: although more up-to-date variants were widely available, Hantaï opted for a particularly sturdy rabbit-skin glue, buying it in sheets that required heating in water prior to application. But the same impetus also underwrites a further array of material features. The gold monochrome, for example, shows the painter adhering the fragile leaf to a deep red ground, a procedure traceable to medieval panel painting. In a similar vein, Écriture rose evinces a time-honored technique known as l’or à la coquille (literally “gold in a shell,” in reference to the natural vessel historically deployed to hold the mixture), in which scant amounts of gold powder or a combination of gold and copper are mixed with glue or resin and then applied to the canvas in viscous form.23 À Galla Placidia poses the question of archaism differently: while Hantaï’s technique, which involved covering a previously worked surface with innumerable layers of tiny touches of paint in a variety of colors, appears unique to his practice, the visual result recalls Byzantine mosaics—a resemblance both confirmed and underscored by the title’s explicit invocation of the fifth-century mausoleum at Ravenna, which the artist had seen en route to France from Hungary

FIg. 35 simon Hantaï with Écriture rose in his studio in Paris, winter 1958.

ten years earlier. Elsewhere, one notes the artist’s glowing, jewel-toned palette, redolent of stained glass. Collectively, these canvases mark perhaps the first and certainly the last time Hantaï permitted himself such a sustained, multivalent engagement with the deep past of painting and its pre- and early modern contexts and adjacencies, from arts of the book to decoration on an architectural scale. In so doing, they suggest a powerful desire to make contact with—to be conditioned by—larger art-historical traditions. 4. Finally, the Écriture rose galaxy suggests a fundamentally new conception of alloverness. In chapter 2, I described Sexe-Prime and related works as attempting to “transgress” figuration, an operation dramatized by the seeming emergence of anthropomorphizing clusters that could nonetheless not be separated cleanly from the surrounding fields. The paintings of later 1958–59 dispose of that dynamic, substituting for that residual figure/ ground opposition a more homogeneous, as it were, molecular articulation of the surface as a whole. Écriture rose and À Galla Placidia present edge-to-edge surfaces of densely layered writing and paint touches, respectively, while the gold monochrome reveals an allover grid or rectilinear scaffolding. Similar effects recur throughout the larger body of work. The overall impression is of a very different kind of space—a feature indicative, I will suggest, of a deep shift in the painter’s search for impersonality. These changes in Hantaï’s art bear witness, in part, to his continued and deepening engagement with the work of Jackson Pollock. The years 1958–59 were a time of increased visibility in France for the American’s painting, following the opening of the artist’s first—posthumous—retrospective at MoMA in New York in 1957. The show arrived in Europe ordInarY PaIntIng

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later that year, travelling to Basel, Amsterdam, Hamburg, and finally Paris, where it opened at the MNAM on January 16, 1959. Presenting a vast panorama of Pollock’s dripped and poured paintings of the key period 1947–50 alongside important canvases by Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb, and others, Jackson Pollock et la nouvelle peinture américaine (Jackson Pollock and the new American painting) was the first survey in France to offer a global view of its title subjects.24 With this new exposure came a spate of writings and reviews devoted to Pollock that insisted as never before on the primacy of “action” in painting. Pronounced in the French context, this emphasis was in fact deeply indebted to the writings of the American critic Harold Rosenberg. As Nancy Jachec makes clear, Rosenberg’s writing is fully bound in the midcentury passage from certain forms of collectivist ideology to a new emphasis on “the creative individual,” as conceived against the backdrop of surrealism, on one hand, and—for Rosenberg in particular— aspects of Marxist theory, on the other.25 Indeed, Rosenberg arguably did more than any other figure to articulate an existentialist framework for American abstract expressionism.26 As put forth in a 1952 essay, “The American Action Painters,” and further developed in a 1968 follow-up, “The Concept of Action in Painting,” Rosenberg’s argument turned upon the by now oft-cited claim that “at a certain moment, the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act—rather than as a space in which to reproduce, re-design, analyze, or ‘express’ an object, actual or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.”27 The American painters Rosenberg had in mind included Hans Hofmann, Pollock, de Kooning, and Newman, among others. 98

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As we have seen, Mathieu was among the first in Paris to insist on the dawning centrality of painterly action. By the moment of Écriture rose, however, that discursive accent was increasingly widespread. For Julien Alvard, writing in 1956, Pollock’s emphasis on the physical gesture provided an exemplary instance of “audacity and truth,”28 while for Pierre Guéguen, reviewing the artist’s retrospective in March 1959, the painter was an “athlete-thinker,” his formal achievements inseparable from the unprecedented nature of his bodily performance.29 This emphasis on action was in many ways the fulcrum of a larger rhetorical constellation that also cast Pollock’s painting in terms of violence (violence), force désespérée (desperate force), brutalité sauvage (wild brutality), and frénésie (frenzy)—that is, a host of terms of precisely the sort that had exerted a strong pull on Hantaï at the moment of Sexe-Prime but from which Souvenir had already shown him moving away.30 Such language tended to pick up on one chief aspect of Rosenberg’s argument, his insistence that the new painting had freed art of its old “aestheticism”—that it had, in a sense, freed art of art: “An action is not a matter of taste.”31 This claim recurs in the context of Tapié’s informel, and it marks a temptation to which Hantaï himself was prone. Witness, among other indexes, the enthusiastic reference in “Notes confusionelles” to a newly opened path, one leading toward “the accomplishment and abolition of art.”32 Back in chapter 3, I read those lines in light of a surrealist-derived aspiration to destroy art and literature in favor of the “actual functioning of thought,” but as the 1958 polemic also asserts, the desire to move “beyond” art could just as quickly collapse into mere psychologism. Rosenberg was also aware of—and vulnerable to—this risk. His argument

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clearly registers and to some extent participates in the contemporary traffic in religious tropes. The type of painter that matters to him is “not a young painter but a re-born one,” and what counts in the painting he produces “is always the revelation contained in the act.”33 Elsewhere, the critic writes: “Based on the phenomenon of conversion, the new movement is, with the majority of the painters, essentially a religious movement. In almost every case, however, the conversion has been experienced in secular terms. The result has been the creation of private myths.”34 “Private myths” is as accurate a translation as any of what Hantaï calls “parodies” of the spiritual.35 Yet even as the painter increasingly resisted these surrogates, it remained far from clear that he had found an effective way of moving past them. Indeed, his near-total overhaul of his painterly procedures suggests a profound dissatisfaction both with the orgiastic excesses of Sexe-Prime and the spiritual abnegation of Souvenir: neither of these seemingly very different but similarly extreme modes offered a means of going on. The fundamental issue here, as Rosenberg recognized, was the perceived lack or loss of an audience for art: “Despite the fact that more people see and hear about works of art than ever before, the vanguard artist has an audience of nobody. An interested individual here and there, but no audience. He creates in an environment not of people but of functions. His paintings are employed not wanted. The public for whose edification he is periodically trotted out accepts the choices made for it as phenomena of The Age of Queer Things.”36 This is very much the situation Hantaï portrays in the “Notes confusionelles.” On this reading, abstract expressionism appears bound in a veritable crisis of communicability, its innovations plagued by a fundamental question of address. Écriture rose

is driven in part by Hantaï’s continued need to come to terms with these issues and helps to record that larger reckoning. Folded into this reevaluation of the social stakes of American abstraction—and serving at once as catalyst and as counterweight to that rethinking—was another, closely related investigation having to do with Hantaï’s roughly contemporaneous experience of the official Church. Polemicizing against surrealism, the painter’s “Notes confusionelles” had come down vigorously on the side of Rome, contrasting the latter’s “absolute of dogma” with the former’s “relativism of experience.” The months following that final manifesto saw Hantaï pursuing the religious question and seeking to apprendre à genoux (learn on his knees, learn kneeling)37—a desire he tried to satisfy in part by attending daily Mass at the Church of Saint-Joseph des Épinettes, near his studio-residence in the Cité des Fleurs. Building upon the earlier research for the Cérémonies commémoratives and Souvenir, he also read heavily in a body of recent texts devoted to the institutional history of the Catholic faith. Foremost among these writings were several books by the Austrian scholar Josef Andreas Jungmann, including La liturgie de l’Église romaine (The liturgy of the Roman Church) of 1957 and his two-volume Missarum sollemnia of 1953 (republished in English as The Mass of the Roman Rite: Its Origins and Development).38 Even more so than at the time of the collaboration with Mathieu, then, later 1958– 59 was a period of intense apprenticeship to the scrupulously choreographed conduct of the Catholic Mass and its elaborate liturgical pageantry—a supreme model, if ever there were one, of actions invested with shared meanings. The essentially social or collective ends of the liturgy are inscribed in the very term, which ordInarY PaIntIng

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derives from two Greek sources: laos (a people) and ergon (a work or oeuvre).39 Jungmann’s Liturgie details at length the various means employed by the Church to guarantee a maximum of formal intelligibility. “By its very nature,” Jungmann writes, “the liturgical formulation participates in the supratemporal character and the venerable impregnability of religious matters, by maintaining itself in an expression fixed once and for all.”40 One primary example of these highly regulated modes would be the use of Latin throughout the Mass. But the distinction also applies to features such as the chromatic code, according to which each color is assigned a symbolic association: white is the “festive color”; red is the color of “feasts, martyrs, and Pentecost (tongues of fire)”; green is the “neutral color” for the Sundays between the festive cycles; and violet is for “times of penitence.”41 Still another rubric governs the gestures and postures of the Mass, which are similarly suffused with meaning—from “standing position: the most human attitude . . . the disposition best suited to a servant with respect to his master” to “the raising of hands: sign of offering or waiting.”42 Écriture rose famously adapts the ritual alternation of colors. Yet Hantaï’s daily missal suggests he was no less interested in this additional aspect of liturgical practice having to do with bodily movement and orientation. His well-thumbed Ordinaire de la Messe (Ordinary of the Mass) is filled with annotations regarding the corporeal performance of the ceremony (fig. 36). On one page, above and below the Offertoire (Offertory)—an account of the central action of the Mass, the offering of the Eucharist—one finds grammatically tenuous, largely unconjugated lists of the officiating priest’s gestures and movements, accompanied by minimal spatial cues: “Walk to his right, fold the fabric take the flasks, most elevated step, bless, present 100

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the flasks, bless, bring back to the credenza, take the tray, flasks and linen. bless. pour. bless.” These and similar notations on ensuing pages approach Catholicism as, among other things, a highly particular technology of the body. Indeed, in contradistinction with the individualist athleticism of Pollockian gesture, the liturgy might now appear to be a paragon of supremely socialized physicality: ordained in advance, transmissible to all, and strictly regulated in practice. Écriture rose takes over something of this, as well, replacing the “arbitrary orgiastic acts” of Sexe-Prime with a new commitment to daily routines of painting, a kind of making ordinary of that activity. (Also relevant, of course, is Hantaï’s professed desire to “learn on his knees”—that is, by bodily as opposed to strictly intellectual implication in his subject.43) My claim, then, is that Hantaï saw the liturgy as the very antithesis of the notion of action then in play in art-critical discourse, interpreting the dogmatic faith and fixed symbolism of the Church as a counter to the “private myths” chronicled by Rosenberg. The problem was that by 1958–59, the religious codes appeared equally untenable—for the liturgy too seemed struck by a large-scale crisis of audience. In conversations with this author, Hantaï described his contemporary disappointment with priests who appeared to him “depressed” and “out of the action,” reduced to static repetitions of the traditional rites before mostly empty pews.44 With attendance in decline, those officiants often found themselves without a public—performing, as it were, an ergon without a laos (and therefore no liturgy at all). This crisis was by no means new, but the winter of 1958–59 did mark a major turning point, as signaled by Pope John XXIII’s convocation of the ecumenical council eventually known as Vatican II. Announced on January 25, 1959, a little more than a week after the opening of the Pollock

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FIg. 36 simon Hantaï’s hand-annotated Ordinaire de la Messe,

detail. Private collection.

retrospective, the decision inaugurated a period of sustained—and highly public—self-examination on the part of the Church itself.45 Écriture rose is somewhere between the two poles I have tried to establish—between the carefully calibrated rites and fixed expressions of the Church, on the one hand, and what had come to appear to

Hantaï as the excessive subjectivism and psychologism of contemporary abstraction, on the other. But the making of that canvas also bears witness to the painter’s engagement with the work of another, seemingly unlikely author. During the latter part of 1958, Hantaï appears to have been deeply absorbed in the writings of a Jesuit priest by the name of Gaston Fessard—a figure he later said could have been the dedicatee of Écriture rose.46 This writer is today largely forgotten, his name left out of most histories of twentieth-century French intellectual ordInarY PaIntIng

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life.47 Within his lifetime, however, Fessard played an important role in the critical reception of Hegelian thought. Educated in philosophy and law at the Sorbonne and theology at the Jesuit Faculty of Lyon Fourvière, he discovered Hegel’s writings in 1926 during a summer retreat in Munich. He soon began preparing a translation of the Phänomenologie des Geistes (Phenomenology of spirit), a text published in 1807 but not yet available in French. Although the Jesuit faculty stopped the project, the aborted attempt marked the beginning of a lifelong engagement with the philosopher’s work. During the 1930s, Fessard attended Alexandre Kojève’s famous seminar on Hegel at the Hautes Études, where he was one of two auditors (the other being Raymond Aron) asked by Kojève to present a critical response at the final meeting.48 His subsequent career was marked by numerous publications, many of them devoted to political questions and immediate problems in world history, of which a complete list would include the first French commentary on Marx’s recently rediscovered Manuscripts of 1844.49 During the 1950s, when Hantaï began reading his work, Fessard was a particularly active participant in then-current debates about the possibilities of collaboration between communists and Catholics. He opposed the trend, condemning in particular the “Christian Progressivist” movement attempting to unite elements of Marxist ideology and Catholic faith on loosely Thomist theological grounds. His anti-Thomism may well have been the initial draw for Hantaï: by the painter’s recollection, he first discovered Fessard’s writings while studying Siger de Brabant during the preparations for the Cérémonies commémoratives.50 The most significant work for our purposes was the first of what would turn out to be three volumes Fessard devoted to the thought of Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuit order and author of 102

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the Spiritual Exercises in 1522. A highly unorthodox account of the saint’s manual, Fessard’s La dialectique des “Exercices spirituels” de Saint Ignace de Loyola is in many ways the linchpin of his oeuvre, as the author himself stressed repeatedly. But it very nearly failed to appear at all due to what Fessard perceived as the near total lack of interest in his subject, and the Jesuit’s preface takes care to lay out three key events in recent intellectual life that he believes ultimately enabled the book to see the light of day. Topping the list were the French reception and translation of Hegel, followed by the application of “the ‘phenomenological’ method,’” the emergence of which “has reintroduced within the philosophical horizon religious and spiritual conceptions previously disdained by a narrow rationalism and a bloodless idealism.”51 But by far the most important factor, to Fessard’s mind, was the broader and more basic reorientation of intellectual inquiry to a few fundamental questions: [Diverse] existentialisms have come to impose a new direction on reflection, at the same time that the success boasted by the Marxists invited philosophers and theologians to interrogate the sense and the reach of a “dialectic of history.” So much so that today no informed mind can doubt that the great problem of our day is that of the historicity of man. What is the historical being that constitutes us? What is the sense of the history in which we are embarked? How is truth possible for a being plunged in the perpetually shifting relativism of events? What kind of liberty does he enjoy there?52 These queries are at the heart of Fessard’s work on Ignatius, which offers a uniquely modern and profoundly original reading of the saint’s manual. Begun in 1923, significantly revised in the

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1930s, left to languish for many years, and finally published with a new introduction and addenda in 1956, Dialectique des “Exercices spirituels” tracks “the movement of liberty” developed over the course of the Exercises as a whole.53 Where previous readings of the guide had tended to stress the role of imagination, as invoked by the saint’s frequent injunctions to “compose” and meditate upon various scenes from sacred history, Fessard’s mature approach draws upon the work of Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Heidegger—three authors whose writings also intermingle and overlap on the surface of Écriture rose. Presenting Ignatius as the greatest of all “technicians of the spiritual,” Fessard focuses on the ways in which the saint leads the reader-performer of the Exercises to go beyond strictly intellectual knowledge of Christian truths toward their appropriation through lived experience (or in Hantaï’s terms, perhaps, to “learn on [their] knees”). By now it should, I hope, be clear what kind of interest the painter was likely to take in a book like this one. However different in tone, Fessard’s protests against modern rationalism are wholly congruent with—and may in fact have provided a source for—Hantaï’s diagnoses in the “Notes confusionelles.” At the same time, Hantaï was almost certainly drawn to Fessard’s sustained engagement with Hegelian thought in particular, just as he was with Bataille’s emphatically atheological practice of “inner experience.” Indeed, Fessard’s work on Ignatius takes up what the painter in his 1958 text presents as the central challenge of the day: it attempts to conceive “the trial of the temporal by and for the spiritual” beyond the seeming closure of the philosopher’s system. In many respects, the making of Écriture rose tropes the Ignatian practice of spiritual exercise, as manifest first and foremost in the artist’s sustained, retrospective examination of his path

to the present day. This is perhaps most apparent in the painting’s central register, where a column of dates runs from 1922, the year of Hantaï’s birth, to 1959, the year of the work’s completion: the format suggests a year-by-year review, in good Ignatian fashion. No less significant, however, are the scattered events sampling techniques and motifs drawn from the artist’s painting of the prior decade. Sprays of black ink look back to the dripping of Sexe-Prime while the area of grattage in the lower left inscribed “Gloria in excelsius Deo” recalls the scraped, black-and-white suite of Souvenir de l’avenir (indeed, the Souvenir brochure lists a painting by that name). Other areas repeat still earlier, pre-surrealist experiments with stencils and staining. In a similar vein, Ignatius’s emphasis on the role of the “Director of Conscience”—a kind of spiritual guide—rhymes with Hantaï’s recasting of the painter-painting relationship in dialogic terms. No matter what the painter does, Hantaï frequently insisted, “It is the canvas that says ‘yes’ or ‘no.’”54 Yet the artist’s engagement with the Ignatian tradition of spiritual exercise—or more precisely, with Fessard’s highly specific rereading of it—is both deeper and more complicated than these few observations can convey. Indeed, Écriture rose and related works bear witness to a constant overlapping of the religious and the art-historical, folding Fessard’s theological reflections into a sustained meditation on modern abstraction. Taking over and transforming definitively the central premises of the painter’s work and thought since “Démolition au platane,” these canvases show their author at grips as never before with a fundamental question about the extent to which painting might still be imagined—or imagined anew—as a vehicle for something other than “private myths,” to use Rosenberg’s term, or “parodies” of the spiritual, to return to Hantaï’s. ordInarY PaIntIng

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To begin with the crucial point: Fessard helps Hantaï to free abstraction from its increasingly apparent dependence on extreme psychological states. As we have seen, the artist’s gestural paintings of the mid- to late 1950s remain linked to excessive, ecstatic, and trancelike departures. Yet the main problem facing him in the latter half of 1958 seems to have been finding a way to go on without needing the “exit from ordinary experience” that Sexe-Prime had associated with eroticism. Fessard’s writings on Ignatius offer one powerful model of a daily practice in which ordinary and extraordinary appear inextricably linked rather than merely opposed. Fessard presents Ignatius as a dialectician of a loosely Hegelian sort, which is to say that he is interested primarily in the problem of liberty as it develops over time. Liberty is defined, in the Exercises, as the union of the individual’s volition with the supraindividual will of God. Read in this light, the Exercises may be seen to map four weeks or “moments” of increasing freedom, divided midway by a crucial event known as Election. Effectively cleaving the time of the Exercises into a Before and an After, this passage turns upon the practitioner’s decision to answer the “call of liberty” for which the first two weeks were preparing. Fessard’s theological language figures this as an irruption of the “vertical” of eternity into the “horizontal time” of the everyday. I believe Hantaï recognized in this description a deep symmetry of Election and automatism. In Fessard’s reading, the “call from on high” is “like all the intrusions of liberty in the physical, social, or religious world . . . ungraspable directly. There is nothing more dissimilar than Before and After. But the point of passage evades all apprehension, precisely because it does not consist of a thing, but an Act; not a given, but a Giving.”55 Significantly, 104

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Ignatius articulates three different “times” according to which the practitioner of the Exercises might experience this transmission. In the first, the call is instantaneous and unequivocal, and the soul responds immediately; in the second, it is the cumulative effect of various signs gathered by memory over time. In the third, by contrast, the self perceives no sign and has to fall back upon deliberation. Described by Fessard as “calm time,” this last possibility entails a period of patient receptivity during the course of which the self seeks to discern variously affective and rational indications of the way forward, which then stand as themselves in need of further testing and so forth. Although the three times are presented as distinct, Fessard draws attention to the ways in which they interlock and at various points double back on one another, so that modes that appear initially in terms of different degrees of inflection toward vertical and horizontal axes in fact constitute a more complicated dialectical spiral, implying a constant interplay of intuition and reflection, rupture and continuity—or perhaps, to return to Écriture rose, automatism and endurance. One way of understanding Hantaï’s subjection of the hand to copying is in terms of a desire to prolong the painterly act, effectively forestalling the spontaneity effect of gestural abstraction while also putting intense pressure on the notion of the individual painterly “voice.” Yet the function of this writing varies from one canvas to another in ways that two additional paintings can help to clarify. The first example presents a dark blue expanse shot through with flashes of pale yellow and what appears to be an intricate field of craquelure (fig. 37). Closer examination reveals that the canvas was marked in two successive campaigns (fig. 38). The first involved the dropping of strings onto a wet base coat to produce a tangle of cursive skeins

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FIg. 37 simon Hantaï, Peinture, 1958–59. oil and ink on canvas. Private collection.

that several additional veils of light-colored paint subsequently served to highlight. The second, chronologically later procedure consisted of covering the same surface with multiple layers of handwriting. These two methods mutually inflect one another so that the strings assume a writing-like appearance, even as the colored inscriptions appear to capture and condense some of the abstract energy of that allover web— as if taking the initial, notionally uncoded or

instantaneous action into some more complicated temporality. The second example works in a somewhat different way, by playing with the pictorial trope of revelation—a key term, as I have emphasized, both for Breton’s thinking about automatism and for Rosenberg’s formulations on action painting (fig. 39). Here, writing overlays a field of petites touches. The form of the lighter, roughly ovoid central area recalls a mandorla, as used traditionally in paintings of the Virgin and other saints to frame the holy apparition. In Hantaï’s painting, however, the figure is replaced by layers of colored script. ordInarY PaIntIng

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FIg. 38 simon Hantaï, Peinture, 1958–59, detail. oil and ink on canvas. Private collection.

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FIg. 39 simon Hantaï, Peinture, 1958–59. oil and ink on canvas. Private collection.

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The shifting, granular articulation of the touches coupled with the near-total illegibility of the written palimpsest introduces a time of continually interrupted reading into one’s engagement with the picture. As the beholder steps forward and back to grasp the different effects, she finds herself drawn into the complex dialectic of closer and more distant looking that Hantaï’s works of this moment repeatedly demand. A further, closely related topic has to do with the notion of indifference. Fessard describes this as a particular kind of performative stance that the Ignatian practitioner ought progressively to adopt: “At the beginning, indifference is not yet but a simple project of the will. At the end, after the first two weeks, the self ought to ‘find’ it as an acquired and to a certain extent already ingrained disposition.”56 Born of a “wish for pure passivity,” indifference is nonetheless “the first rule of action” in Ignatian dialectic: “For the free act,” Fessard writes, “it is no longer the ego that should choose.”57 On the contrary, the exercitant experiences every true act of Election as une sortie du soi, or exit from the self (and here, significantly, Fessard provides a virtual recoding of the Bataillean language of eroticism).58 I have argued that related ideas were of considerable interest to Hantaï in his rethinking of automatism. His writings from “Démolition au platane” forward appeal first to a “metahuman condition” and then to a “supraindividual state,” and in one case as in the other, he seeks an opening to something “beyond” the ego. The newly allover mode evinced by Écriture rose and related paintings appears to be the pictorial analogue for such notions, eschewing discrete areas of interest and thereby suspending the machinations of a comparably centered subject. Yet these same canvases 108

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also grapple with the limits of Hantaï’s thinking to date, proposing a more complex and nuanced vision of the mutual immixing of self and otherness. The results are somewhere between Ignatius and Pollock and further suggest a new interest on Hantaï’s part in other, “quieter” abstract expressionist artists, most notably Mark Tobey.59 Two of Hantaï’s paintings of this moment are entirely covered by variegated fields of positive and negative marks: scraped traits and applied touches (figs. 40–41). Repetitive as they are, the traces nonetheless differ in orientation, dispersion, and internal scale. The variety of marks resulting from just two basic gestures helps to keep the beholder’s eye moving around the surface as a whole. Just as importantly, however, the manifold nuances also serve to index the painter’s embodied, all-toohuman being and the subjection of that being over time to various movements and degrees of élan, boredom, and fatigue, both manual and corporeal. Such irregularity is particularly pronounced in the horizontal work with golden-brown traces, in which the scraped traits appear to be longer and more prominent in the lower right quadrant. This corner is often the most strongly weighted in Hantaï’s art: as we have seen, the gestural clusters in the majority of canvases from the Sexe-Prime moment tend to slope downward toward the right, as do the written areas in the 1958–59 paintings; additionally, the right-handed painter most often signed his canvases within that region, as he has done here. The specially charged nature of this zone calls attention to this basic fact of manual orientation—and through that phenomenon, to a broader category of specifically bodily automatisms. FIg. 40 simon Hantaï, Peinture, 1959–60. oil on canvas. Collection galerie Jean Fournier, Paris.

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FIg. 41 simon Hantaï, Peinture, 1959. oil on canvas. Private collection.

This basic tension between a form of alloverness established through repetitive procedure and a subtle but insuperable heterogeneity bound up in its bodily mediation may be taken to translate the phenomenon Fessard describes as both the finitude and the inevitability of the self. While the Ignatian follower seeks to exit the vicissitudes of self-interest, “there is never, for us, any pure liberty; even if we were to choose the most spiritual reality, we cannot help but choose, at the same time, a particular sensible reality, which becomes the body of that soul which is the free decision . . . , the accident of that new substance.”60 Hantaï 110

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often put the matter more succinctly: “Impurity is the true situation.”61 One implication of this acknowledgment may be that the difficult claims of indifference, as they emerge in the painter’s practice in this moment, do so by way of checking what is potentially absolute and purist in a stance that appeared initially as an attempt to overcome the finite self. That recognition of finitude underwrites another signal feature of these works, bound in their powerful yet decidedly unstable appeal to the sense of touch. Here, too, Hantaï finds a foothold in Fessard’s text. Throughout the Dialectique, alternate terms for conceiving of the passage from Before to After cast the transition as one

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from Representation to Enactment or, again, from Seeming to Being. A few curious pages at the heart of Fessard’s text place this movement under the sign of “hope,” described as “the soul of the movement” of the Exercises—a formulation that recalls, as it was no doubt meant to, Aristotle’s casting of plot as the soul of tragedy in the Poetics.62 For the saint and his commentator, the hope in question is that inspired by the resurrected body of Christ. But because this body must be experienced as an object of faith, it cannot be an object of perception—for this, in Fessard’s reading, “would suppress it, transforming it into an object of science.”63 The kind of “seeing” thus required of the devotee is of the sort that “makes us touch, not see, the reality of that which we believe . . . —Even though we never touch but the wounds,—even though consolation never appears but at the edge of a scar, when the crushing negation is still fresh—it’s enough that the action of hope makes itself felt throughout our affective life.”64 Where Fessard’s reference to touch is obviously figurative, it nonetheless speaks to his interest in a kind of contact that both exceeds and yet is also, somehow, closer than vision. These lines are striking in part for the return of something like Bataillean déchirement among these sacred scars and wounds: associated thematically with bodily breaches, hope comes not to the retreatant closed upon himself but to the one who recognizes precisely his inability to grasp, appropriate, or dominate; opening toward the future, hope’s transformative action depends by definition upon a certain caesura. For all of these reasons, Fessard’s ruminations provide a suggestive new context in which to consider Hantaï’s own longstanding refusal of optical mastery. As we have seen, his recourse to the raclage method

had already suggested broad resistance to projective techniques. Following in this vein, Écriture rose and its satellites bear witness to a rich multiplicity of approaches to the surface (writing, scraping, rubbing, wiping, etc.), all of which draw the painter into unusually close corporeal proximity to the painterly surface. In so doing, they aim at suspending the oppositional relationship identified in Hantaï’s thinking since “Démolition au platane” with the undesirable workings of the “double yoke.” One technique in particular—the use of petites touches—appears to thematize touch as both limit and surplus of vision. Consider the privileged example of À Galla Placidia. Like Écriture rose, À Galla Placidia required an enormous investment of time and labor. A canvas that was initially sewn together, painted white, and excoriated meticulously was then colored selectively with red, obscured completely with a coat of black, scraped in broad strokes from top to bottom, partially occluded anew with a thin film of white, and finally covered from edge to edge with innumerable layers of miniscule daubs of pigment in a variety of hues. The result is a somber counterweight to Écriture rose. With its dark ground and translucent veil, À Galla Placidia is hard to see. The combination of tiny marks and large dimensions renders the work elusive, as if it were peculiarly ungraspable at any distance. Yet for all that these touches thematize contact, they are of course addressed to sight as well—impossible though it may be to capture a stable mental image of the painting. As different aspects of the work alternately become legible for and slip away from a mobile beholder, the touches also may recall writing—just as the writing of Écriture rose, seen up close, bears a powerful tactile charge. ordInarY PaIntIng

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FIg. 42 simon Hantaï, Peinture, 1959. oil on canvas. Collection CaPC, Musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux. gift of Jean Fournier, 1998.

A third work sums up this constant folding of touching into writing and vice versa (fig. 42). Here, as elsewhere throughout the suite, the canvas appears to have been entirely covered with black at one point and then scraped from left to right—that is, according to the directionality of Western writing. The resulting negative space bears an unmistakable resemblance to an unjustified paragraph, playing one relatively straight margin against an opposing, dramatically staggered 112

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periphery. Within that highly suggestive framing, hand-copied, largely illegible layers of actual script intermingle with internally variegated “lines” of black-edged daubs. The result is a more meditative version of the dynamic I have suggested traverses Sexe-Prime, as marks one might see as allegorical of the condition of greatest physical intimacy are caught up in larger, inscription-like rhythms. Read against Hantaï’s earlier investment in eroticism, the 1958–59 paintings might be taken to register the difficult acknowledgment that there is no passage beyond the limits between self and other, no final fusion, and no end to the necessity of reading.

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There is another intimately related way in which Fessard’s formulations on hope might appear to resonate with Écriture rose. I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter that no rose-colored ink was used in the making of that work, although the liturgy would have permitted its substitution for violet on two occasions: either the third Sunday of Advent or the fourth Sunday of Lent. Symbolically, then, the color pink is linked to Christ’s birth and resurrection and thus to the hope of the new community (as an annotation in Hantaï’s missal puts it, “joie tempère la pénitence” [joy tempers the penance]). Hantaï did not make this replacement, not finding the requisite color among the inks available to him. But by the end of work on Écriture rose, a kind of carnation had appeared nonetheless in the form of what Johann Wolfgang von Goethe would term “phenomenal” or “called” color—conjured, in this instance, by the canvas’s copious amounts of green ink in interaction with light.65 Originally at least, the rose of Écriture rose was therefore not a literal feature of the painting (it could not be touched) but an effect of that painting as it appeared for an embodied beholder: contingent, experiential, simultaneously “more” than matter and inseparable from matter. It was, one might say, a kind of excess traversing the painting as a whole, an extraordinary and unforeseen result of the “ordinary time” invested in that canvas.66 Last but not least, the 1958–59 suite marks the decisive appropriation of a certain notion of repetition, one that we might now take to have been at least implicitly—and ever more explicitly—operative in all of Hantaï’s painting and writing to date. Repetition is built into the very structure of Ignatius’s manual, where later exercises continually resume and recapitulate earlier ones. What is more, one might say the Exercises are never completed

once and for all but are conceived, rather, as essentially circular. In Fessard’s evocative gloss, this is an aspect of Ignatian practice contingent upon the fact of human finitude: “Insofar as I live in time, it is impossible for me, without taking account of that implication, to attend to the revelation that opens me to the truth of my past and to the presence of my definitive future. At the risk of losing the benefits of the road traveled, and of taking the representation of divine unity for its reality, one must return continually to the point of departure and ceaselessly take up again the finished route.”67 This passage sounds one of the most important notes in the Dialectique des “Exercices spirituels” as a whole: the idea that the state of fragile unity with the divine will that Ignatius seeks to help one achieve must be constantly lived and revived through action if it is not to collapse into mere representation.68 (For Fessard as for Hantaï, “representation” is on the side of disunion or mediation by the ego.69) The reader-performer of the Exercises has thus continually to open up differences in his experience of them and so reenact the passage from Seeming to Being. Repetition is at work in Écriture rose and its galaxy on multiple levels, from the routinized nature of the daily labor on each painting to the proliferation of closely related supporting canvases and the polyvalent retrieval or, so to speak, condensation of other moments and media from the panoply of prior art. Building upon Hantaï’s longstanding emphasis on repetition-withdifference—what the “Notes confusionelles” call “dynamic eschatology”—these materially and temporally layered works present the act of painting as always already repainting, inscribed within a history each canvas would at once gather up and disperse anew. Viewed in this light, the incorporation of writing is a way of making explicit ordInarY PaIntIng

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something structural to this body of work as a whole: these paintings are imagined as in passage, never simply identical to self but invariably caught in a larger temporality that exceeds them. Each one keeps faith with a certain past by prolonging it, but that prolongation is equally—inevitably—a displacement. Repetition therefore structures the painter’s relationship to the art of the past, whether we imagine that history as Hantaï’s own (Sexe-Prime, Souvenir de l’avenir, etc.) or the vast, “supraindividual” tradition to which Écriture rose and related works appeal in diverse ways. But these relations also function laterally, each painting around the central canvas reinventing some aspect of that work: the relation of writing to touching, the specific imagination of alloverness, a certain kind of gesture, or a particular experience of scale, for example—as if staying present to the master painting somehow required that the project spread beyond Écriture rose; or as if those repetitions, by setting Écriture rose at however great or slight a distance, made it possible ceaselessly to take up that work again in some new way. Viewed in this perspective, the gold monochrome marks perhaps the furthest remove from both Écriture rose and À Galla Placidia, an extreme suspension or caesura within the larger, suite-spanning weave of writing-like marking.

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Yet repetition does carry a particular force within Écriture rose, where Hantaï’s successive acts of writing have the ultimate effect of visually grinding up or rendering all but illegible the copied texts. One might say the canvas dramatizes legibility as such; one might equally aver that it acknowledges Western thinking about the sacred as precisely a body of texts, bound to history and exposed to reading. And intrinsic to that shift, I want to suggest, is a new recognition that there can be no final setting aside of the self—no end, that is, to the constant threading of action through its own inscription; Being through Seeming; language through its own reserve. For even as the script pulls one near, the very layeredness of that writing frustrates aspirations to absolute transparency. Then, too, the prominently placed cross, ink splatter, and miniature gold monochromes push back, remarking the painterly surface as the site of finitude, separation, extension, and exposure. Irreducible to the content of the liturgy as such, Écriture rose perpetually defers Fessard’s dream of divine unity, temporalizing an act of beholding one might never exhaust once and for all. That recognition might be experienced as a loss. But as the rose is there to remind us, it might also be a promise.

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the Passage to Pliage

CHAPTER 5

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From June 22 through July 31, 1967, Hantaï held an important exhibition with his Paris dealer, Jean Fournier, at the latter’s recently relocated (and newly eponymous) gallery in the rue du Bac.1 Entitled Peintures 1960–1967 (Paintings 1960–1967), this was the artist’s fourth solo exhibition of work produced through various techniques of folding. Previous shows, also with Fournier, had focused on particular moments of production. Peintures Mariales (Marian paintings), of May– June 1962, introduced his inaugural explorations with canvases painted in variously crumpled states. Two exhibitions of 1965, 138 peintures de petit format. Jalons des années 1962–1965 (138 small-format paintings. Milestones of the years 1962–1965), held during the summer months June–July, and 12 peintures récentes de grand format (12 recent large-format paintings), of September–October, surveyed the immediately subsequent painting groups La porte, dits: Les Catamurons (The door, called: The Catamurons) and Maman! Maman! dits: La Saucisse (Mama! Mama! called: The Sausage). (Hantaï later retitled the second series Panses [Pouches], the designation I will use throughout the following.) Each presentation showed the artist working through the new possibilities afforded by different manipulations of unstretched cloth supports, and each amounted to a report on experiments still underway or very recently concluded. In some ways this pattern is also true of Peintures 1960–1967. Yet this exhibition nonetheless differed crucially from its predecessors. As the first to bring together canvases from all three bodies of work completed to date—as well, we shall see, as one just beginning—the show suggested a more sustained taking stock, an attempt to form a global view of an emerging whole. As if to emphasize this distinction, Peintures 1960–1967 was also the first presentation of folded and unfolded canvases to garner a slim catalogue. The supplement immediately

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conjures Hantaï’s theoretically dense dépliants of the preceding decade, yet it also makes clear how much has changed. On the cover, presaging the installation of the show, are a number of Panses, arranged in a kind of allover grid (fig. 43); inside is a short text by philosopher Jean-François Revel, a longtime habitué of Fournier’s gallery. That Hantaï should have turned his preface over to another writer is itself striking; it underscores, in a way the simple absence of a manifesto would not quite do, the artist’s willed indifference or attempted self-quieting before the work in question, his newfound refusal to lay out a program on its behalf.2 There is, however, one notably spare yet significant contribution by the painter on the catalogue’s concluding page (fig. 44). Entitled “Silences rétiniens” (Retinal silences) and presented simply as offering the beholder some repères, or reference points, this text is essentially a list of the named painting groups represented in the show, along with the relevant dates for each. It is at the end of this inventory, signed with the artist’s initials, that we encounter Hantaï’s first recorded reference to pliage as a method. Looking at this deliberately minimal statement, it is tempting to say that, where Hantaï’s previous exhibitions had revealed various folded and unfolded canvases, this one means to show pliage—and to show it as capable of taking over the force and burden of painting as a whole, as a way of going on with it. In so doing, the exhibition also makes clear the artist’s conviction that Pollock’s challenge to painting goes deeper than style, calling instead for the invention of new procedures (what Stanley Cavell calls “new automatisms,” using the term in a way distinct from but not entirely foreign to the surrealist reference). Historically, this declaration paves the way for the painter’s reception in terms of “pliage-as-such”—that is, for readings that

FIg. 43 (oPPosIte) simon Hantaï, catalogue for the exhibition Peintures 1960–1967, June 22–July 31, 1967, galerie Jean Fournier, Paris, detail of cover showing works from the series known as the Panses. FIg. 44 simon Hantaï, catalogue for the exhibition Peintures 1960– 1967, June 22–July 31, 1967, galerie Jean Fournier, Paris, detail of inside end page.

have tended to privilege a generalized notion of impersonal process over the continually modified gestures and profoundly varied results apparent in the canvases themselves. Our long traversal of the 1950s enables a different approach, one that grasps these paintings not as the site of a definitive overcoming of the self but as engaged, rather, in precisely the tHe Passage to PlI age

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complex interplay between activity and passivity, blindness and lucidity, increasingly integral to Hantaï’s work of the preceding decade. Against the denial in “Démolition au platane” that the automatic message can have any sense “but for he who transmits it and only for the duration of the transmission,”3 the folding method inherits fully Écriture rose’s explicit recognition of both the finitude and the inevitability of reading, “insofar”—as Fessard emphasizes—“as we live in time.”4 The passage to pliage thus secures a deeper, more gradual shift in Hantaï’s understanding of his practice, one effect of which, as will emerge, is that he returns ceaselessly to the work at issue in this chapter (as from all stages of his art to date), continually drawing from it new implications. We shall have to do the same. But that election also, and no less crucially, compels a more difficult understanding of the kind of audience this work might hope to gather. Where neither paintings nor persons are imagined as simply present to self, pliage matters in part as it assumes—allegorizes—a new conception of community, one explicitly staked on the inevitability of reserve: a constitutive opacity or caesura at the heart of our dealings with others. Let us remain for the moment with perhaps the most striking aspect of the presentation of Peintures 1960–1967: its marked refusal of an authorial statement of the sort that had accompanied Hantaï’s major exhibitions prior to pliage. With the painter’s closing list, his commentary upon the work is reduced to the flat enumeration of group titles and dates. Here I want to suggest that this seeming retreat is in fact attuned to a deeper appropriation of writing on the level of the work itself, one forced by Écriture rose’s incorporation or absorption of text and manifest in pliage’s explicitly serial drift. 120

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To be sure, some stake in seriality (or what I have called “proliferation”) had been a feature of Hantaï’s practice from the time of his earliest encounters with Pollock if not before. Yet throughout the later fifties, that dimension of his production arguably was overshadowed by the polemical emphasis he placed on certain “statement” pictures, Sexe-Prime and Souvenir de l’avenir in particular. On some level, this privileging of individual, exemplary canvases appears indexed to the avant-garde tradition of the manifesto, which is why these paintings do not simply find but seem actively to demand further expression in precisely that kind of writing. Yet as we have seen, both texts and pictures are equally bound from the first in larger plays of repetition and displacement (a point that the 1958 “Notes confusionelles” are the first to thematize openly under the sign of “dynamic eschatology”)—an entanglement that erodes their exceptional status from within. Écriture rose marks at once the intensification and the undoing of that impetus: conceived as something like the ultimate summary picture, its vividness and indeed, I have suggested, its intelligibility for Hantaï nonetheless depended upon its simultaneous proximity to and difference from a host of related works, both within the triple nucleus it came to form with À Galla Placidia and the gold monochrome and across the Écriture rose galaxy as a whole. What Hantaï’s earlier work had begun to demonstrate, pliage declares. For the first time in this artist’s practice, he presents paintings as instances of larger series, assigning them inherently plural titles. The invitation card for the first exhibition of folded and unfolded work, the 1962 Peintures Mariales at the Galerie Kléber, sets the tone (fig. 45). The titles, dates, and dimensions of all sixteen paintings shown occupy a simple, fourfold grid, with each canvas assigned two lowercase

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letters and a number: an opening M, for Mariales; the letter A, B, C, or D, according to its belonging to one of four subseries that had emerged gradually over the course of roughly two years;5 and a roman numeral, reflecting the work’s more or less chronological place within that group. Far from foregrounding an exceptional statement, the repetition of the opening M with the alphabetic code and ascending numerals powerfully highlights the metonymic cast both of the series as a whole and of each group within it. Such presentational gestures recur throughout Hantaï’s practice of the early 1960s. Numerical designations often are visible in the bottom corners of the Catamurons and the Maman! Maman! paintings in particular, and they are also included in the pasted insert to the Peintures 1960–1967 brochure detailing the specific examples included in the show. (That Hantaï tended to opt for “M.M.” in inscribing the Maman! Maman! canvases might equally be seen as suggesting that these paintings selectively repeat and even redouble aspects of the M-initialed Mariales.) Two earlier exhibition titles, we now know, similarly fall back on numbers—138 peintures, 12 peintures—and even where the former canvases are qualified as “milestones,” the sheer accumulation undermines the implication of breakthrough status. Installation shots, for their part, show canvases arranged in long chains and serial rows (fig. 46). Both singly and collectively, these framing strategies suggest that Hantaï has fully embraced the essential iterability of writing—and further, that such iterability now finds expression primarily through the repetitions and displacements manifest in the paintings themselves, in their newly serial drift. The suite’s ability to write itself in this way, continually exceeding the painter’s intentions, is at the very heart of its becoming methodical.

FIg. 45 Invitation card for Peintures Mariales, May 25–June 1962,

galerie kléber, Paris.

What is true of each major modification of the folding process is also true of pliage generally. This comes through clearly in the brochure for Peintures 1960–1967. Tellingly, the artist’s closing list extends the title Peintures Mariales to all the featured painting groups and presents each of the two series after the inaugural corpus—under the new collective rubric Le mur, dits: Manteaux de la Vierge (The wall, called: Cloaks of the Virgin)—as the prolongation tHe Passage to PlI age

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FIg. 46 Peintures 1960–1967, June 22–July 31, 1967, galerie Jean

Fournier, Paris, installation view.

or suite of the one before. What Hantaï’s 1962 card had done for the original Mariales, this page does now for pliage as a whole: it presents pliage as a series of series, a suite of suites. These chronologically successive groups, Hantaï’s list makes clear, originate not in radically new ideas or about-faces of the sort that had at times seemed to define his course of the previous decade but rather through the sustained unfolding of a particular set of continually self-complicating possibilities. Just as the inaugural exhibition showed four subseries, this retrospective is built of four series. The point is worth dwelling on, for the repetition of fourfold structures strikes me as pointing 122

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back even beyond the Mariales to Écriture rose and the still earlier subdivision of the Spiritual Exercises among four weeks or moments. I see in this an implicit homage to the catalyzing role of what Fessard repeatedly calls “Ignatian method” in Hantaï’s initial move to “pliage as method”—a point to which I return below. More important, the painter’s recourse to four resists framing pliage in terms of a more conventionally dialectical movement of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.6 It is, then, another way of keeping the emerging system open. Indeed, the 1967 table effectively enacts rereading, both in the renaming of the initial painting group and in the extension of the Peintures Mariales appellation to the still-evolving oeuvre in its entirety. That the fourth moment in Hantaï’s list is not so much a culmination as a further displacement is reinforced by the designation of the newest

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paintings, called Meuns, as a “suite ou non” (a continuation or not). Leaving the question open, Hantaï suggests the Meuns’ belonging or following remains to be seen. And what of the paintings themselves? In many ways, the painted configurations within Hantaï’s folded and unfolded canvases also appear as if thinking through and visually articulating this deep transformation of painting’s relationship to writing—at once completing the uneasy digestion already underway in Écriture rose and marking the birth or rebirth of another problem on fundamentally changed terrain. One way of summing up the trajectory of Hantaï’s work in the later 1950s is in terms of a dawning recognition of the inextricable entanglement of the automatic message with its inevitably material and therefore historically contingent figurations or incarnations; of the fact, one might say (against “Démolition au platane”), that no “sacred essence of the mental” stands apart from or anterior to sensible reality. This enmeshment is apparent in what I have cast as the self-interrupting inscriptions of the raclage paintings, and it is also discernible, differently, in the increasingly complex supports of the two accompanying dépliants—the latter of these appearing far more densely enfolded upon itself than its predecessor, even as the corresponding title canvas marks out a new extreme of asceticism, with stripped-down gestures and thinned-out paint. With the concluding palimpsests of that turbulent decade, the ordinary and the extraordinary are at last construed as fully mutually conditioning. The unexpected illumination, the unforeseen effect, is not simply burdened with but instead actively enabled by the material dross of the highly routinized procedure and the march of days.

The Mariales begin here, and they do so by converting the earlier fantasy of frictionless transmission into a more difficult thought of painting as a medium traversed by excess and reserve, always doing more and otherwise than Hantaï could be said, strictly speaking, to have intended. Working on the floor of his studio in Paris, the artist crumples an expanse of unstretched canvas. In the majority of cases, that cloth support—usually at least 6'6" wide in both directions—has been marked in advance with some form of black or dark-brown staining or dripping, much as the canvases in his earlier scraped paintings had tended to be spattered at the outset with high-keyed hues. Hantaï then brushes the visible portions of the partially occluded surface with a coat of primer, followed by one or more layers of industrial oil paint. The whole is left to dry and only later unfolded or, more precisely, pulled from edge to edge to reveal the previously inaccessible zones, thereby shattering the continuity of the painted. Like the overlapping skeins of language in Écriture rose and related works, the canvas in pliage “cuts into itself,” “invaginates and hides itself.”7 Throughout the earliest Mariales in particular—those of the A and B groups—Hantaï’s tight, edge-to-edge crumpling inherits the allover inclination of the immediately preceding nets of text, even as the thickly applied pigment lends the richly colored crusts newly corporeal heft (fig. 47). Here, the literal relief of the folds—an effect preserved, as the painter noted, by his quick-drying, varnishheavy medium8—supersedes the virtual push-pull of the prior scriptural mesh, as do the volumetric effects internal to the colored shards: the crinkling and puckering of the variously pooled paint during the drying process, its spontaneous organization into quasi-graphic configurations. Such works reverse the seeming volatilization of tHe Passage to PlI age

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matter enacted by the Souvenir suite and maintained among the shimmering surfaces of 1958–59, converting the mantles of writing in the prior palimpsests into the rough-ridged textures of these newly conceived cloaks. Elsewhere, as among the works of the C and D groups in particular—and as if to drive home both the adjacency and the difference all the more powerfully—Hantaï’s inaugural suite dramatically confronts a received mode of writing-like marking with the shattered facets produced through folding (fig. 48). Where the underlying, chronologically prior drips and direct staining of the canvas recall the pseudo-Pollockian gestures and spatters of the Sexe-Prime manifesto, an association further encouraged by the return to a more vertical, page-like orientation, the primed and pigmented zones of the superior strata suggest a new kind of “writing,” one in which the obdurate materiality of the support participates fully in a play of spacing.9 (Pursuing this comparison to the 1956 polemic, one may wish to see these works as rediscovering the cuts of the collage beneath the impassioned cursive liaisons.) Like the putative transmissions from obscure regions that Hantaï had been seeking since his surrealist days, the reserves that appear upon unfolding rearticulate the whole in unpredictable ways. To a far greater extent than with his previous appeals to supraindividuality, however, this surrender is visibly enabled and conditioned by decidedly earthbound materials and operations—such matters, for example, as the heft and resistance of the cloth support; the thickness and opacity of its variously produced folds; and the viscosity and drying time of paint. Hantaï’s palette participates in this overall displacement of emphasis. A handful of early Mariales, particularly among the near-monochromatic canvases of the A group, extend the sumptuous

FIg. 47 (oPPosIte) simon Hantaï, M.A.4, 1960. oil on canvas.

Private collection. FIg. 48 simon Hantaï, M.C.8, 1962. oil on canvas. Private collection.

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jewel tones of the previous painting groups: witness the cadmium red M.A.4 or the rich marigold M.A.2, to take but two instances employing colors already observable, in far more limited fashion, in Hantaï’s brilliant underpainting throughout the Sexe-Prime suite and beyond. By contrast, later canvases reveal a marked shift toward more naturalizing registers, with various instances conjuring gently troubled water, cracked earth, and leaves, among other associations (fig. 49). Mineral tones prove especially recurrent, as if identifying the artist’s longstanding tendencies toward layering and packing with naturally occurring forms of sedimentary accumulation: consider, for example, M.C.7, 1962, in which a striking azure surface—one of several “Marian” blues that recur throughout the suite—appears shot through with malachite flashes (fig. 50). Here, the canvas “comes down to the ground”—or indeed, “descends to earth”—both figuratively and literally.10 Many of the Catamurons and even the Panses retain these greens, blues, and rusty browns (fig. 51). Yet the two later series also reveal importantly new aspects. The Mariales borrow heavily from Hantaï’s work on already-stretched supports and in carrying forward the immersive, allover effects of the later 1950s paintings—indeed, in liquidating definitively the inherent linearity of writing, a neutralization accentuated by the frequent use of nearly square formats—they are as much the end of something as a new departure. By contrast, the immediately subsequent suites show the painter bringing the edges of the canvas more fully into view, both by shrinking the overall dimensions (a diminution not unlike the passage from Sexe-Prime to Souvenir) and by refocusing his energies on specially emphasized zones. The results inaugurate a new dialectic between a more or less clearly demarcated painted area and unpainted otherness. 126

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In retrospect, this is the central event in Hantaï’s post-Mariales practice, the one that drives pliage’s continued becoming as method. Here, too, one wants to emphasize the principle of metonymic prolongation summed up in the 1967 list. With the Catamurons, Hantaï opts for the essentially deductive structure of a square within a square, in certain cases simply refolding and repainting a previously completed, allover canvas so as to introduce an internal frame. That unpainted or overpainted margin effectively marks the transition from one series or pliage generation to the next, even as it underscores the support itself as something like a generative body. This solution is further altered in the Panses, which introduce the use of knots in the corners of the support and, at times, around its boundary (fig. 52). True to the series’s title, this modification produces rounded, pouch-like volumes during the folding stage and irregular, distinctly biomorphic configurations upon unfolding. The variously womb-like, phallic, and fetal forms—or protoforms—appear richly allegorical of the canvas’s newly discovered capacity to serve as a vehicle of incarnation in its own right, its ability to birth unforeseen results from within its folds. Suggestively foregrounding the apparent fecundity of Hantaï’s method, Maman! Maman! appropriates the Virgin’s mantle in more ways than one.11 This Incarnationist orientation, rooted in the 1958 “Notes confusionelles,” clearly resonates in the title Hantaï gave first to his inaugural suite of pliage paintings and then, as of the 1967 list, to the total succession of folded and unfolded groups (with, again, some hesitation around the Meuns):

FIg. 49 simon Hantaï, M.D.1, 1962. oil on canvas. Private

collection.

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FIg. 50 (oPPosIte) simon Hantaï, M.C.7, 1962. oil on canvas.

FIg. 51 simon Hantaï, Catamurons, 1960–64. oil on canvas. Musée

Private collection.

d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris. gift of the artist, 1998.

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Peintures Mariales brings us back to the very vehicle or medium of the event Hantaï once cast as the “essential problem for painting.”12 Yet I want also to set this reference in relation to a text that I have argued underwrites Écriture rose from the first, and in which the Virgin occupies a wholly singular place: Gaston Fessard’s La dialectique des “Exercices spirituels” de Saint Ignace de Loyola. Read through the lens of these ruminations, Hantaï’s dedication can help us to think more deeply about pliage’s simultaneous continuity with, and no less significant difference from, the painter’s work and writing of the later 1950s, thus about the full complexity of his passage to pliage. The Dialectique des “Exercices spirituels” frames Mary as a privileged—if somewhat unexpected— hinge figure, operating the crucial transition in Ignatius from the third to the fourth and final moment. The third week closes with a contemplation of the Passion, centrally including Mary’s solitude and suffering, while the fourth begins with a meditation upon her vision of the risen Christ. As Fessard puts it, “The passage from painful memories to triumphant hopes takes place in Mary’s solitude.”13 This progression nonetheless appears to him a peculiar plotting, to say the least—both insofar as the mystery of the Resurrection does not itself serve as an object of contemplation, being instead absorbed into the appearance to the Virgin (“Why this telescoping?”14) and, what is even more striking, in light of the fact that the Gospels say nothing about this visit while Paul accords the first apparition to Peter.15 Turning to the short synopses of the “Mysteries of the Life of Christ” intended by the saint to guide these meditations, he takes note of Ignatius’s explanatory gloss: “First: He appeared

FIg. 52 Folded Panses in simon Hantaï’s studio in Paris, ca. 1964.

to the Virgin Mary. It is certainly true that Scripture says nothing about it, but it implies as much when it tells us that he appeared to many others. Scripture assumes that we are intelligent. Was it not said to the apostles: ‘Are ye also yet without understanding?’” Fessard’s problem is to understand just what “intelligence” means in this context, and his thesis is a bold one. Ignatius is referring not simply to some kind of common sense but to a power or powers of discernment that it is the task of the Exercises as a whole to cultivate—and that the saint means for the retreatant to discover within himself at just this point in the process. Fessard’s reading is complex, yet there is reason to believe Hantaï followed it closely: he circled the catalytic note in Ignatius in several different inks and left emphatic marks in the margins of his copy of the Dialectique des “Exercices spirituels” (fig. 53). At the center of these negotiations is the idea of “senses of the spirit” (sens spirituels), a term not used by Ignatius but derived from medieval texts, particularly those of Saint Bonaventure. Fessard defines these senses as “organs of information and understanding” deployed by consciousness in its quest “to follow the Image of Liberty, to imitate and unite with it.”16 He is particularly interested in the ways in which he believes these faculties articulate with another order of sense that is explicitly evoked in Ignatius’s manual, the “senses of the imagination” (sens imaginaires): roughly put, the five senses of sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch that the saint repeatedly enjoins the exercitant to bring to bear upon his contemplations all throughout the Exercises. Where Fessard believes earlier commentators have been concerned primarily to keep these registers apart, he suggests that it is part of Ignatius’s historical originality to deny any fundamental difference between the two. Instead, he proposes, the saint enables us to trace the progressive tHe Passage to PlI age

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FIg. 53 simon Hantaï’s hand-annotated copy of Ignatius of loyola,

Les exercices spirituels, detail. Private collection.

emergence of the one from the other, showing how the senses of the imagination first awaken, and then help to educate, the senses of the spirit.17 This education is at stake at every turn of the text, and the Dialectique des “Exercices spirituels” tracks it through key episodes. In the second week, faced with “The Mysteries of the Childhood and Public Life of Christ,” the senses of the imagination enable the recognition of sin and the desire for a change of course. In the third week, which centers upon the guided contemplation of “The Mystery of the Passion,” that same mode of apprehension through the senses helps to prepare the finer faculties for the climactic realization that one must die to oneself, through the jointly enacted extinction of carnal desire and of pride.18 With this, Fessard avers, the spiritual senses turn toward “confident waiting” for the redemptive fruits of the requisite 132

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annihilation.19 It is that night of the soul that the Virgin in her vigil experiences most entirely, just as it is she who, by virtue of total submission to the ordeal, most fully, indeed faultlessly, realizes the goal of the exercitant: perfect union with the will of God.20 Here, Fessard thinks, is the answer. Mary’s relationship with Christ differs fundamentally from those involved in the other apparitions— and precisely for that reason, it cannot appear in Scripture. Exceeding representation, “that presence could not enter into the order of observation and narrative”; it is “subtracted from the historical order by its very preeminence.”21 In other words, this episode demands that the retreatant exercise his own, hard-won spiritual senses, that he apprehend the apparition otherwise withheld through precisely those new faculties of discernment brought forth by the very manual that now calls out explicitly for this “intelligence.” Nor, Fessard thinks, is this an isolated exigency. Generalizing the point, he refers to a larger structure of delay subtending the Gospels: “But precisely the truest and holiest of these effects [of the Resurrection] do not reveal themselves to the Christian conscience as immediately as the most miraculous ones”22—a rule he takes to explain, among other phenomena, the very recentness of the papal definitions of the central Marian dogmas (the Immaculate Conception dates from 1854; the Assumption, from 1950).23 This delay, he suggests, is because, unlike the Virgin’s perfect faculties, the finite individual’s spiritual senses—and indeed, those of the Church itself—inevitably remain prone to lacunae and lapses of various sorts.24 There are, I think, two main, closely related points we might usefully draw. The first is that Mary figures in Fessard’s account as something like a textual silence in Scripture. Like the reserves that

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are starting to interest Hantaï, she is nonetheless a wholly active absence, structuring and articulating the whole. As a tutelary figure for pliage, she helps to position that painting as a method likewise attuned to the constitutive power of the interstitial. No less important, however, is the fact that these meditations on Mary bring to the fore the role of reading itself—both in Fessard’s own text and, by virtue of what that account makes visible, within Ignatius’s manual. Indeed, this argument all but requires that we grasp Fessard’s approach as forged in no small part by its object (even as it brings that object newly into view). I take Hantaï to be interested in just this idea that a method might actively cultivate its own conditions of legibility, that the text at stake here is not flatly available but on some level demands, and so aims to effectuate, a fundamentally new disposition on the part of its reader. Pliage, I surmise, stakes a similar claim. It, too, models a highly particular intelligence, itself the fruit of a certain path. Yet here as in Hantaï’s writings—and written paintings—of the 1950s, the artist repeats his sources with fundamental differences, acknowledging a tradition that has helped to form him but that he already knows his work to exceed. His reserves are not true and holy effects of the Christian history they nonetheless conjure, nor do they promise a future fullness of revelation. Neither simply inside nor altogether outside that faith but, as it were, proliferating beyond its hermeneutic bounds, pliage does to the Ignatian text what the Sexe-Prime manifesto had once done to its expropriated surrealist sources. It is a mark of Hantaï’s continued attachment to the mutual, nonlinear jostling of distinct realities that one might detect a particular haunting of the Mariales by some rather different Virgins (and Brides, or Mariées); that one might discern unstable yet insistent traces of another Passage behind the

FIg. 54 Marcel duchamp, Passage from the Virgin to the Bride,

1912. oil on canvas. Museum of Modern art, new York.

advent of pliage (fig. 54); that the 1967 list’s silences rétiniens might open not simply toward the painterly equivalent of Fessard’s scriptural blanks but also, complexly, toward a whole host of more recognizably Duchampian refusals that have in some sense been here all along—and that are perhaps reasserting themselves with renewed force on the other side of Hantaï’s intensive traversal of religious tradition. (Is it sheer coincidence that one should feel this particularly among the inaugural paintings of the M.D. suite?) The next chapter takes up precisely this additional linkage, exploring what I see as the painter’s renewed, if still largely subterranean, engagement with Duchamp’s profoundly eroticized model of art making within the terms of folding.

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Figuring Finitude 1

CHAPTER 6

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The catalogue for Simon Hantaï’s 1999 retrospective at the Westfälisches Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte in Münster, Germany, reproduces side-by-side on a single page two paintings that were also hung adjacently within the show (figs. 55–56).1 Both are from 1968 and belong to the body of canvases known as the Meuns, after the tiny hamlet near the Forêt de Fontainebleau where the artist recently had established a joint studio and residence. The pictures are of similar dimensions, being just slightly taller than the standing human form and very nearly square. Comparable, too, is the overall disposition of painted forms: both reveal quatrefoil, roughly rounded shapes—one lobe in each quadrant of the support—and both are similarly marked in the upper right zones with downward-slashing diagonals of unpainted cloth. Clearly, the two paintings form a pair. But, like many couples, the two works also reveal striking differences; indeed, they appear differently sexed. Consider in particular that oblong form between the black Meun’s lower lobes, a feature oddly reminiscent of another pseudoappendage in the center of Sexe-Prime (fig. 57)—yet conspicuously lacking from the predominantly brown partner. Not that the latter canvas is devoid of equally suggestive incident: rather, its midsection is traversed instead by long, horizontal slits. Given Hantaï’s active participation both in the installation of the Münster exhibition and in the preparation of its eventual catalogue, it is hard not to see this juxtaposition as a highly pointed pairing. The Meuns are generally taken to mark a key crux in the pliage work, as in the broader history of late modern painting in France. As various writers have repeatedly stressed, they announce Hantaï’s mature reckoning with the art of Matisse—and ultimately, with that of Cézanne—whose immense achievements he would now remake “after Pollock.”2 While this claim is rarely unpacked in depth,

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FIg. 55 simon Hantaï, Meun, 1968. oil on canvas. Private collection.

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FIg. 56 simon Hantaï, Meun, 1968. oil on canvas. Private collection.

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FIg. 57 simon Hantaï, Sexe-Prime: Hommage à Jean-Pierre Brisset, 1955, detail. oil on canvas. Musée national d’art moderne—Centre georges Pompidou, Paris. Purchase by the state, 1968.

it turns primarily upon the readily apparent formal resonance between these monochromatically painted canvases and the cutouts of Matisse’s late career. Integral to that resemblance are the blank or white zones that, for the first time in Hantaï’s work, so prominently penetrate the pigmented areas and allow the paintings to “respire” as never before.3 All of this is right so far as it goes. And yet, as the painter’s closing list in the catalogue for Peintures 1960–1967 can serve to remind us, this “suite 138

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ou non” also marks a moment of deep uncertainty, if not crisis, in his evolving conception of his medium. To the extent that we see that hesitation as provoked largely by the emerging opposition between painted and unpainted, our opening couple suggests the haunting of that polarity by another set of questions having to do centrally with sexual difference. Later in life, Hantaï often forced the issue, claiming to spend his days in the studio “spreading vaginas”—a reference to the folds of his unstretched canvases—and retrospectively describing the slits in his first pliage series, the Mariales, as displaced stand-ins for the decidedly creaturely sex concealed by the Virgin’s robes.4 Such comments were clearly meant to provoke and discomfit, and they run their own risks of banalizing what was, from first to last, an extraordinarily complex and searching practice. They nonetheless recall earlier emphases in the painter’s post-surrealist oeuvre: for example, Sexe-Prime’s assertion that “the canvas reacts sexually to the sexual gestures of the hand.”5 And in so doing, the artist’s remarks remind us of the willfully “impure” nature of his oeuvre, a point on which Hantaï never ceased to insist. This chapter advances a new story, one aimed at articulating the relation of Hantaï’s later pliage work to his earlier explicitly eroticized painting— and at the recovery of deep continuities among the more evident ruptures. Of special interest to this account is the extent to which the artist might be understood as retrieving, so as to rethink fundamentally, a certain notion of “the feminine”—or better, femellité—that had been operative in his painting of the early 1950s and that now comes to signify anew in the context of the folding method. The Meuns, I claim, show him bringing together two problematics we tend to think of as distinct— the surrealist exploration of sexuality and the modernist investigation of medium—and making

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them mutually driving for his art. These pivotal canvases thereby provide a powerful response to then-emerging narratives of modernism as a drive toward “pure visuality” or “the literal” (accounts at times applied, as seen in the introduction, to Hantaï’s own work), pointing toward a more difficult and nuanced vision of the painterly enterprise. Some time in the course of 1953 while Hantaï was an active member of Breton’s circle (and prior to the writing of “Une démolition au platane”), he painted two canvases that he called Femelle-Miroir I (Female-mirror I) and Femelle-Miroir II (Female-mirror II) (figs. 58–59).6 Emerging against the backdrop of the openly experimental and frequently abstract work that had preceded the painter’s first encounters with the group, these works suggest a renewed interest in the problem of the figure. Despite their sequential titles, the two pictures probably were worked on simultaneously in the studio, and the I and II might be taken as reflecting something more conceptual or mythical than literal succession. Each painting turns upon a central protagonist—presumably, the title Femelle—painted for the most part in sickly, acid-green tints and portrayed before a real or suggested mirror.7 At 5'5" × 5'8.64", in the case of Femelle-Miroir I, and 4'8" × 5'8.38", in that of Femelle-Miroir II, both works are fairly large for Hantaï at that time, and both were produced through controlled acts of the painter’s then-characteristic scraping technique—that is, through the selective removal of pigment with razor blades and other implements. They are also, to put it mildly, among the unloveliest pictures Hantaï ever made, and even the painter’s most ardent admirers rarely dwell on this period of his production. Nonetheless, they can help to shed new light both on what Hantaï took from the

surrealist leader’s discourse on desire, and what in it he resisted.8 Clear debts to Breton are flagged from the first by the paintings’ title notion of a Femelle-Miroir, a conjunction indebted to one of Breton’s best known poems.9 Entitled “Free Union,” it appeared first in the 1931 collection Earthlight and later was included among Nadeau’s selection of representative surrealist documents in his foundational chronicle, The History of Surrealism of 1944. A central statement in the annals of surrealist poetry, it is among the most striking manifestations of Breton’s persistent tendency to associate that practice with an exalted femininity, the latter serving as the catalyst and support for the former.10 Breton’s poem offers a series of striking images of a woman, identified only—and repeatedly— as ma femme, a description typically translated into English as “my wife.” Each line focuses on a specific physical attribute, from the opening “My wife with her wood-fire hair” to “My wife with breasts of a deepsea molehill” and “My wife with springtime buttocks,” among other images.11 In so doing, each line also offers a double context in which to consider the poem’s title. On the one hand, Breton’s amorous inventory of the feminine anatomy is consistent with the larger surrealist celebration of romantic love and erotic coupling. On the other, each image is itself an example of “free union”—the “fortuitous juxtaposition” of “two distant realities” invoked from the 1924 “Manifesto” forward as the defining principle of surrealist poetics.12 Those images, Breton never ceased to stress, are less forged by the surrealist poet than received by him as luminous revelations of his own desire: “The mind becomes aware of the limitless expanses wherein its desires are made manifest . . . where its obscurity does not betray it.”13 FIgurIng FInItude 1

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FIg. 58 simon Hantaï, Femelle-Miroir I, 1953. oil on canvas. galerie Jean Fournier, Paris. FIg. 59 simon Hantaï, Femelle-Miroir II,

1953. oil on canvas, mirror, bones. Musée national d’art moderne—Centre georges Pompidou, Paris. gift of Maurice gorelli, 1990.

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These two kinds of congress are superimposed ceaselessly throughout the poem, as when Breton presents his femme as endowed with “fingers of chance” or—the line on which Hantaï draws—a “mirror sex.”14 She, like the automatic images that are all we know of her, offers a heightened reflection to the poet, one that both completes him and reveals him to himself. Accordingly, despite the seeming dispersion of her body into a succession of disparate images, Breton’s femme nonetheless appears in the poem’s final line as the site of a higher unity. In her “eyes of water level air level earth and fire level,” she gathers the four classical elements: all the material of which the world is made, and to be made anew.15 Hantaï’s response to Breton’s poem shows him working at once with and against the grain of the elder man’s practice and theory in at least two key and closely related respects. First, he refuses the surrealist leader’s idealist elevation of his feminine muse, recasting his title protagonist as the femelle of a decidedly nonhuman, indeed monstrous, species—something closer, perhaps, to Duchamp’s pendu femelle in the Large Glass. Second, he displaces Breton’s hallucinatory emphasis on the notionally separable, metaphoric incident—each line of verse, like each body part, a distinct jewel in its own right—in favor of the formal and metonymic rhythms and permutations of a comparatively circumscribed range of biomorphic shapes. For where Breton’s femme appears to be the unifying support for a seemingly inexhaustible production of poetic images, Hantaï’s femelle is a literal composite, an aggregate of interlocking but seemingly detachable or movable parts—and indeed, it is precisely this that appears monstrous.16 The zeppelin-like “breasts,” for example, not only are mismatched but also appear utterly distinct from the torso as a whole. But for a

curiously human right hand, the figure’s arms appear constructed of repeating wrench shapes. The mandibles connecting head to breasts echo uncannily the protagonist’s legs. The odd double knee of the femelle’s proper left leg appears to be a reversed and slightly smaller version of the no less peculiarly rotated and stacked buttocks. And so on. Further compounding these repeating visual rhymes, virtually all the forms that compose this body have counterparts or near counterparts in the more dispersed shapes that take up the rest of the field. It is as if Femelle-Miroir I shows those elements coming together momentarily to make a roughly anthropomorphic assemblage; or, alternately, we are to imagine those forms as the dispersed remnants or disjecta of a shattered figure, regrouping beyond the limits of the person. (That the vertical presence on the left registers as having lost a leg seems to support the latter view.) Either way, the femelle’s realm appears as one that somehow refuses or resists totalization, its emblematic figure having, as it were, no solid center of its own. That lack finds mythical expression in Hantaï’s displaced and almost comically hideous version of a “mirror sex”: the striking double image of gaping maw and depicted looking glass, the opaque darkness of which reads initially as a hole in the support itself. Hantaï’s displacements of Breton draw upon other veins of surrealist practice—the earlier fascination with the praying mantis, for example, as a once widespread emblem of a devouring and castrating femininity (of femininity as devouring and castrating)17 or the disarticulated and combinatory anatomies elaborated by Picasso and Alberto Giacometti in the 1930s. Indeed, perhaps the closest pictorial precedent for Femelle-Miroir I—and one exactly contemporaneous with Breton’s poem—is a work by Picasso in which those FIgurIng FInItude 1

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FIg. 60 Pablo Picasso, Seated Bather, early 1930. oil on canvas.

Museum of Modern art, new York.

conventions come together, the 1931 Seated Bather, revealing a female nude with vertical bosom and serrated mandibles (fig. 60).18 There, as elsewhere in Picasso’s work, the female figure appears as the privileged terrain for a larger violence against form. Hantaï reimagines her as that menace embodied, a seemingly active agent of destruction. But where the painter draws upon such precedents, it is only to wield them against Breton’s idealizing tendencies—effectively pitting surrealism’s stronger impetuses against its weaker eventualities. Pushing this further, one might then see the central figure in Femelle-Miroir I as an early allegorical emblem of what Hantaï and Schuster would soon identify in “Démolition au platane” as 142

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the surrealist imperative par excellence: the need to “[exalt] as much as possible that obscure part that, in the human [l’homme], begins to be human no more”19—as an augur, that is, of the “metahuman condition.”20 Such exaltation was, in Hantaï’s view, always at least implicit in the movement, coursing through virtually all its stronger productions. But it was also an exigency from which the painter believed Breton and his friends inevitably turned away, erecting the myth of a higher or truer self just where selfhood as such appeared most precarious. That perceived failure—that shrinking from the abyss—finds allegorical expression in turn in Femelle-Miroir I’s successor, Femelle-Miroir II. The protagonist in this picture is very different and not only on account of the real skull and bone attached to the canvas, standing in for head and neck. Unlike the menacing aggregate of Femelle-Miroir I, this figure is presented as possessed of something like interiority in at least part of its body: note the cursive scrapings that mark its proper right hand and forearm, as if so many cruelly exposed nerves. (Similar scrapings also appear in two cutaway sections in the torso of the being to the left but have been denaturalized by their bluish-purple and turquoise coloring. In Femelle-Miroir I, comparable effects are associated only with the main figure’s props or attributes: the sponge-like form in its proper right hand and the giant egg on which it perches.) No less crucially, the creature is depicted with a flat, uninterrupted torso, and the painted portion of its body is altogether smoother: gone are its predecessor’s hyperbolic attributes of femellité, the wrenched buttocks and pneumatic breasts. One effect of that difference is that it appears less a biological femelle than a mâle in the process of becoming other—and doing so against anything we might imagine as its will.

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Indeed, one has a much stronger sense here of forms impinging upon or actively breaking up the figure, such as the blue-green vise with which the being to the left clamps the central entity’s proper right arm or the turquoise shape evoking an inverted pelvis that encircles the other arm. (Note that both events can read almost as diagrams of the sexual act.) Most telling of all, this figure grips a yellow, suggestively phallic form in its visibly innervated right hand, even as other elements in the painting latch on to it—as if to carry it away into the impersonal free-for-all that otherwise reigns (or is, at any rate, on the verge of reclaiming its rights). That the form is a kind of phallus is underscored not just by its placement near the otherwise lacking groin of the faceless being to the far left; nor by the at least equally testicular cast of what appears initially as the central figure’s cleft and therefore “feminine” sex; nor even by the recurrence of a similar yellow shape along the same horizontal axis, meaningfully appended to the final presence to the painting’s far right. These are all features that help frame the central figure as an allegory of resistance to the claims of that “obscure part” that exceeds the human, an obstinate but impotent clinging to a besieged and menaced unity. The alternately mortifying and comic undercurrents to this scenario fight for expression in Femelle-Miroir II’s seemingly grinning skull. One additional, crucial aspect of this picture concerns the “sculptural” qualities of its title creature and, indeed, the work as a whole. The pull of sculpture is most apparent in Hantaï’s use of three-dimensional collage elements, from the real, if decidedly nonreflective, mirror visible through a cutaway square in the canvas to the projecting, hyperbolically phallic bone. But Hantaï’s raclage technique also appears to be a quasi-sculptural process, insofar as it involves a kind of direct

“carving” into color. And indeed, the brightly hued, carefully modeled protagonist stands out powerfully from the painting’s gray-brown ground. Even the forms described earlier as impinging upon that figure—the two turquoise shapes encircling the arms—in fact bolster the illusion of three-dimensionality by presenting those arms in the round, able to be gripped in that way. These features are of course not absent from Femelle-Miroir I. There, too, Hantaï’s raclage has produced the illusion of any number of pumped-up, pneumatic, or tumescent shapes. And yet the central “castrating” figure and her support appear in many ways on the side of painting. The eponymous mirror is painted, as is the femelle’s head. The curiously gridded ground, seemingly produced through acts of folding and pressing the as-yet unstretched canvas, remarks the literal superficiality of that support, yet that field is nonetheless virtualized and made to recede by the brightly colored forms seeming to hover in front of it. This ambiguity is redoubled in the central entity. Identified chromatically with the ground, she appears in places on the verge of sinking back into it; elsewhere, however, forms are depicted as if passing behind her, therefore forcing her forward again. Some of the figural distortions read as deliberate send-ups of painterly illusionism: I think in particular of her oddly rotated buttocks, wrenched to one side as if explicitly for two-dimensional representation. (Here as elsewhere, one suspects Hantaï has Picasso in mind.) As if clinching the association, her proper left hand holds a form suggestively like a palette. Her deformation is keyed intimately to the planarity of the support; her menace draws impetus from that flatness, renders it animate. At stake here, then, are different stances not only toward matters of unity and dispersal but also toward art making as such—or more precisely, FIgurIng FInItude 1

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toward art making conceived as a means to unity or dispersal. To summarize, one might say that Femelle-Miroir I figures painting itself as marked by lack, its two-dimensional surface always already removed from the world of three-dimensional things, compelling distortion and displacement from the start; whereas the refusal of that voracious flattening—of that voracious flatness—maintains itself in a fantasy of the literal, of “being,” that finds expression in a certain aspiration to sculpture. Considered as a pair, Femelle-Miroir I and Femelle-Miroir II suggest that Hantaï himself oscillated between these two poles, not so much dissolving the opposed impulses of Breton’s surrealism as rotating them toward different mediums.21 What emerges in this movement is a deep and driving question about the possibilities and impossibilities of embodied self-recognition before a painting that would not simply borrow its effects from sculpture. The question of medium implicitly broached in Femelle-Miroir I and Femelle-Miroir II was not one especially encouraged within surrealist environs, given the group’s professed indifference to formal concerns.22 And as we have seen, Hantaï’s own work in the years following his 1955 break with Breton appears to opt definitively for dispersal, as he pursues what, partly owing to his first encounters with Pollock, he comes to understand as the necessarily abstract imperatives of surrealist automatism. Abandoning the suggestively sculptural volumes of his earlier figurative work, he turns increasingly to gestural and allover modes of marking. And yet those same paintings suggest the enduring hold on Hantaï of the yearning for plenitude apparent in Femelle-Miroir II, as if a generalized, palimpsestic density— what I have characterized as a form of horror 144

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vacui23—were now superseding the finite, bounded sculpture-likeness of the earlier work. (Insofar as Hantaï’s increasingly writing-like gestures take over and transform the cursive scrapings identified earlier with innervation and interiority effects, they only strengthen the sense of partial, problematic continuity.) The paintings’ tightly woven surfaces are less about flatness than a higher, “supraindividual” fullness. Their centerless mesh is beyond male and female, beyond bodies, beyond the human. Pliage emerges in part as interrupting or checking that imagination—and does so by bringing the body of the support itself actively in play. For, as we have seen, the canvas in pliage is not a taut screen awaiting inscription but obdurately physical stuff. Crumpled, redoubled, at times knotted, it exists as a variously three-dimensional volume, from light relief to pneumatic sack. Unfolded, however, that same, previously “sculptural” mass is revealed to be a painted surface—and more often than not, one traversed by unpainted reserves or “holes.” Hantaï, I propose, experienced that revelation as a new and more extreme version of the earlier surrealist paintings’ menace of dispersion. Witness a range of strategies that effectively mitigate the potentially disruptive nature of the unpainted, from his frequent use of black dripping, to near monochromy, to repeated acts of folding and repainting that pulverize the borders between painted and unpainted, and thus approximate the effects of the earlier layering and packing. Yet he also—and again as in the surrealist work— found himself drawn to that threat, as suggested by his recurrent, though visibly hesitant, attempts to bring the unpainted back into play. This is the context in which we have to grasp the artist’s mature, mid-1960s reckoning with prior moments in French modernism, crucially commencing with the work of Cézanne. Hantaï

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had looked before at the latter’s painting and in fact admired it deeply during his student years in Hungary.24 But that interest had gone underground during his surrealist tenure and its immediate aftermath.25 Integral to Hantaï’s renewed engagement with this predecessor was the perception that Cézanne, too, had confronted the prospect of painterly flatness, as raised by new practices of plein air painting. The challenges of retaining or indeed recovering “the sculptural” after impressionism come through clearly in a letter sent by Cézanne to Camille Pissarro in July 1876, which Hantaï cited frequently in his later years. In that missive, the artist, then working at L’Estaque, describes the intensity of the sun as producing contrasts so strong as to reduce all objects to depthless shapes: “It is like a playing card. . . . The sun here is so tremendous that it seems to me as if the objects were silhouetted not only in black and white, but in blue, red, brown, and violet. I might be wrong, but to me it seems the opposite of modeling.”26 Cézanne could not, however, be content with that sapping of mass and volume. Thus his famous rejection of Paul Gauguin, as reported by Émile Bernard: “‘He didn’t understand me,’ he responded furiously. ‘I never wanted and never will accept the lack of modeling or of gradation; it’s nonsense. Gauguin wasn’t a painter, he only made Chinese images.’”27 Cézanne’s solution, as has been amply documented and discussed in the literature on his art, involves a rejection of modeling in a traditional sense—that is, as an effect of light and dark contrasts—and its effective reinvention as a matter of chromatic oppositions, as built up patiently through the repeated application of flat, discontinuous deposits of pigment.28 Returning to Hantaï’s early pliage work discussed in chapter 5, we might now say that one group in particular—the Panses—shows him

experimenting with Cézanne’s method of construction through color. Like Femelle-Miroir I and Femelle-Miroir II just over ten years prior, these new paintings with their relatively circumscribed and roughly centered forms reveal the artist pulling back from a more allover mode—in this case, the edge-to-edge crumpling of the Mariales—so as to reinstate a dialectical tension between figure and ground, as if he were again concerned not to go “too quickly,” as if he sensed that something about this opposition remained to be thought through (see fig. 43).29 The results often appear as deflated or collapsed versions of the pneumatic-seeming and similarly biomorphic forms in Hantaï’s earlier peintures raclées. Yet the folded and unfolded works no longer mobilize the light-dark contrasts that model the otherwise monochromatic forms in the two Femelle-Miroir pictures; rather, each act of folding and painting appears to have involved the use of multiple, often closely related tones: here a range of dusky plums, pinks, and violets; there a family of teal, turquoise, and cerulean blues. Sometimes he places these touches side by side, as if so many individual chromatic cellules (an idea brought to explicitness by his avowed reference to some then-recent lines by the poet Henri Michaux);30 more often, however, he layers them densely or blends them with paintbrush or finger to create alternately subtle and striking local effects of relative recession and projection, as seen in Panse, M.M.3 (fig. 61). Canvases of the former sort often let at least some unpainted support peek through (a feature also apparent in Cézanne’s later work but of which he despaired31) while those of the latter variety make of the painted areas surprisingly sculptural masses—forms as if cut out against the unpainted far more than internally cut or interrupted by the unpainted. Tellingly, Hantaï recorded a number of these works in his notes simply by FIgurIng FInItude 1

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drawing the contour around the pigmented area, the interior operations of the unpainted being comparatively negligible (fig. 62). Not incidentally, a number of these configurations also appear profoundly anthropomorphic—even, in a handful of smaller Panses, portrait-like (figs. 63–64). Read against such results, the encroachment of the unpainted can appear as a threat not simply to the painted but, indeed, to personhood; it is a new avatar of the simultaneously desired and resisted release from human bounds of the two Femelle-Mirroirs. And as in those earlier canvases, the proliferation of La Saucisse (The sausage)—Hantaï’s original title for the series—can read as, in part, at once the symptom and the vehicle of a continued evasion or disavowal. Hantaï’s dealings with these issues might have remained there had they not been interrupted and transformed by another, closely related movement of redoubling and new recognition. In 1967, the painter was named the first laureate of the Fondation Maeght in Saint Paul, France. While in residence there to prepare his subsequent exhibition, Hantaï took time for two key trips: to Aix-en-Provence, where he saw both Mont Sainte-Victoire and Cézanne’s studio at Les Lauves, and to nearby Vence, where he visited Matisse’s Chapel of the Rosary. The artist was of course familiar with Matisse’s work already. Indeed, the MNAM’s 1949 exhibition of the master’s late papiers découpés had been among the first shows Hantaï had seen upon arrival in France, prompting him to make several small-scale works of his own employing cut out forms, as well as stenciled shapes that resemble cutouts. Nonetheless, that early approach had remained without consequence during and in the wake of the painter’s

FIg. 61 (oPPosIte) simon Hantaï, Panse, M.M.3, 1965. oil on

canvas. Musée Fabre, Montpellier. FIg. 62 simon Hantaï, sketches of works in the Panses series, date

unknown.

surrealist tenure—whereas this second encounter transforms his practice altogether. What Matisse shows Hantaï, in short, is a new means of “carving” into color, oriented less to the presumed density of things-in-themselves than to the lateral rapports that at once link and divide them. And FIgurIng FInItude 1

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That the passage in question was experienced as difficult, indeed menacing, by Matisse himself is among the central claims in a defining essay by Georges Duthuit. In 1958, the art historian—who was also Matisse’s one-time son-in-law—published “Le tailleur de lumière” (The carver of light) in the last of several special issues of Verve devoted to the recently departed master. There Duthuit begins by situating the papiers découpés as Matisse himself did, which is to say, as the culmination of a lifelong quest to construct through chromatic contrasts alone so that “the work is born of the pure confrontation of colors.”32 He then describes a crucial shift in the overall development of the painter’s oeuvre, having to do with what one might call the delivery time of his painted surfaces. Earlier works by Matisse, Duthuit claims, inevitably conjured duration and that duration was on the side of density:

FIg. 63 simon Hantaï, Panse, 1965. oil on canvas. galerie Jean Fournier, Paris.

it is in light of that fundamental shift that the younger man is able, in turn, to embrace pliage as a medium in which the reserve of painting— the “lack” associated since Femelle-Miroir I with the title protagonist’s displaced “mirror sex”— ceases to register simply as form-destroying and instead becomes fully implicated in a larger play of spacing. 148

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From the time Matisse painted The Dance and Music, there certainly existed large surfaces delivered of local tones; but the course of the paintbrush nonetheless insinuated its highs and its lows, its moments of assurance and of hesitation, of quickening and of turning back. It wove from them, touch upon touch, a fabric of compliances, of conciliations, of joys, that loosened the inertia of the canvas, and allowed it to palpitate, to respire. It had, in all its frankness, an unfolding: the labor of the painter in time, going against routine, modulating space by his effort, rediscovering volume and depth by virtue of that effort.33 All of this, however, the art historian takes to have changed with the papiers découpés Matisse began making in the 1940s. There the artist cut directly into gouache-covered surfaces, modulating their predetermined hues through contour

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alone—or more precisely, through the creation of differently proportioned and shaped areas of color. In a further central passage, Duthuit discusses Matisse’s own likening of such cutting to the “direct carving of the sculptors”:34 Is it not the first time, in fact, that the technique of statuary is applied to the substance of painting? The artist carves in a block that is no longer sandstone or marble, but chroma. He therefore assigns himself an onerous task, for color does not lend itself easily to sculptural treatment. . . . He must imagine a language in which to continue to say weights and measures. Similarly, the former means of marking distances, and therefore of aerating the work, no longer offer him the least help; and yet, the work must continue to breathe. Matisse finds himself in the situation of an organism suddenly required to modify radically its breathing apparatus, to substitute a system of gills for lungs. The work now respires thanks to a subtle play of expansions and contractions, entirely due to the configuration of forms, since the flatness of the plane and the integrity of the color are without recourse.35 Duthuit frames this fundamental transition as, above all, an experience of exposure, indeed, of lucidity almost to the point of excess: “If there is strangeness here, it is not the strangeness that proliferates in the reserves of obscurity, but the strangeness of light . . . [that] invades our innermost being.”36 This light—“exterior, physical, or rather natural”—appears less as a complement to what Duthuit calls its “age-old guarantor, the light within” than as a uniquely threatening element:37 “If the most intimate aspect of being receives

FIg. 64 simon Hantaï, Panse, 1964. oil on canvas. Private collection.

access to liberty, it is only to feel itself just as soon dissipated by that liberty, just as pockets of humidity evaporate when exposed to the burning heat of summer.”38 Matisse moves toward that light as toward his peril. A blue and green canvas of 1968 shows Hantaï retracing and renewing that passage on his own terms (fig. 65). The painting is one of several transitional or “uncertain” Meuns that show the painter beginning once again to divide tone, as he limits himself increasingly to one color per area FIgurIng FInItude 1

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of the cloth support or even per act of folding, painting, and unfolding.39 Like the great decorative panels by Matisse cited by Duthuit, the work begins to suggest an expansive quality that will be one of the hallmarks of Hantaï’s later pliage work. But also like those pictures, it reveals internally variegated fields of highly legible brushwork—a luscious painterliness facilitated by Hantaï’s use of extremely liquid oil paint, which introduces a sense of palpable volume into many of the pigmented zones. That effect is further enhanced by the addition of blue paint around the edges of the green areas to the lower left and upper right: as in so many works by Matisse and indeed Cézanne before him, that addition appears meant to suggest a turning of forms in space. Such effects show Hantaï, like those predecessors, straining against the potential collapse of painting into the “playing card.” Yet this same work reveals deeper transformations nonetheless taking place in Hantaï’s art: in particular, the interruption of the painted forms by greater and lesser expanses of unpainted canvas. Breaking the continuity of the painted fields, those zones draw our attention away from the internal inflections proper to any one chromatic area, toward the overall modulation of the entire surface by all the forms, working at once in concert with one another and against the total unpainted field in which they appear. Put another way, the painting shows Hantaï learning a fundamentally Matissean lesson: that the work of art is constituted entirely by rapports.40 This recognition allows the younger artist eventually to move toward comparatively homogenous areas of flatly applied color and also toward

FIg. 65 simon Hantaï, Meun, 1968. oil on canvas. Private

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higher-keyed hues—shifts soon confirmed and carried forward by the immediately subsequent Études. (The increasing availability of acrylic paints also plays a role in this story.) A lemon yellow Meun of 1968 is especially daring in this respect (fig. 66). No color could be less adapted to picturing density, yet the forms do indeed breathe and turn, aerated by the variously proportioned slivers and stretches of unpainted canvas. The work is made fully of those ever-changing contrasts between painted and painted, as between painted and unpainted. This realization also proves enabling for Hantaï in a larger sense. It proves the liquidation of his longstanding resistance to the femelle body as that which lacks a solid core. One of the most striking developments in the overall elaboration of the Meuns is the painter’s gradual shift from choked or crowded to positively denuded central zones (fig. 67). Read against Hantaï’s earlier negotiations with surrealism, his acknowledgment of the unpainted suggests an active submission to precisely that menace of dispersion at once staged and denied in Femelle-Miroir I and II. That the painted areas in so many Meuns appear as later avatars of the earlier femelle’s exaggerated buttocks, breasts, and cleft sex appears to me to support this view (fig. 68)— as does a no less striking structural rhyming of so many unpainted “stars” with Femelle-Miroir I’s jagged maw.41 Such references can at times seem a bit too close to the surface (fig. 69). Yet the majority of Meuns exceed the dictates of recognizable figuration, their constellations appearing keyed instead to the diffuse and notionally impersonal physicality of the canvas itself (fig. 70). The acceptance of dispersion is perhaps the central event of the Meuns as a distinct ensemble and what divides this series crucially from Hantaï’s earlier pliage work. That assent is most immediately palpable in the increasing dynamism of the FIgurIng FInItude 1

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suite over time. Yet it also subtends the unfolding of each and every canvas, its passage from the monistic wholeness of a monochrome pouch to the contrastive structure of a surface riven by difference. Literalizing Duthuit’s description of a deep shift from “the reserves of obscurity” toward a “light . . . [that] invades our innermost being,” this pivotal transition appears to have been perpetually at stake, as suggested by Hantaï’s summation of his choice before each crumpled sack: “Whether to unfold it, or to leave it in mountain-form.”42 A number of Meuns bear visible reminders of their prior “sculptural” state. Indeed, many virtually invite the beholder to reconstitute their folded forms, the compacted volumes they once were (fig. 71). In so doing, they assume some of the force of effects previously made possible in the papiers découpés by the continued role of mimetic reference—the ways in which Matisse’s 1952 Vénus, to take just one example, is able to imply foreshortening through cut contour alone. Yet the Meuns also point to a key difference between Hantaï and Matisse. Where the latter draws momentum from external models, the younger man derives his from the materiality—the “body”—of the canvas itself. This markedly different emphasis is typically viewed as a kind of literalism, but the painter’s own remarks lead in a different direction, attributing the support an unprecedented degree of agency and selfhood. Hantaï does not cut into his canvas; rather, that canvas “cuts into itself . . . invaginates and hides itself.”43 That self-cutting action is further dramatized by an overall shift from the rounded paint areas of earlier Meuns to the increasingly slashing and shard-like forms of later instances within that group and, indeed, in all his subsequent suites. Hantaï’s experience of the unpainted frees up an inclination at least implicit in his practice, if not

FIg. 66 (oPPosIte) simon Hantaï, Meun, 1968. oil on canvas.

Private collection. FIg. 67 simon Hantaï, Meun, 1968. oil on canvas. Private

collection.

fully available to him, since his surrealist tenure. From now on, he approaches the canvas as a body in its own right—indeed, as a desiring body, one whose desires are at least partially opaque. And where that transformed situation may be liberating, it nonetheless raises more questions than it answers. In particular, the painter recalled, he soon found himself asking not simply what he wanted from painting but the inverse as well: “What does painting want from me?”44 FIgurIng FInItude 1

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FIg. 68 (oPPosIte) simon Hantaï, Meun, 1968. oil on canvas.

galerie Jean Fournier, Paris. FIg. 69 (leF t) simon Hantaï, Meun, 1968. oil on canvas. galerie

Jean Fournier, Paris. FIg. 70 (BeloW) simon Hantaï, Meun, 1968. oil on canvas.

Collection Mamac, nice. Purchase, 1989.

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FIg. 71 simon Hantaï in his studio at Meun, 1967–68.

This is, to say the least, a rather peculiar query. Idiosyncratic though it may seem, however, it resonates with investigations then taking place in other fields of profound interest to the artist, contemporary psychoanalysis foremost among them. I am thinking in particular of the teaching and writing of Jacques Lacan, who was in these same years reconsidering the notoriously fraught topic of feminine sexuality. (One recalls Freud’s infamously puzzled, “Was will das Weib?” [What does woman want?].45) Significantly, Lacan has traversed much the same surrealist culture as Hantaï, and the 156

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psychoanalyst, too, is critical of the movement on not unrelated grounds.46 He can provide a suggestive lens and even, at times, unintentional glosses on defining aspects of the problematic sketched so far. The key issue concerns Lacan’s insistence on rethinking sexual difference within the context of a return to Freud in which castration figures centrally. This emphasis is integral to his critique of American psychoanalysis and what he sees as its tendency to naturalize differences between the sexes, rooting them in brute biological fact. Against this penchant, Lacan points to what appears, in Freud, as the essentially psychic construction of

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these categories, recasting the castration complex as a drama about the ways in which human subjects discover themselves through language— and discover themselves, crucially, as mediated by otherness. The charting of these negotiations drives Lacan’s later work on feminine sexuality and particularly his 1972–73 seminar, Encore. There the psychoanalyst introduces a now well-known diagram ascribing each of the two sexes one of two sides, with those halves mapped in turn by different propositional formulas (fig. 72).47 His sustained scanning of these propositions evinces the difficulty characteristic of his later writings, but the basic point is simple enough: Lacan sees “masculine” and “feminine” as something like two different stances or positions one might inhabit. “Every speaking being,” he stresses, “situates itself on one side or the other,” yet nothing prevents a woman from taking up a place on the masculine side or a man from finding himself on the feminine side.48 This elasticity is possible precisely because one’s sex is not a natural given but a particular way of negotiating questions of unity and selfhood. Nor do the sexes divide as plenitude to mere lack, the masculine finding itself in a fullness of presence denied the feminine: both are subject to what Lacan calls the “phallus,” marked by and mediated through it. Both dream of a position outside the play of contraries that compose them (of a subjectivity without reserve, one might say), but they dream it differently. In Stephen Melville’s useful gloss: “The masculine position is one that thinks—poses—itself punctually and directly: ‘I am’ (for example) ‘not a slave’; whereas the reserve of feminine subjectivity asserts itself only mediately, through a unity which it is not: ‘Not all women are slaves (and I am not all).’ It is this ‘not-all,’ pas-tout, that Lacan takes to define

FIg. 72 diagram after Jacques lacan, from Encore: On Feminine Sexuality; The Limits of Love and Knowledge, 1972–73, vol. 20 of The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, edited by Jacques-alain Miller, translated by Bruce Fink (new York: W. W. norton, 1999).

woman.”49 The differences between the sexes are, as it were, grammatical differences. The psychoanalyst’s insistence on castration offers a new context in which to consider Hantaï’s passage beyond surrealism. Breton never ceases to dream of a unified self, free and undivided; that is the self he was seeking in the “mirror sex” integral to Hantaï’s negotiations with the movement. But what opposes this fantasy in the painter’s surrealist-era work—and what eventually supersedes it altogether with the move to pliage—is a deep, if initially inchoate, sense of the fact and claims of medium: that there is no language that does not originate with others, whose laws one can do no more than appropriate and transform. Against Breton’s defining early conception of surrealist automatism, then, a medium would be a FIgurIng FInItude 1

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FIg. 73 simon Hantaï, catalogue for his exhibition Hantaï, Musée national d’art moderne, Paris, May 26–september 13, 1976, detail of cover. FIg. 74 simon Hantaï, catalogue for his exhibition Hantaï, Musée national d’art moderne, Paris, May 26–september 13, 1976, detail of inside pages.

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language emphatically with reserve.50 Pushing this further, one might then say that “sculpture” and “painting” line up for Hantaï roughly as “masculine” and “feminine” do on Lacan’s chart, sculpture being that which “thinks—poses—itself punctually and directly,” while painting is marked from the first by a fundamental reserve and therefore “asserts itself only mediately, through a unity which it is not.” Like Lacan’s woman, painting for this artist comes to be defined by its condition of pas-tout, “not all.” Hantaï’s early pliage work often appears to stage the discovery of difference and the castration complex in a way that can feel not simply knowing but self-deprecating. So, for example, he multiplies phallic forms throughout the Panses and puts himself explicitly in the position of the child by virtue of the suite’s plaintive original title, Maman! Maman! dits: La Saucisse. (Asked about that title, the painter responded drily: “You can see this guy is lost.”51 Not for nothing does he use the third person here, as if further depersonalizing the drama.) By contrast, Hantaï in his later years privileged an unmistakably Oedipal trope for his reversal of fortune in pliage: through folding, he claimed, he “put out” his eyes.52 The unpainted reserves that assume prominence from the Meuns forward are both the marks of and the figures for that blindness—the constitutive nonmastery—in the act of painting. Psychoanalysis, I am suggesting, provides Hantaï an allegorical context in which to think through the problems of painting. By the same token, pliage might be understood as a therapeutic practice in its own right—a partial continuation on changed terrain of the earlier, post-surrealist association of automatism and spiritual exercise. Importantly, this method leads away from integration of the self toward a more difficult figuration

of the fundamentally split and knotted nature of subjectivity. Roughly put, Hantaï’s painting performs the task of the Lacanian analyst: it brings him (the “analysand”) to recognition of his finitude and contingency.53 The catalogue for Hantaï’s 1976 retrospective at the MNAM offers a further taking up and transformation of these issues. Designed by the painter himself with help from Fournier, this striking layout begins by presenting an implicit origin story for the artist’s pliage practice, and like all good instances of the genre, it is no less compelling for being mythical. That its very staging appears to have gone largely unremarked is perhaps but a further testament to that power. On the cover of the catalogue there appears a silkscreen detail of a large painting from a suite Hantaï had commenced in 1972 and called Tabulas (fig. 73). Like the Meuns, this work descends from Femelle-Miroir I, but where the 1967–68 canvases inherit the biomorphic shapes variously gathered and dispersed about that antecedent, this more recent effort reprises its gridded ground and dark-painted square (the depicted “mirror”). Powerfully reinforcing the association is the second image in the catalogue, a detail of a Tabula prior to unfolding (fig. 74). But this recognition would not have been available to Hantaï’s readers in 1976: neither Femelle-Miroir I nor its pendant was included in the MNAM show or its accompanying volume. Instead, what the catalogue offers— in the place of the third image—is yet another Femme-Miroir: a grainy, black-and-white photograph of the artist’s own mother, circa 1920.54 She gazes directly at the camera, the lower half of her body covered by her impeccably pressed tablier, or apron, which appears as a dark, gridded, and apparently reflective cloth, gleaming in the light.55 FIgurIng FInItude 1

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FIg. 75 simon Hantaï, catalogue for his exhibition Hantaï, Musée national d’art moderne, Paris, May 26–september 13, 1976, detail of inside pages.

Much ink has since been spilled about that garment, which has become a highly auratic object in its own right.56 My interest, however, is less in the thing itself than in the function it serves in the story Hantaï is telling, which is essentially a Freudian fable of the discovery of difference. Regressing through time—from open Tabula to closed Tabula—we find the powerful figure of the mother, her tablier as if commanded by Freud, the better to stoke the child’s curiosity about what lies behind.57 That we are indeed on a path of this sort appears 160

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confirmed by the following image in the catalogue, a detail of a 1949 painting by Hantaï of nine female bathers by a river, unclothed but holding various bits of fabric, including yet another gridded cloth (fig. 82). The scene is set; these various moments have only to be charged retroactively. And indeed, the next few images suggest the irruption of a sudden threat, the shattering of that quiet world by the river: from an allover painting of interlocking forms, we pass immediately to a 1951 painting of a monstrous figure with a cruelly amputated arm and blown-open stomach, its pose presaging elements of both Femelle-Miroir I and Femelle-Miroir II (fig. 75). Then we are in a new and alien land: a world

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of viscera and entrails, bodies in parts, horror vacui. Pliage emerges within and in reaction to this universe, letting the air back in. One could pursue this reading indefinitely, each additional image suggesting further constellations of associations, new sites from which to gather up Hantaï’s work. That interminability is the very point. For what the catalogue conjures is the birth of a subject riven by difference and conditioned by limits, a subject who will always have an “obscure part”—a monster to himself. This is, for Hantaï, the kind of being who makes paintings. Pliage is born of that monstrosity, engendered by it. Hantaï had, of course, been saying something like this all along: recall the earlier ruminations on what “Démolition au platane” had termed the

metahuman condition. But by 1976, there were new reasons for insisting on the claims of excess. The writings of Greenberg were increasingly available; American minimalism increasingly visible. Presented in France as “The Art of the Real”—as in the 1968 exhibition by that name at the Grand Palais—this work defined a new context in which the pressure of “the literal” was making itself felt with renewed force. Indeed, as will emerge, the Tabulas themselves take over structures and strategies broadly associated with minimalist art. Yet they do so only to show their deformation from within. It is to that confrontation that we now turn.

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Figuring Finitude 2

CHAPTER 7

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Over a period of roughly a decade, first in the years 1972–76 and then again in 1979–82, Hantaï produced his longest-running pliage series, the Tabulas. Beginning with an unstretched canvas or, increasingly as the suite developed, a generous expanse of thin Belgian linen of the sort typically used to manufacture bedsheets, the painter measured, marked, and folded that support into a regular rectilinear armature, twisting and securing the fabric at the intersections of the horizontal and vertical creases with bits of knotted string (fig. 76).1 This process alone could take up to several months, depending on the dimensions both of the format as a whole and of the internal units. Only when the entirety of the cloth had been folded and tied in this way did Hantaï flip the surface, flatten the resulting relief (a heavy roller might be deployed at this point), and apply paint to the exposed and newly planed expanse—an operation invariably effected with a modestly sized brush and typically at the rate of one constituent area at a time. Unfolded and subsequently stretched, completed Tabulas reveal allover arrangements of mono- or polychromatically painted squares or vertically oriented rectangles within unpainted grids. Traces of the generative creases are nearly always visible in the smoothed-out interstices. These paintings mark an important juncture in Hantaï’s art. On one hand, they have to be understood in part as evidence of the artist’s continued debts to Matisse, who had included similarly gridded areas within such paintings as Still Life with “Dance,” 1909; Interior with Aubergines, 1911; Still Life on a Green Sideboard, 1928; and Large Reclining Nude (The Pink Nude), 1935, to name but a few examples. Hantaï’s debts to his storied predecessor are especially palpable in any number of Tabulas deploying a particularly Matissean azure (fig. 77). On the other hand, however, the paintings’ edge-to-edge fields of repeating units appear bound in a decidedly contemporary drift toward various kinds of series and sets—a

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FIg. 76 simon Hantaï’s studio in Meun with a Tabula in progress, ca. 1975. FIg. 77 simon Hantaï, Tabula, 1974. acrylic on canvas. Private collection.

phenomenon importantly driven by, although by no means limited to, the increasingly ubiquitous cubes of American minimalism. Otherwise put, the Tabulas turn Hantaï’s newly Matissean emphasis on rapports—a reorientation integral, I have suggested, to the formal and philosophical achievements of the chronologically earlier Meuns—toward the modular grids of the 1960s and 1970s. 164

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In retrospect, the confrontation appears inevitable. The years leading up to this suite had seen the beginning of a highly active (and at times, notably anxious) reception in France of minimalist art.2 Perhaps the single most salient event was the exhibition The Art of the Real: USA 1948–1968, which arrived at the Galeries nationales du Grand Palais, Paris, in 1968.3 Curated by E. C. Goossen for MoMA in New York, the show displayed recent works by such figures as Tony Smith, Donald Judd, Robert Morris, Carl Andre, and Sol LeWitt alongside abstract expressionist and color field paintings and presented the featured artists as fundamentally united in their “insistence on the stubbornly literal idea of the ‘real.’”4 Goossen’s text especially

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emphasizes the growing importance of “the simple, irreducible, irrefutable object,”5 while the show offered various examples of such basic, apparently indivisible forms, whether exhibited in isolation (such as Smith’s infamous Die, 1962, perhaps the paradigmatic example) or as modular units in a simply repetitive, uncomposed grid or serial row (such as Judd’s eight cantilevered, vertically arrayed boxes in galvanized iron of 1965). Closely related works could be seen that same year in the solo exhibitions accorded to Morris and Smith at the Galerie Ileanna Sonnabend and the Galerie Yvon Lambert, respectively, while 1969 brought Don Judd: Structures to Sonnabend. Minimalist work was also visible in the international art press, with Artforum International and the Lugano-based Art International serving as particularly key sources for information and photographic reproductions of the new developments. Within France, the Tel Quel satellite and Supports/Surfaces organ, Peinture, cahiers théoriques, which commenced publication in 1971, and art press, which followed in 1972, revealed a particular orientation toward advanced American art and its criticism. Specific to this reception is the fact that it essentially coincided with—and indeed, to a significant degree, helped catalyze—the first real awareness in France of the texts of Clement Greenberg, whose now-canonical 1960 essay “Modernist Painting” appeared in translation only in the February 1974 issue of Peinture, cahiers théoriques.6 There it was presented as the expression of a typically American, rationalist, and positivist enterprise that nonetheless had the virtue of directing attention to the physical properties of painting as a medium, after what the journal’s affiliates had experienced as the windy rhetoric of the postwar criticism practiced in France by Tapié, Pierre Restany, and others.7 Minimalist art was broadly 166

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seen in this context as continuous with modernist “reductivism,” an impression that Goossen’s exhibition would have helped to encourage. Indeed, for Marcelin Pleynet—the central critic in this circle as well, as we have seen, as an early and important writer about Hantaï’s art—the work of Judd, Morris, and others appears largely as the prolongation in three dimensions of a partly salutary but ultimately misguided conception of the painterly enterprise, one that effaces the historicity of the medium and its problematic relationship to a larger social field under the sign of a strictly literal reality.8 The Hantaï of the Tabulas is broadly attentive to all of this, even as the discourse in Peinture, cahiers théoriques in particular is profoundly indebted to his practice. (Indeed, one might even speak of a feedback loop, in which the painter at once responds to and departs from positions elaborated substantially in response to his own achievements to date.) His final suite of publicly avowed pliage work confronts the challenges of minimalism and its complex aftermath. Yet it does so from within and by way of rearticulating what has already emerged as the artist’s hard-won commitment to a certain understanding of painterly reserve. Whereas the earlier Meuns appear animated by a deep and driving analogy between the finite canvas and the feminine (or femelle) body, the Tabulas mark the return of what might now appear to be the perennial problem of the ensemble or group, and in so doing, they seek a mode of relationality other than the sheer copresence implied by the “one thing after another” of the minimalist series or set.9 Such, at any rate, is the reading I wish to pursue in the following. As always, this investigation involves the manifold rereading and refiguring of what might otherwise appear as simply disparate moments in Hantaï’s practice to date.

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The grids that define the Tabulas have a long and varied prehistory within Hantaï’s art. Already in later 1948 or 1949, in the immediate wake of his arrival in Paris, the painter had produced a textile design that strikingly presages his later paintings: near-square azure units are suspended in a wavering, off-kilter armature while the structure itself, drawn in wax prior to the application of pigment, has rejected the blue medium and thus appears “unpainted” (fig. 78).10 Never intended as a stand-alone work, this diminutive pattern has no exact precedent or parallel within the artist’s contemporary painterly output. Yet it does resonate broadly, if differently, with at least two distinct groups of canvases produced in the immediately preceding and subsequent years. The first set of paintings, figurative works completed in Budapest prior to Hantaï’s departure for Paris and at least partly under the impress of his first encounters with French modernism, reveals some suggestive—and often spatially ambiguous or unruly—precedents for the slightly later schema. These canvases deploy gridded motifs in a manner akin to Matisse’s in the sense that the patterning is confined to depicted elements.11 In Hantaï’s friezelike, multifigure La joie de vivre (The joy of life), 1946, a yellow grid appears as if inscribed directly upon an otherwise white tabletop but conspicuously fails to recede in a manner consistent with that identification (fig. 79).12 In two other works, Az erkélyen (On the balcony), 1947, and an untitled, undated still life of roughly the same moment presently known only through a poor-quality color photocopy from the artist’s archives, comparable motifs have migrated to depicted linens: a pale cloth with blue grid in one case, a white material with black squares and green circles in the other (figs. 80–81). Particularly notable in the latter two paintings is the extent to which at least some

FIg. 78 simon Hantaï, Untitled, ca. 1948–49. Watercolor and wax

on paper. Private collection.

portion of the gridded textile registers as exactly flush with the picture plane. In the 1947 scene, the dangling fabric appears to be a virtual hinge between two nearly perpendicular planes of differing ontological status, pressed against each in turn: the literal support and the represented slab.13 In the still life, by contrast, the view is as if looking down on the arrangement from directly above. Here the picture plane and the tabletop are construed as parallel, the majority of the gridded cloth constituting an ultrathin intermediary surface between the two. Both textiles, it bears noting, belong to a larger body of depicted domestic linens. Variously colored and patterned dishrags, floorcloths, and bath towels appear throughout these and other Hungarian paintings—and even in one of the artist’s first works in Paris, the 1949 Peinture (Les baigneuses) (Painting [The Bathers]) (fig. 82). They therefore provide an early indication of what would prove Hantaï’s recurrent tendency to associate the canvas FIgurIng FInItude 2

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FIg. 79 simon Hantaï, La joie de vivre, 1946. oil on canvas. Private

collection.

with seemingly humble, “authorless” fabrics, as if their depicted variants already appeared to him uniquely resonant devices with which to interrogate the mechanics of representation as such.14 A group of early Parisian paintings from ca. 1950–51 move in a different direction. Here, the gridded or color-blocked surface appears coterminous with the support as a whole while its compartments are given over to near-repeating but always varied tangles of gestural grattage. In some, such as Peinture (Painting), 1950, and Espaces engourdis (Numb spaces), 1950–51, individual divisions differ in both color and dimensions (figs. 83–84). Their contents are similarly heterogeneous: a few contain additional rectangular (or 168

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nearly rectangular) units, in a kind of mise-enabyme, and many include—whether within those subsections or apart from them—multiple scraped areas of differing color, density, and overall disposition (note the naturalizing recourse to a landscape-like motif in the lower row of Espaces engourdis). Each unit within these otherwise impersonal geometric arrays therefore registers as highly particular, while the grids themselves are markedly irregular.15 In other paintings, such as Peinture (Painting), ca. 1950, which strikingly evokes the later Tabulas, the rectangles within the bright orange armature have been regularized in both size and color; each contains a single scraped area, approximately centered within its respective module (an arrangement that recalls the earlier tablecloth with its nested squares and circles) (fig. 85). These quadrangles read as derived

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FIg. 80 simon Hantaï, Az erkélyen, 1947. oil on canvas. Janus Pannonius Múzeum, Pécs, Hungary. FIg. 81 simon Hantaï, Nature morte, 1947. oil on canvas. location unknown.

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FIg. 82 simon Hantaï, Peinture (Les baigneuses), 1949. oil on canvas. Private collection.

from cubism, their edges deduced from the framing bounds of the canvas as a whole. At the same time, their side-by-side multiplication speaks forcefully to Hantaï’s interest in episodic organization: a mode of disposition in which each rectangle retains a certain independence rather than appearing subsumed within a larger pictorial hierarchy. Multipart arrangements of this sort mostly drop out of Hantaï’s painting of the mid- to late 1950s, as his work becomes more fully centered on the dialectic between the finite body and the writing-like field that I have presented as driving 170

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his post-surrealist period, and they remain in abeyance during the first decade of his pliage practice, in which I have suggested that dialectic plays out anew via the confrontation of painted “figure” and blank reserve. Yet they are in a sense reactivated by Hantaï’s exhibitions throughout the latter period. Looking at installation views of, for example, 138 peintures de petit format. Jalons des années 1962–1965 and especially Peintures 1960–1967, one is struck by the extent to which Hantaï and Fournier’s distinctive hangs recapitulate the irregular grids that scan the surfaces of individual artworks roughly fifteen years earlier (figs. 86–87). Paintings are arranged in vertical rows two or three canvases deep, each upright band typically a bit higher or lower than

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FIg. 83 simon Hantaï, Peinture, 1950. oil on canvas. Private collection.

but sometimes at precisely the same level as the one beside it. As with the differently sized units of the 1950–51 paintings, the featured works are of disparate dimensions, while the staggering of the vertical columns affords a relative autonomy to certain local groupings: the grid is never totalizing. Begging the connection to the surrealist-era

tables even more strongly is the cover of the 1967 catalogue, in which, as we have seen, a variety of mostly rectangular canvases form a nearly square configuration (see fig. 43). Once this basic structural resonance comes into view, one also notes the visual similarity of the painted areas to the earlier scraped motifs. Analogously individuated in terms of color and total configuration, each canvas now appears to be a separate module, compartment, or—to FIgurIng FInItude 2

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extend a term I used in chapter 6 to describe the constitutive daub of pigment to the painting as a whole—cellule within a larger contingent grouping. And as in the 1950–51 compositions, the irregular, misshapen, or indeed formless quality of the folded and unfolded zones registers as decidedly insubordinate to, if not openly pitted against, the otherwise rectilinear geometry of the whole. Yet one is immediately aware of an integral difference. Where the grid had been internal to the individual work, it now appears negatively, as an affair of unpainted interstices among materially discrete paintings. That distinctness is respected: canvases are not hung (or, in the case of the cover photograph, placed) flush with one another but juxtaposed, made to “communicate,” across slight but substantial reserves. These gaps call attention to the edges of each painting, thereby affirming the larger shift in Hantaï’s art from the over-lifesize scale and expansive alloverness of the Mariales to the smaller and more clearly circumscribed canvases and painted zones alike of the Catamurons and Panses. The diminished forms read as exposed and vulnerable, tipping this way and that within their stark white fields. That so many canvases also appear slightly off-kilter only underscores the singularity of each painting relative to its neighbors, as well as the new air of precariousness that attends the grouping as a whole. There is another way in which Peintures 1960– 1967 might be seen to relate to the artist’s earlier Hungarian work. Looking at the installation photographs, it can be tempting to say that Hantaï and Fournier’s hang brings “grouping” to the fore as an active process. The grid offers a means of gathering together a multiplicity of works without imposing hierarchy upon them. In this sense, it appears interestingly continuous with the lateral, friezelike

FIg. 84 (oPPosIte) simon Hantaï, Espaces engourdis, 1950–51. oil

on canvas. Private collection. FIg. 85 simon Hantaï, Peinture, 1950. oil on printed image mounted on cardboard. Private collection.

arrangements that distinguish Hantaï’s earlier multifigure paintings—as if the theme of conviviality, of the social assembly of implied equals, were here being transposed from depicted individuals to the canvases themselves and the fact of their coming together on a particular occasion. That a number of the painted zones can read as alternately phallic- and womb-like ciphers of the different sexes only reinforces the sense of a meaningful connection between the two moments. This link would then be a new twist within the larger displacement from depicted body to literal support that takes place in Hantaï’s painting as early as Sexe-Prime, a development carried further in turn by the eventual emergence of a certain number of strictly lateral Tabulas. FIgurIng FInItude 2

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FIg. 86 Peintures 1960–1967, June 22–July

31, 1967, galerie Jean Fournier, Paris, installation view. FIg. 87 Peintures 1960–1967, June 22–July 31, 1967, galerie Jean Fournier, Paris, installation view.

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Yet one might equally grasp the 1967 installation as dramatizing the primordial plurality of Hantaï’s practice: the ways in which these paintings have been bound up in one another from the first, conditioned by a larger play of repetition and difference. For just as Peintures 1960–1967 refigures the constituent paintings as so many cellules, the overall hang conjures a process of continually recommenced, unpredictably variable mitosis. Forms split and sprout excrescences; they swell and double. Certain passages assume a cinematic quality, as if slowing down or freeze-framing the division and displacement of one cell beyond itself or the flipping, rotation, or alternately slow and sudden evolution of clearly related configurations. And this, too, one might see in retrospect, is suggestively anticipated in the Hungarian work by the doubling effects discernible among the human subjects: for example, the red-haired, bearded man—almost certainly a self-portrait of the artist— who figures toward the left of La joie de vivre only to reappear, reversed but with hands similarly upraised, at the extreme right of the same canvas (see fig. 79). Put differently, even where the painted areas suggest the reemergence of some form of figuration within Hantaï’s pliage practice, those zones—and indeed the paintings as such—nonetheless register less as individuals in the sense of indivisible wholes than as singularities within a larger ensemble. Each work is related to the others and permeable to them. This impression is in no small part an effect of the hang, of the extent to which the sheer numerousness of the works in question tends to flatten or mitigate what one might otherwise see, on the basis of isolated and especially larger examples, as the same canvases’ unabashed painterliness and compacted density—their seemingly greater “subjectivism”—relative to the earlier Mariales.

The overall shrinking of dimensions is also crucial, helping as it does to shift the emphasis from any particular canvas to the nonlinear proliferation of the suite. Already in 1967, then, Hantaï offers a strong figuration of a group that is precisely not an ensemble of irreducible units. Not incidentally, as discussed in chapter 5, we remember this exhibition in part for having launched the formula “folding as method” (le pliage comme méthode), and there is room to think the painter’s celebrated phrase aimed to capture just this teeming fecundity.16 Like Cavell’s modernist series, pliage had proved capable of generating a multiplicity of clearly related yet importantly distinctive results: it could repeat with difference, both within suites and across them. The Tabulas take over and further transform that vision, effectively reappropriating plurality within the space of the single painting. But for this to take place, several further developments are necessary. Looking again at the Meuns, we recall the ways in which these canvases forced Hantaï to confront an unprecedented and initially disturbing dispersion of “the painted,” a shattering brought about in part by the renewed increase in dimensions. That reckoning culminates in his new conviction as to the constitutive potential of the blank reserve, and in its wake, two subsequent, closely related pliage suites at once register this reorientation and signal the emergence of a different issue. In the Études (Studies), which take up anew the edge-to-edge crumpling of the Mariales, the evocative, quasi-figural quality common to the Meuns cedes the terrain decisively to the allover, more or less equal distribution of colored fragments and unpainted areas. Hantaï’s continued use of monochromatic painted color and its increasingly flat application illuminate the extent to which the FIgurIng FInItude 2

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FIg. 88 simon Hantaï, Étude, 1969. oil on canvas. national gallery

of art, Washington, d.C. FIg. 89 simon Hantaï, Blancs, 1973. acrylic on canvas. Private collection.

activity of the white interstices now modulates the pigmented zones (fig. 88).17 The polychromatically painted Blancs (Whites) of 1973–74, by contrast, tip the balance explicitly in favor of the unpainted reserve (fig. 89). Here, the painted regions are clearly subordinate to the increasingly sizable expanses of primed or, more and more frequently, unprimed cloth. At the same time, the appearance of that literally blank support is shown to be no less contingent upon the neighboring 176

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color zones—and thus essentially heterogeneous, manifold from the first. (Throughout this series, accordingly, it is the individual canvas and not the suite as a whole that bears the plural title.18) Rather than the once-driving dialectic between two poles that Hantaï seems to have conceived previously as monolithic—the painted and the unpainted— everything now appears to be an affair of local adjacencies. That the artist tends to assign different hues to distinct areas further underscores the singularity of each colored patch, the impossibility of suturing them together in one homogeneous whole. Polychromy prolongs the work of folding, articulating and particularizing. What the Blancs show, in other words, is that the one has given way definitively to the many— or rather, that the one has always been a certain myth, bound in a more primordial plurality. This is for me the central idea in Hantaï’s art of the 1970s, and the Tabulas are one—and by far the more enduring—of two additional bodies of work that, emerging virtually contemporaneously with the Blancs, further develop its implications. They do so in part by responding to a pair of new, more or less immediately ensuing imperatives.19 The first is the need to restore a kind of visual consistency to the painted areas, to counteract their increasing volatilization across the Études and the Blancs. The second is the desire to introduce some basic parity among the pigmented zones—that is, to distinguish them decisively from fragments of an imagined whole and establish them instead as so many distinct entities. The smaller and largely unknown suite, entitled Bourgeons (Buds), 1972–74, reveals rounded, variously fractured areas of color produced by painting small pouches of gathered cloth—what Hantaï also called nœuds, or knots (fig. 90). The unprecedented highlighting of individual knots—or rather,

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FIg. 90 simon Hantaï, Bourgeons, 1974. acrylic on canvas. Private collection. FIg. 91 simon Hantaï, Tabula, 1980. acrylic on canvas. Private collection.

the presentation of the knots as something like individuals—powerfully dramatizes what, against the backdrop of the Meuns, we might now describe as the fundamental reversal of the pliage process: phallic protuberances and ocular globes give way, upon untying, to flattened, plainly cleft forms. And indeed, the erratically proliferating, disparately sized, and differently riven results appear as miniature avatars of the painted areas in that previous suite. Nonetheless, we remain precisely within the domain of multiplication. Every knot is importantly distinct from the others while the irregular spacing encourages the air of seeming independence, the perception that each is floating freely with respect to the others. 178

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The painted forms of the Tabulas operate otherwise. In certain obvious respects, these canvases inherit but also regularize the rectangular subdivisions of the 1950–51 works. And as in the 1967 installation (as previously in the 1948 pattern), the grid armature is unpainted. Further strengthening this resonance, the Tabulas register as both reprising and propagating the rectangular painted areas of the earlier Catamurons (see fig. 51). Yet the continued use of knots—now on the reverse of the canvas and uniquely at the intersections of the grid—tends to distort that geometry from within.20 Slashing diagonal reserves traverse multiple forms, suggesting a formerly shared crease; runoff paint from one square limns the edge of its immediately abutting neighbor; excess pigments from a group of four intermingle in the irregular ring left behind by their once-common knot. There is at times something quasi-gestural in the way contiguous units appear to hail one another with mirror-reversed rivulets, as in one of the most beautiful Tabulas, a polychrome example of 1980 (fig. 91): note in particular the pinkish, mutually beckoning tentacles extending from the rose- and teal-colored rectangles in the upper right. All of these events underscore the constitutive plurality of the painted areas, the fact that none is an individual unto itself. Quite the contrary, each painted entity appears implicated in its adjacencies not just figuratively but in fact. With this, we have arrived at a powerful countermodel to the minimalist series or set, one that partakes of the American work’s insistence on the literal properties of the art object without ceasing to assert the profound mutual entanglement of its component elements. These painted forms are not made to relate; rather, they are always already in relation. That vision, moreover, has

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FIg. 92 Invitation card for simon Hantaï, Tabula, suite récente,

october 14–november 15, 1980, galerie Jean Fournier, Paris, detail of recto. FIg. 93 Invitation card for simon Hantaï, Tabula, suite récente,

october 14–november 15, 1980, galerie Jean Fournier, Paris, detail of verso.

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emerged as deeply rooted in Hantaï’s work and thought. Beyond the early compositions and exhibition hangs described thus far, one might equally think back to “Démolition au platane”: there the geometry of Duchamp’s Large Glass appears as completely invested by the bachelors’ desire, “folding itself” to that inherently multiple impetus. The Tabulas suggest a continued reckoning with, indeed a new “unfolding” of, that œuvre-phare among others. Yet it is to Écriture rose in particular that we must return (see fig. 29). The resonance is methodological before it is formal: in contradistinction to the faster and more improvisatory modes of handling characteristic of the later-1960s pliage suites (as of Hantaï’s gestural paintings roughly a decade earlier), the temporally protracted and labor-intensive activity of measuring, marking, and systematically pleating canvases recalls the previous discipline of copying texts, and like that pivotal prior reorientation, this new way of working does not emerge gradually from the preceding painting group but is imposed consciously by the artist. In much the same vein, insofar as grids had come to do a work of “external” framing, the reappropriation of these armatures on some level repeats the earlier migration of writing from notionally separable document to painted surface. Bolstering the association, the suite title suggests that the Tabulas, too, are “writing tables” of a sort21—an idea reinforced by a typically brilliant invitation card by Hantaï and his dealer for an exhibition of Tabulas at the Galerie Jean Fournier, revealing two faces entirely covered by replicate iterations of the show’s title in bright green and other details in rose (figs. 92–93). But where Hantaï, in the 1958–59 palimpsest, wrote on the support, the Tabulas—in keeping with pliage generally—show him writing with the support,

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implicating it crucially in a play of spacing. The resulting allover fields of repeating but not identical units then emerge as allegories of a distinctly modern mode of gathering: one that is nonhierarchical, integrally conditioned by limits, and everywhere riven by difference—with no deeper ground than itself.22 In many ways, Hantaï might be said to perform what philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy has identified as perhaps the central, if often unspoken or disavowed, imperative of our uneasy epoch: the need to rethink community after Christian communion. This task is at the heart of La communauté désœuvrée (The inoperative community), a text keyed in its entirety to what Nancy in his opening lines calls “the gravest and most painful testimony of the modern world”: that of “the dissolution, the dislocation, or the conflagration of community.”23 Deeply indebted to Derridean deconstruction, as to the work of earlier writers such as Bataille (an interlocutor, I have suggested, of profound, if notably ambiguous, importance for Hantaï in the years leading up to Écriture rose), Nancy’s contribution fundamentally reframes the stakes of what he calls “being-in-common.” The philosopher begins from the widespread perception that communication has become problematic. This understanding, he affirms, rests on an assumption that things were not always so, that there was once an age, now lost, “in which community was woven of tight, harmonious, and infrangible bonds.”24 The figures for such a lost or broken community are many: his partial list includes “the natural family, the Athenian city, the Roman Republic, the first Christian community, corporations, communes, or brotherhoods.”25 It is, Nancy thinks, a myth, but it is a myth deeply embedded in the Western world, and one whose “true consciousness” is Christian:

The community desired or pined for by Rousseau, Schlegel, Hegel, then Bakounine, Marx, Wagner, or Mallarmé is understood as communion, and communion takes place, in its principle as in its ends, at the heart of the mystical body of Christ. At the same time as it is the most ancient myth of the Western world, community might well be the altogether modern thought of humanity’s partaking of divine life: the thought of a human being penetrating into pure immanence. . . . Thus, the thought of community or the desire for it might well be nothing other than a belated invention that tried to respond to the harsh reality of modern experience: namely, that divinity was withdrawing infinitely from immanence . . . and that the divine essence of community—or community as the existence of a divine essence—was the impossible itself.26 Moving beyond that invention thereby involves a double recognition: first, that there can be no return to an intimacy that has never taken place; second, that communication is constituted precisely by such facts of separation and exteriority as have foreclosed that supposedly seamless immanence from the outset. In their broad outlines, Nancy’s maneuvers amount to a reassertion of the claims of finitude—and of community as the place where that finitude appears, in all its “irredeemable excess.”27 Integral to these negotiations is the philosopher’s sustained attempt to distinguish a certain notion of singularity from what he sees as a misguided emphasis on the individual, as construed as something like an indivisible unit.28 Where we have tended to imagine the latter as prior to relationality, the singular being, as this author intends the term, would be constituted FIgurIng FInItude 2

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from the first by its exposure to, indeed its insuperable entanglement in, otherness. In order to better characterize the “specific phenomenality” of that entity, Nancy proposes a neologism: “compearance.” A literal translation of Heidegger’s Mitsein, or “being-with,” the term encodes the proposition that “finite being always presents itself ‘together,’ hence severally; for finitude always presents itself in being-in-common and as this being itself.”29 Similarly, against what he identifies as a fundamentally Marxist conception of individuals as making themselves—that is, producing their common essence—through work, Nancy means to emphasize the extent to which beings are always and at the same time “unmade” (désœuvrés) by their rapports with others. The articulation of a community so understood thus turns upon a simultaneous movement of dis-articulation or unworking—a kind of constitutive reserve. Drawing upon these insights, we might say that the Tabulas “rewrite” Écriture rose, refiguring the earlier painting’s complex mutual threading of self and Otherness—here recast as the interplay between painted and unpainted—to include more fully one’s primordial implication in the finite others all around us. Nowhere is this inheritance more apparent than with respect to one désœuvrement effect in particular, the immaterial color that now arises from the mutual interactions of all the squares, as mediated by the unpainted intervals and irruptions on which the singularity of each depends: for example, the extraordinary rose light that radiates from a yellow Tabula of 1980 (fig. 94). This phenomenon appears to be the new appropriation, on fundamentally different grounds, of perhaps the key event of Écriture rose, the one that lends that canvas its eventual name. I am referring to the pinkish hue that—initially at least—was a result not of any rose-colored medium literally 182

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applied to the surface but of the mutual interplay of the materially present colors as perceived under certain ambient conditions. Unintended by Hantaï, that effect could nonetheless bear liturgical weight, appearing attuned (as noted in chapter 4) to Christ’s birth and resurrection and thus to the hope of the new community. The phenomenal colors called forth by the Tabulas have no such symbolic meaning nor do the literal colors on which they depend.30 Nonetheless, we might still see them as meaningfully, rather than merely incidentally, after that painting’s liturgical framework. To some extent like the liturgy, these hues are immaterial effects contingent upon, but by no means reducible to, a gathering of finite bodies within a shared space. And also like the liturgy, their appearance—when and to the extent that it takes place—cannot be hypostatized once and for all. But against that earlier promise of communion, the event of unlocalized color depends upon a fundamental acceptance of separation. It remains a mark of our perpetually unreconciled world, our endlessly finite condition. As with earlier breakthroughs in Hantaï’s oeuvre, this revelation appears to have called for sustained testing, the stakes of which, clearly, were never simply formal. And indeed, the Tabulas are at once extraordinarily numerous and remarkably varied. Far from a free play with diverse parameters, however, these paintings manifest one of Hantaï’s oldest commitments: his conviction in the necessity of change over time. Several developments in particular differentiate earlier and later canvases within this temporally riven body of work.

FIg. 94 simon Hantaï, Tabula, 1980. acrylic on canvas. Private collection.

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FIg. 95 simon Hantaï, Tabula, 1981. acrylic on canvas. Private collection. FIg. 96 simon Hantaï, Tabula, 1980. acrylic on canvas. Private collection.

There is, to begin with, a distinct shift in Hantaï’s approach to the sheer number of painted squares. Among the Tabulas of the first period— 1972–76—the constitutive units tend to be smaller and more numerous, their proliferation derived, one suspects, from the overall dissemination of seemingly infinite painted shards in both the Études and the Blancs. By contrast, later examples move toward larger and fewer rectangles, and the colored forms are more highly particularized, whether through local variations in paint 184

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saturation, a greater array of unpainted reserves, or some combination of the two; adjacent units are also more likely to be distinguished by different hues. Groups of eight, six, and four become increasingly common while the final years of Hantaï’s folding practice also see a number of “diptychs,” or paintings with coupled units— always, it is worth adding, disposed laterally (fig. 95). Around 1980, there even appear single-form Tabulas, in which errant color traces indicate the unit has been cut from a prior group or pair (fig. 96). Such paintings in some sense invert the suite’s overall taking up and transformation of the earlier Catamurons, even as they clearly retain indexes of more primordial conditions of compearance.

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In all of these ways, the later Tabulas increasingly underscore the unrepeatable singularity of each painted entity. Yet they also suggest a growing orientation to the finitude and exposure of the gathering as such, a shift apparent in a second line of experimentation, bearing upon the relation of the painted assembly to the format’s edges. Tabulas of the earlier period are much more likely to include internal frames comprised of partial squares, thus fostering the impression that the grid might go on indefinitely in all directions— and indeed, Hantaï did at times cut one or more paintings from a larger canvas, even after exhibiting the latter as a completed work.31 By contrast, paintings postdating his three-year hiatus from production appear much more contained within their physical limits: the perimeter coincides with the white reserve, and in many cases, the outermost angles of the painted corner units are visibly softened, curving and, as it were, peeling away from the extremities of the material support (fig. 97). In so doing, they emphasize the generative nature of precisely those edges. Such features help to foreground the painting as an inherently plural

singularity, the latter term being just as important as the former. One might even see this newly bounded array as a figure for the named group or “suite” at the center of Hantaï’s practice since his turn to folding. It would thereby signal the difference of such collectivity from a theoretically untrammeled phenomenon of serial drift. There is also a general point to be made. Here as in preceding suites, it is integral to Hantaï’s conception of pliage that his paintings can fail: that painted and unpainted might be literally copresent on the canvas but remain inert, that the whites or blanks might simply divide and not also link. In making relationality as such the very subject of his art, the Tabulas bring these risks to the fore. Indeed, the caesura at the center of the suite might well appear to be a mark of uncertainty about the continued direction of his work—just as two highly ambitious projects postdating that suspension can seem to discover limits endemic not only to this painting group but indeed to pliage as a “whole.” That possibility is at the heart of the next and final chapter.

FIg. 97 simon Hantaï, Tabula, 1980. acrylic on canvas. Private collection.

FIgurIng FInItude 2

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abandoned Painting

CHAPTER 8

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Two photographs separated by at least two decades show the same wall in Hantaï’s studio in Meun (figs. 98–99). The first, dated to 1975, was published in the catalogue for the artist’s 1981 retrospective at the Centre d’arts plastiques contemporains (CAPC) in the Entrepôt Lainé in Bordeaux.1 Accompanied there by the caption “biographical wall” and an explanatory key, it shows the plaster surface teeming with paintings. The group comprises small works spanning some twenty-five years in France, from the artist’s experiments of the later 1940s and early 1950s (among them a stenciled painting and the early pliage discussed in the introduction, both now in the MAM collection) through his folded and unfolded suites of the later 1960s. The canvases are affixed directly to the wall; most are unstretched, and more than one dangles by a single corner. Interspersed among them are sundry additional artifacts. Photographs range from personal mementos, such as a tattered image of the four-year-old Hantaï with his elder brother in Bia, to reproductions of paintings by revered predecessors (Cézanne, Matisse, and Pollock are all represented) and portraits of individual artists (Cézanne again, Sam Francis). Elsewhere, one finds a fully unfolded and flattened paint tube, mounted on a support and described as a “relief sculpture”; a color chart; a Provençal bread of the sort known as fougasse; and a “folding for domestic use” (pliage à usage domestique), employed for cleaning the floor. The beholder is invited to consider the complex constellation of relationships among these items—to note, for example, the clear visual rhymes between the rounded, airy armature of the traditional bread and the variously riven forms of Hantaï’s own paintings or the suggestive interplay between openly exploratory artwork and humble linen. It is, as the legend suggests, a nonlinear and, one senses, continually evolving map of a life lived largely in painting.

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Some of the same elements—the reproductions particularly—reappear in the second photograph, which was most likely taken in the later 1990s.2 Yet the paintings have largely disappeared, leaving but one stretched black Étude. In their place are new additions of another sort: graphic notations in the artist’s hand, scrawled directly on the wall. There are rows of linear marks, a handful of dates, and a few distinct phrases; certain elements appear within hand-drawn boxes or circles while an arrow connects the uppermost tally with a cryptic verbal gloss. Enigmatic at first glance, these jotted traces appear, upon further examination, to chronicle the concerted destruction of Hantaï’s own work. Some of the paintings are qualified as “grandes” (large ones), as per a further inscription lower down; others, as “petites” (small ones), as signaled by a capital P. The vertical traits record the losses, as do at least two additional inscriptions: “75 d’un coup” (75 at once—or even “all of a sudden”), in the upper left; “détruits 67 + 73” (destroyed: 67 + 73), slightly lower and to the right. A third, “tout petits sans nombres” (innumerable little ones), included within a hand-drawn circle in the upper right, nonetheless points beyond these inventories, suggesting a larger, seemingly incalculable culling of the oeuvre. Two dates—“le 12, 5, 94” (May 12, 1994) and “le 13, 5, 94” (May 13, 1994)—help to situate the events in time, while another label, “Ascension,” relates the first of those dates suggestively to the liturgical calendar. These handwritten tallies and assorted notations take us back to a highly fraught period in

FIg. 98 simon Hantaï, photograph of studio wall in Meun, 1975. FIg. 99 simon Hantaï, photograph of studio wall in Meun, late

1990s.

the painter’s life and art. By 1981, the year of the CAPC retrospective, Hantaï was widely acknowledged as a major figure in France—a status amply confirmed the following year, when he represented that country at the Venice Biennale and staged a critically acclaimed show with his Paris dealer at the Galerie Jean Fournier. All three exhibitions centrally involved new suites of Tabulas arranged in quasi-environmental configurations attuned, as Hantaï put it at the time, to his professed desire to “inhabit color.”3 Yet shortly after the presentation at the gallery, the painter withdrew from exhibiting his work, declining invitations from major museums both within France and abroad and rebuffing repeated entreaties from Fournier himself. The retreat lasted fifteen years. Then, in the spring of 1997, Hantaï suddenly resurfaced, contributing a new work to a thematic show at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Didi-Huberman and Didier Semin’s L’empreinte (The imprint). Further exhibitions followed quickly, as did important donations to the MAM and the MNAM in 1997 and 2003, respectively. Each carefully selected occasion showed the artist intervening in the existing narratives about his art and implicitly or explicitly unfolding his oeuvre anew. Hantaï’s hiatus has exerted a tremendous fascination over his critics, who have tended to frame this public silence or “painting strike,” as Alfred Pacquement dubbed it, as distilling key tendencies long at the heart of his pliage practice:4 in particular, its supposed refusal of expressive gesture, its progressive foregrounding of decidedly dynamic blanks, and its presumed aspiration to impersonality.5 At the same time, largely following the artist’s own lead, writers have also cast Hantaï’s withdrawal as motivated primarily by external factors,6 including the French state’s robust program of new cultural initiatives and the booming art market of aBandoned PaI ntIng

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the 1980s.7 Reframed as a durational version of “the unpainted”—as an active, continuously maintained manifestation of reserve—this sustained caesura has served as evidence of the painter’s uncompromising moral stance,8 his self-professed desire to remain a “gutter rat.”9 There is good reason to take Hantaï at his word. When he deplores the affirmative mutual embrace of national museums and “advanced” artists, as in a 1998 interview with Libération,10 or bemoans the impossibility of meaningfully interrogating “the social horror,” as in exactly contemporaneous remarks to Le Monde,11 these statements powerfully recall claims made by the painter already in his writings of the 1950s, in which his despair of community first came to the fore. Yet for precisely this reason, it is permitted to think that Hantaï’s oft-cited comments raise more questions than they answer about the precise timing and catalyst of this later withdrawal, as also, of course, about his carefully orchestrated moments of renewed visibility. Looked at in this light, the wall in the studio at Meun hints at another story, that of an artist engaged in a sustained and at times scathing examination of his own path to date. This process, one might say, was rather like the notionally interminable exercise enacted in Écriture rose—and as in that landmark work, I will suggest, it is bound up with the sense that Hantaï’s own practice has hit a certain limit, that pliage itself is at an impasse. Nowhere is this restless interrogation more apparent than in the works with which the painter returned to view. Largely overshadowed in the existing literature by the very withdrawal they help to render salient, these post-pliage productions reopen and revisit central issues in the folded and unfolded work that had immediately preceded the artist’s retreat. Yet precisely in so doing, they also “correct” what Hantaï had come to see as the 192

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problematic course of his painting in the early 1980s, displacing that practice onto distinctly altered terrain. Relentlessly self-critical objects, they invite us to reread both the painter’s achievement and its seeming abandonment. During the months from March to June 1998, Hantaï’s first solo exhibition in sixteen years took place at Renn Espace d’art contemporain, a noncommercial site in Paris owned by the filmmaker Claude Berri. Among the twenty-two works included in the show, eleven provided a representative sampling of Hantaï’s classic pliage production. The remaining half, however, had been completed in the roughly nine years leading up to the exhibition—which is to say, entirely within the span of the artist’s presumed suspension of his painting practice. With the exception of one untitled silkscreen, those new works bear the title Laissées, a designation usually translated into English as “Leftovers.” (One other new silkscreen, equally untitled, had been featured the year earlier at the MNAM, in the exhibition L’empreinte.) All show the painter abandoning folding. Deploying different, if arguably contiguous, techniques, they suggest a double movement of rupture and rereading relative to pliage, via one group of paintings in particular: the suite of very large format Tabulas Hantaï had completed in 1981 and revealed that same year in his retrospective at the CAPC Entrepôt Lainé—the last museum survey to which the artist had contributed actively (fig. 100). That show was itself the site of a certain return to public life. Due to Hantaï’s painting hiatus in the years 1976–79, his exhibition in Bordeaux was conceived primarily as a retrospective of his folded and unfolded work prior to that break, and its title—Simon Hantaï, 1960–1976—clearly announced this focus. The painter nonetheless

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FIg. 100 Simon Hantaï 1960–1976, CaPC / entrepôt lainé, Bordeaux, 1981, installation view with Tabulas, all 1981.

decided to make an ambitious suite of new canvases specifically for the locale’s large, open nave. The French automaker Renault—at that time state-owned and a major sponsor of contemporary art—provided financial support and working space at one of its garages in the commune of Maisons-Alfort outside Paris, thereby allowing

Hantaï to adopt significantly greater dimensions than had been possible for him thus far.12 Work on the new paintings began in 1980 and continued into 1981. The results develop a central tendency within the Tabulas. As we have seen, Hantaï’s longest-running painting group shows him experimenting with a variety of formal and material parameters. Increasingly, however, the artist had come to focus on the matter of the work’s dimensions—an issue that he, like Newman before him, aBandoned PaI ntIng

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FIg. 101 simon Hantaï at work, Maisons-alfort, 1981.

professed to consider “the only real problem.”13 His overall drift toward progressively larger formats appears bound in his active appropriation of phenomenal color effects. By dramatically expanding the painted areas, Hantaï hoped to render them more intense (per Matisse’s famous dictum, “One square centimeter of any blue is not as blue as one square meter of the same blue”) and, simultaneously, to heighten the immaterial and unlocalizable 194

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chromatic impressions produced by the optical interaction of pigmented areas and blank reserves.14 At the same time, however, those increased dimensions had the not unwelcome effect of loosening the hold of Hantaï’s own projective capacity, an aptitude with which the artist had struggled from the first. Indeed, the progressive expansion of formats suggests the revival of a much older fantasy of quasi-corporeal immersion, one that had previously found expression in his “orgiastic” implication in Sexe-Prime and that continued to underwrite his oft-professed desire to lose

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himself in the folding process. Working at outsize dimensions served that ambition, allowing him to engross himself even more fully in the decidedly physical and theoretically blind manipulation of canvases whose ultimate disposition of painted and unpainted areas was always, to some extent, a surprise (fig. 101). Throughout the making as in the final unfolding of these greatly enlarged pictorial fields, then, Hantaï appears to have sought a wholly encompassing experience: a kind of engulfment by color, whether as literally present among the intractable volumes of unstretched support or as immaterially expressed by the resulting surfaces. The Bordeaux paintings push this exploration to extremes unprecedented within Hantaï’s oeuvre. Among the exhibited Tabulas were seven canvases measuring nearly 29'6" tall by over 49' wide. Lacking the means to stretch them, a final step on which he had until this point typically insisted, the painter showed them without supporting chassis. Stapled along their top edges to wooden bars that were in turn hoisted in space and secured to the architecture by cords, their bottom borders resting directly on the floor, the paintings can appear to realize Hantaï’s dream of an environment constructed, as it were, through or of color alone. Yet the results were not, in his view, successful. In a 1995 article in the review art press—the first to indicate that Hantaï was again at work on an as-yet unnamed body of new paintings—the critic Catherine Millet summarizes the artist’s retrospective charges against the CAPC showing: “Looking at photographs of the exhibition, Hantaï expresses two criticisms. The whites, due to the very large knots necessitated by the dimensions of the canvases, are too large— they are practically legible forms (some resemble columns, comparable to those in the actual space). As a consequence, they separate the squares in

such a manner that the latter are organized into ‘series.’”15 Millet, following Hantaï, casts the overall effect in terms of a deflation into “the decorative,” a fate she understands as one of the greatest dangers facing post-Matissean painting generally.16 (Among other examples, the critic points to then-recent work by Hantaï’s one-time friend and professed admirer, Daniel Buren—a corpus that by this point included the younger man’s own, equally immense installation at the CAPC.17) Effectively severed from an authorial subject, Millet suggests, Hantaï’s tireless attempts to liberate color suddenly appeared—by virtue of that seemingly indefinite extension—all too congruent with another kind of “expansionism,” that of “institutions and the market.”18 Her assessment draws out the larger stakes: “Hantaï may have known the temptation to inhabit color, but surely not in order to find himself caught up in the hotels and chateaux of the cultural circuit—nor in its cafeterias.”19 Millet’s characteristically incisive comments help to clarify the uncomfortable connection, what one might even call the unintended complicity, between Hantaï’s painting and the cultural situation he famously deplored. What one wants to insist on in particular is the pejorative force the painter now implicitly attributes to the notion of the “series.” These whites, the artist’s comments suggest, notably fail to “paint”: unlike the active reserve that both divides and links, they remain strictly on the side of separation. And that development, in turn, spells the breakdown of the dynamic interplay among the materially discrete yet primordially plural painted zones at the heart of Hantaï’s mature pliage practice, the collapse of the colored areas and indeed the paintings as such into the sheer, potentially unlimited enchainment of one thing after another. Worst of all, this was a failure aBandoned PaI ntIng

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endemic to the very terms of Hantaï’s folded work, to the continued enlargement of formats on which he had increasingly staked his painting’s promise to exceed the existing order. By contrast, the Laissées turn entirely upon the recovery of limits, a point powerfully dramatized by contemporary photographs of the artist’s process. While the authorship of these photos is not always clear (some appear to have been taken by Hantaï himself; others, by his wife, Zsuzsa) and the dates appear similarly divided among several separate séances in the years 1994–95, these documents offer visual evidence of a working procedure Hantaï had deployed as early as 1989.20 By the mid-1990s, this practice was paradigmatic of the Laissées generally, as he clearly wished to make known. The photographs importantly include images of the arena prior to Hantaï’s action: one or another CAPC Tabula, spread out in the artist’s garden at Meun, sunlight and shade playing off its fully extended surface (fig. 102). We see the cutter poised to make contact with the canvas; we see the blade just at the surface; we see it, finally, slicing through the cloth support, tracing long, rough-edged slits through painted and unpainted areas alike (fig. 103). Additional images show newly cropped fragments scattered about the lawn while others record reserved remnants in the studio, stacked on the floor or pinned to the walls for further consideration (figs. 104–5). After a time, some of those “leftovers” would be restretched as considerably smaller paintings, a process that frequently involved the addition of fresh canvas. These images signal a deceptively obvious point. Hantaï’s work on the Laissées commences where his painterly labor in pliage had tended to leave off: with the unfolding of the results of a notionally immersive process of painting. Sundering that fully exposed surface, the ensuing lacerations inherit 196

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from previous désœuvrement effects in his practice to date, from the self-interrupting skeins of writing in Écriture rose and related paintings through the unruly irruption of the whites in the folded and unfolded work. Hantaï, it should be noted, typically framed his turn to material scission as a way of radicalizing the figurative “cuts” introduced by the unpainted canvas in the painted areas.21 Yet that technical shift is in many respects a significant departure insofar as it shows the painter taking back at least some of the agency—one might even say, the responsibility—formerly given over to the pliage process. To put it simply: where previously the canvas cut into itself, Hantaï now cuts into the canvas. The resulting incisions inevitably harken back to the movements of wrist, arm, and shoulder, inscribing the painter’s intentionality at the very heart of painted expanses that had seemed originally to deny it. This amounts to a new willingness to draw—and as such, it suggests a concerted liquidation of the earlier aspiration to lose himself in the folding process. Each cut is a decision: an active election that is, moreover, at once displaced and prolonged through the sorting of the resulting fragments. Just as importantly, however, these photographs foreground Hantaï’s own exposure, his willing submission to forces beyond his control. The cutter is a deliberately crude instrument in keeping with the painter’s preferred implements of the 1950s, from the hand-held razor blades to the metal alarm-clock ring. As in pliage generally, the artist retains a commitment to working horizontally, putting himself “inside” the canvas as opposed to comfortably in front of it. In fact, insofar as the knife edge necessitates contact, it requires that Hantaï get even closer than Pollock to the cloth support—indeed, that he stoop more or less continuously as he traverses the field (usually

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FIg. 102 Photograph of Tabula, 1981, in the garden at Meun, august 1995.

FIg. 103 simon Hantaï slicing Tabula, 1981, Meun, august 1995.

FIg. 104 Fragments of Tabula, 1981, in the garden at Meun, august 1995.

FIg. 105 Canvas fragments in the studio, Meun, 1995.

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FIg. 106 simon Hantaï with Tabula, 1981, Meun, 1995.

backward). And where that already-painted surface is literally revealed to his gaze, the photographs suggest another kind of blinding, one associated less with the opacity of material folds than with the too-bright illumination of the sun, as reflected off the large unpainted zones in particular (fig. 106). Each decision remains, in its own way, a throw of the dice. This renewed emphasis on limits carries through and is indeed even more powerfully figured within the completed works. Characteristically for the artist, the Laissées show Hantaï moving on in part by repeating aspects of his oeuvre to date. As early as 1980, as we have seen, the painter had realized a number of single-form Tabulas that give the impression of having been cut from pairs or ensembles. Such canvases suggest that, even before his withdrawal from exhibiting his work, Hantaï was aiming to recapture a certain intensity of encounter, to forestall the mere “seriality” effects of the 198

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Bordeaux work—in short, to recover precisely the specificity of the singular unit. The earliest Laissées, three paintings completed in 1989—all derived, as an annotated photograph in the artist’s archives makes clear, from the same polychrome Tabula—reprise this strategy (figs. 107–8). Each one is just over life-size: close enough to the standing human form to conjure a meaningful relationship to it but large enough to suggest a movement beyond—indeed, an active exceeding of—that inevitable measure. This register had been important for Hantaï since at least the Meuns, in which the unpainted first came to the fore. Here, as in that breakthrough suite, the dimensions encourage both quasi-corporeal identification with the painted and, through that attachment, a sense of almost physical ravishment, of disruption or dislocation by the unpainted. Indeed, the Laissées exacerbate these effects. It is not simply that the internal scale disjunction between the transplanted form and the newly reduced format creates a much greater sense of tension, as if the painting were only barely contained within its physical bounds.22 Just as significantly, the painted configurations in the Laissées eschew the rounded, intermittently broken contours that encircle the pigmented zones within the 1968 works, thereby indexing the prior, sack-like states of precisely those areas of cloth. These new forms, cropped from their original contexts, remain open in all four corners, inexorably conjuring now-absent others. (Precisely by excising the overlarge whites at issue in the source supports, then, the cuts retroactively “project” the intimacy that was so notably lacking when the featured units were literally side-by-side.) The highly liquid paint rivulets that figure prominently in all three paintings appear newly suggestive in this connection, as if underscoring the quasi-bodily violence of laceration and graft alike.23

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FIg. 107 Laissées et autres peintures, renn espace d’art

contemporain, Paris, March–June 1998, installation view with Laissées, paintings completed in 1989, incorporating fragments of Tabulas, 1981.

These dislocation effects become even more marked among later Laissées. In one example of 1994, revealing a dark blue form derived from the same polychrome Tabula as the painted areas in the preceding group, the detached fragment appears

suspended from one corner, its upper and left edges brushing the painting’s new limits (fig. 109). Elsewhere, a handful of exactly contemporaneous Laissées with black forms—again derived from a single, multisquare source—position the excised units right of center and, in one case, as if dropping into the lower corner, a placement that recalls the characteristic weighting of the written areas in Hantaï’s gestural paintings nearly half a century aBandoned PaI ntIng

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FIg. 108 Photograph with undated annotations by simon Hantaï. FIg. 109 simon Hantaï, Laissée, 1981–94. acrylic on canvas. Private collection.

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prior (figs. 110–12; compare figs. 29, 39, and 42). Finally, in two starkly vertical paintings of 1995— the largest in the group—the constitutive cuts are not confined to the source canvas’s unpainted reserves but rather traverse pigmented areas and blanks indifferently (figs. 113–14). Just as importantly, these lengthwise incisions assume increased prominence in the resulting, asymmetric paintings, in which each chosen vestige abuts a fresh lateral margin of unpainted canvas. These coarsely cut, fraying edges serve either to materialize the temporal gap or separation between the 1981 moment and the later reworking, or—alternately— to temporalize explicitly the very notion of the “unpainted” long at the heart of Hantaï’s practice. The paintings’ double dates particularly underscore the latter reading. Although to some extent continuous with the durational markers in Écriture rose, the Laissées’ internally divided designations insist far more emphatically on the claims of time in its insuperably linear dimension, its literal irreversibility. Call this the hard truth of Sexe-Prime’s closing chronophotograph, orgiastic transports notwithstanding. This temporal accent is also implicit in the suite’s highly suggestive title. The substantive opens simultaneously toward notions of the remainder, leftover, or indeed excremental leaving—Le petit Larousse offers “fiente des sangliers,” or wild boar droppings—and toward the rejected outsider or a refused delivery (“un laissé-pour-compte”). Various accepted usages of the infinitive draw it toward death, exile, separation, forgetting, and—in a somewhat different register—leaving be, freeing, not consuming, and permitting. In the very failure of these diverse connotations to fold seamlessly one into another, as in the more specific associations of each variant, they frame Hantaï’s painting as a practice integrally involved not just with empirical

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FIg. 110 simon Hantaï, Laissée, 1981–94. acrylic on canvas. Private collection. FIg. 111 simon Hantaï, Laissée, 1981–94. acrylic on canvas. Private collection.

remainders (in this instance, the material leftovers of the CAPC works) but with something more like the fact of the remainder—and therefore, with the inevitability of excess. At the same time, they figure Hantaï’s canvases as at once resistant to consumption or capture and, what is no less key, primordially exposed to abandonment, contingency, and loss, a condition further underscored by still another photograph revealing an entropic heap of discarded fragments set aside for composting (fig. 115). 202

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The closely related, untitled silkscreens that Hantaï effected in 1996 and 1997—the first in three parts, the second as a single panel—and showed alongside the Laissées further take over and transform all of this (fig. 116). Like the paintings that immediately precede them, these double-dated works on canvas turn upon selected sections from the Bordeaux Tabulas. Unlike the Laissées, however, they do not directly incorporate remnants but instead reproduce photographic views shot in dramatically raking perspective (fig. 117). Taken by Hantaï’s longtime confidant and fellow artist Kamill Major at the Maisons-Alfort during the preparations for the CAPC show and subsequently cropped anew by Hantaï, these anamorphic extracts offer something like the painter’s own perspective from all fours (fig. 118). Yet they notably displace that vision from the binocular register of human seeing to the monocular view of the machine. They also enact a further estrangement, rotating the featured elements from the horizontal axis of production to the upright formats of the finished works. Doubly detached from what we might imagine as a lived situation of extreme intimacy with or quasi-corporeal immersion in the unfinished canvases, these silkscreens refigure Hantaï’s painting as exposed or abandoned in another way: to the iterations and alterations of mechanical reproduction. An interest in what Hantaï tended to call, quite simply, “the machine”—and the extent to which it might “paint” in the artist’s place24—comes to the fore even more fully in a subsequent body of work entitled Suaires (Shrouds). In 2001, these works constituted the painter’s contribution to Fables du lieu (Fables of place), a thematic exhibition organized by Didi-Huberman for Le Fresnoy-Studio national des arts contemporains, in Tourcoing,

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FIg. 112 simon Hantaï, Laissée, 1981–94. acrylic on canvas. Private

collection. FIg. 113 simon Hantaï, Laissée, 1981–95. acrylic on canvas. Musée

national d’art moderne—Centre georges Pompidou, Paris. FIg. 114 (oPPosIte) simon Hantaï, Laissée, 1981–95. acrylic on

canvas. Private collection.

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FIg. 115 Canvas fragments set aside for composting, Meun,

august 1995. FIg. 116 simon Hantaï, Untitled, 1981–96. screen prints on canvas. Private collection.

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FIg. 117 simon Hantaï, preparatory study for a silkscreen print, 1996, based on a photograph taken by kamill Major in 1981 at the Maisons-alfort. FIg. 118 Hantaï at work, Maisons-alfort, 1981.

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FIg. 119 Fables du lieu, le Fresnoy-studio national des arts

contemporains, tourcoing, February–april 2001, installation view with Suaire, 2001, Suaire, 2001, and Tabula lilas, 1982.

France (fig. 119).25 Like the show of Laissées three years earlier, Hantaï’s presentation at this event turned upon the deep caesura of his absence, at once conjuring and displacing another installation from immediately prior to his 1982 withdrawal. And even more powerfully than the untitled silkscreens, the Suaires suggest a palimpsestic rewriting of pliage’s purported endgames, divesting event and oeuvre alike of their presumed closure. During the months of June and July 1982, in what was to be his final exhibition before his retreat, Hantaï showed a group of seven new works at his longtime dealer in Paris, the Galerie Jean Fournier (figs. 120–21). Collectively entitled Tabulas lilas, the paintings had all been executed in white acrylic paint on unprimed canvas prepared simply with rabbit-skin glue; each measured roughly 9'6" high by nearly 15'6" wide. All were shown unstretched, with five of the canvases stapled directly to the walls and—what was 208

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unprecedented in the artist’s practice—two spread on the floor, such that the entire ensemble fit in the space beneath the main room’s most distinctive feature: its soaring glass ceiling. A simple invitation card suggests that the abundant natural light was integral to Hantaï’s conception of the installation from the first. Rather than announcing an evening vernissage, as one might have expected, it fixes the opening for “the afternoon” (figs. 122–23). Separated from the CAPC showing by one year, Tabulas lilas followed upon an additional disappointment. Selected to represent France at the 1982 Venice Biennale, the artist had planned to “[take] over the totality of the walls” with another group of monumental Tabulas, similarly produced at the Maisons-Alfort but considerably smaller than those shown in Bordeaux (fig. 124).26 This time, the painter’s intentions were, in his view, thwarted by the curators’ inclusion of sculptures by Supports/Surfaces artist Toni Grand within the same rooms, insertions that again impeded Hantaï’s avowed objective of a wholly encompassing experience of color. Tabulas lilas corrects both precedents. By placing two paintings directly on the floor, a staging previously confined to the immersive situation of the studio, the artist appears to foreclose even the possibility of a sculptural addition, thus designating the space a place for painting—even as the latter medium continues to be questioned, made “banal,” brought “down to the ground” (a preferred trope, as we have seen, in Hantaï’s later writings about pliage27). At the same time, the constituent canvases appear directly responsive to what he had perceived as the shortcomings of the CAPC works. They show him reducing his overall dimensions but also, as if to counterbalance that return to more familiar formats, pushing a limit of another sort: that of the monochrome. By dramatically reducing the

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FIg. 120 Tabulas lilas, galerie Jean Fournier, Paris, June 17–July 17 1982,

FIg. 121 Tabulas lilas, galerie Jean Fournier, Paris, June 17–July 17, 1982,

installation view with Tabulas lilas, all 1982.

installation view with Tabulas lilas, all 1982.

FIg. 122 Invitation card for simon Hantaï, Tabulas lilas, June 17–July 17,

FIg. 123 Invitation card for simon Hantaï, Tabulas lilas, June 17–July 17,

1982, galerie Jean Fournier, Paris, detail of recto.

1982, galerie Jean Fournier, Paris, detail of verso.

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FIg. 124 Simon Hantaï, Venice Biennale, French Pavilion, June– september 1982, installation view with Tabulas, all 1980–81.

contrast between applied color and support through his use of white paint on unprimed canvas, the painter shifts the burden even more fully onto the phenomenological effects produced by the endlessly unstable relation between these close but not identical whites, as activated by the continually shifting illumination. This reorientation is at the heart of an important review published in October of that year in the journal Critique. Coauthored by poet Dominique Fourcade and philosopher-critic Yves Michaud, two writers deeply sympathetic to Greenberg’s vision of modernism, the text presents the exhibition as “an extreme accomplishment” and particularly praises what the two authors see as Hantaï’s unprecedented mobilization of strictly optical effects.28 The review recalls, in particular, “ever changing colors: lilacs, mauves, grayish or more rose-tinted mauves, 210

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depending on the intensity and angle of the light, depending as well on the invasion and fascination of the gaze.”29 The perceptual result—presented as the goal toward which all the Tabulas had been tending—was, in these writers’ view, “an absolute of immateriality and delocalization, because no colored matter corresponded to the real color of the canvases, because the lilac was not present but as called, suggested, provoked by the encounter of eye and light.”30 Encompassing the spectator entirely in this ambient coloration, encouraging “a visual impression and, soon, a physical sensation of jubilation and levitation,” painting itself appeared “transmuted into light.”31 This reading remains firmly entrenched in the literature on Hantaï’s art. Indeed, as recently as 2013, it figured prominently in the painter’s posthumous retrospective at the Pompidou—a show that Fourcade helped curate and for whose catalogue he served as the primary author. There, illuminated by specially filtered light and set back slightly from the immediately adjacent paintings, a unique Tabula lilas marked both the culmination of the “classic” pliage work and the threshold to its notably de-emphasized aftermath, as represented by a handful of canvases in the exhibition’s closing room. It therefore appeared, once again, as the effective telos not only of the Tabulas suite but indeed of pliage as a whole: the extreme act of poetic rarefaction that secures the sense of the artist’s achievement. Yet Hantaï’s showing at Le Fresnoy significantly complicates this view, urging a more difficult understanding both of the Tabulas lilas from which the Suaires derive and of the larger logic of the folding method. Integral to this maneuver were the irrevocable changes that had befallen all but one of the Tabulas lilas—that lone survivor later included in the Pompidou exhibition—in the long interim

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FIg. 125 Photograph of simon Hantaï, Tabula lilas, 1982, used by

the artist in the making of Suaires and H.b.l.

since their first and last showing nearly two decades prior. I am referring to the progressive, if irregular, degradation of Hantaï’s unprimed canvases by the ultraviolet rays of the sun, a problem endemic to the painter’s later work. Over time, the resulting discoloration of the canvas had radically undermined and then all but foreclosed precisely those optical effects associated with the paintings in their original state. (The canvas later revealed in the retrospective, by contrast, had been kept folded and preserved from natural illumination.) Initially at least, Hantaï appears to have envisaged Fables du lieu as an opportunity to turn back

the clock, a chance to digitally recreate and then print a new version of one of the lost originals, its subsequent corruption effectively scrubbed. Preparations for the show—which were carried out with the assistance of several other parties, artist Patrice Vermeille foremost among them—involved scanning a photograph of a Tabula lilas in its present state and reworking the file in Photoshop with an eye to “painting” the eventual result on canvas with an ink-jet printer (fig. 125). By all accounts, the impossibility of reproducing the original was quickly apparent.32 Rather than renounce the project, however, Hantaï became interested in precisely the new possibilities of repetition and transformation afforded by digital processing. The Suaires—four new works in all—result from this exploration. Following their debut at Le aBandoned PaI ntIng

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FIg. 126 Quatre impressions numériques sur toiles de Simon

Hantaï provenant de “Fables du Lieu,” Fresnoy, Studio national des arts contemporains, galerie Jean Fournier, Paris, May–June 2001, installation view with two Suaires, both 2001.

Fresnoy, where they were shown alongside their dramatically yellowed predecessor painting, the Suaires were again exhibited immediately thereafter at the recently relocated Galerie Jean Fournier, where they occupied a space roughly equivalent to that previously given over to the 1982 suite, under a different glass ceiling (fig. 126). Three years later, this experimentation also found a further prolongation in a new group of digital prints, this time on paper affixed on aluminum, that Hantaï entitled H.b.l. (after the consonants in the Hebrew word for breath or vapor33) and displayed, again at Fournier’s, early in 2005 in a joint exhibition with the painter François Rouan. Of all the new works, only one—the Suaire shown directly across from the original Tabula lilas in Tourcoing—amounts to a 1:1 remaking or new iteration of the source canvas (fig. 127). Elsewhere, 212

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Hantaï and Vermeille have taken greater liberties with the digital file—for example, by stretching it vertically. Various distortions and reframings also appear among the H.b.l. prints: at least one flips the source image virtually along its horizontal axis and rotates it 90 degrees counterclockwise (fig. 128), and the majority of the works show cropped areas printed at enlarged or reduced scale, offering something like selected citations from the digitally manipulated antecedent. The new interest in excision comes even more powerfully to the fore in a quartet of H.b.l. prints that largely maintain the yellowed coloration of the 1982 painting in its degraded state and that relate closely to the painter’s physical cutting of prints of the source photograph from around the same time (fig. 129). Here as throughout the 2004 series, the sharply defined edges of the works’ metallic mounts at once secure and further stamp out the newly drawn bounds. All of this places the Suaires and H.b.l. firmly in the wake of the Laissées. It is tempting to see these prints as engaging and expanding more fully on what might now appear to be a whole range of quasi-photographic effects produced previously by Hantaï’s manual slicing of the Bordeaux canvases.34 And as in the Laissées, cutting becomes a means of reasserting the claims of finitude—indeed, in this case, of acknowledging the exposure and contingency implicit in the loss of the original Tabulas lilas. Cropping, I am tempted to say, interprets that destitution as an affair of cleaving or separation. The new works are at once literally and figuratively cut, or cut off, from a prior pictorial event to which they nonetheless remain powerfully indexed. In fact, the digital prints move even further than the Laissées in this direction: where they no longer incorporate actual fragments of their otherwise irretrievable originals, they appear strictly as further emanations or imprints of them,

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FIg. 127 simon Hantaï, Suaire, 2001. digital inkjet print on canvas. Private collection.

something like the funereal shroud of—or the fog left on a glass by—a now-absent body. Reinforcing that impression is the seemingly disincarnated nature of Hantaï’s practice. Viewed from a certain angle, the apparent progression from the strongly contrastive and obdurately material Laissées to the photographically mediated silkscreens that immediately succeed them to—at last—the decidedly ethereal images of the Suaires and certain H.b.l. prints might seem to repeat the atmospheric “delocalization” enacted by the original Tabulas lilas, as read by Fourcade and Michaud.

Upon closer examination, however, the later works reveal a surprising array of unmistakably physical events (fig. 130). There is, to begin with, a certain found “writing”: spidery, reticulated maps of the fractured and bifurcating folds produced by Hantaï’s handling of the original cloth support. Here and there, the lines give way to darker, bruise-like areas, further calling attention to the irreducibly material substrate for those strictly optical effects that had so impressed the paintings’ first beholders. Then, too, the lilas or variously lilac and mauve tonality famously produced by the earlier canvases is now hypostatized in the overall (but locally irregular) coloration of the prints—a kind of caput mortuum of the digital manipulations undertaken in the course of this aBandoned PaI ntIng

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electronic alchemy. Rather than presenting us with a new “absolute of immateriality,” then, these machine-mediated versions register as drawing out pliage’s intractably material dross, the inevitable leftovers or dregs that resist sublimation. That Hantaï further insists on printing these images— first on the traditional canvas support of painting and then on paper mounted on aluminum—is equally significant. Never does he leave completed works simply in the form of digital files or images on screens. Rather, by consistently effecting the further translation back into the world of finite, physical things, Hantaï insists that these iterations, no less than their degraded predecessors, stand exposed to the ravages of time. Presumably, the increasingly explicit appeals to the tradition of the vanitas—not to mention the undeniable, albeit more complex, associations with the Shroud of Turin—are to be read as referring both to the loss of the original canvases that set these works in motion and to the all but inevitable unworking that awaits these displacements in turn. Most important for our purposes, these emanations do not lead back to, or in any way presuppose, an eternal essence; rather, they interpret the finitude of paintings that were already plural and decidedly earthbound.

FIg. 128 simon Hantaï, H.b.l., 2004. digital inkjet print on paper. Private collection.

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Let us return, one more time, to the point of departure and take up again the finished route. Écriture rose attempts to gather a tradition—and to gather it from a body of texts (see fig. 29). Emerging from the copious quotations and collage procedures in Hantaï’s prior writings, from “Démolition au platane” through the Sexe-Prime manifesto and the “Notes préparatoires,” the dense interweaving of polychromatic script figures painting as essentially palimpsestic, endlessly rewriting its own past and, in so doing, continually engendering remainders.

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Hantaï’s hand-copied citations, wrested from their sources, appear as so many tangled, self-interrupting skeins; the writing, circling repeatedly upon itself, ends by visually grinding itself up, while the colors, exposed to the contingencies of beholding, combine optically to produce the phenomenal bloom that lends the canvas its eventual name. The latter event, in particular, is entirely an affair of the painting’s exposure—and therefore a powerful, unexpected reminder that there is no reading that is not finite and no escape from the contingencies of situation. Pliage turns this recognition toward a new and more powerful foregrounding of the lateral. The Tabulas in particular underscore the process of iteration-as-alteration that now drives Hantaï’s practice as a whole, giving themselves over entirely to that play of sameness and difference. This logic, such paintings make clear, does not simply befall the individual instance after the fact but inhabits it from the first—just as each unit within a given Tabula appears primordially entangled within a larger field of adjacencies. As we have seen, the implications of that embrace are never simply formal but ethical as well, and it is significant that the specific sets of Tabulas at issue in Hantaï’s final period see him trying to move this vision onto an architectural scale, to remake entire sites and spaces in these terms. Yet precisely in so doing, those suites also—each in a different way—show Hantaï “forgetting” exposure. What begins as a fantasy of total immersion in the CAPC paintings soon gives way to the virtual volatilization of materiality with the Tabulas lilas, their white-on-white surfaces reinforcing their status as a kind of summa. In still another echo of the Sexe-Prime moment, one might say that the pursuit of called color proves no less ambiguous than Hantaï’s earlier fascination with

FIg. 129 simon Hantaï, H.b.l., 2004. digital inkjet print on paper. Private collection.

Bataillean eroticism. In one case as in the other, finitude is lost. Against this backdrop, Hantaï’s work from the Laissées forward registers—paradoxically— as retrieving abandonment, reopening seemingly closed events to further possibilities of repetition and displacement. Better put: his final artworks pick up that painting precisely as abandoned, across the withdrawal that has to some extent literalized that condition, without ceasing to foreground this essential discontinuity within Hantaï’s own oeuvre. The artist’s grafts are most visible in the Laissées, paintings that physically unmoor fragments from a prior unity, mounting them anew in ways that at once emphasize the material and aBandoned PaI ntIng

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temporal finitude of the constitutive cuts and enable the actual dispersal of the results. The Suaires and H.b.l., for their part, constitute more subtle but in some ways more radical instances of citation, eschewing clear and localizable divisions between past and present even as they subject their source canvases to dissemination of another sort via the relays, deferrals, and translations of various reproductive technologies (and the technicians and producers who effectively navigate them with and for the artist). Photography, here, appears as another kind of writing, at once effacing and overcoding this palimpsest anew. Actively recovering and indeed emphatically exacerbating a certain thought of exposure implicit in folding from its inception, these machine-mediated paintings elaborate Hantaï’s mature conception of his medium as one in which painting itself appears given over to abandonment, contingency, and loss.

FIg. 130 simon Hantaï, Suaire, 2001, detail. digital inkjet print on canvas. Private collection.

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envoi a Politics of “With”

There is, midway through Hantaï’s 1998 interview with Libération, a moving and suggestive passage that appears to have gone unremarked in the ever-expanding literature around his oeuvre. The precise catalyst is obscure though the target is clear enough: the recently passed legislation known as the Pasqua laws (after two-time minister of the interior, Charles Pasqua). Voted into effect in 1993 and reformed in 1997, one year before the interview, this code had severely restricted immigration to France, sparking intense debate and widespread protests throughout the nation. “I am a foreigner,” the painter notes, adding: “When they were passed, I believed the Pasqua laws were directed specifically at me.”1 He continues: “But one hasn’t the words to express it; we don’t know how to talk about those things. We never quite get to the politics of ‘with.’ For the first time, I heard the word ‘clandestine’ used as an insult, whereas it was a very beautiful word during the war.”2 Proffered at the moment of Hantaï’s own return to at least partial visibility, the painter’s remarks resonate in several different registers. First and most obviously, they take aim at a French state that he presents as becoming ever more closed or, at any rate, aspiring to a certain closure: its dread of the “clandestine” translates a larger refusal of the other as outsider. Rhyming with the deconstructionist discourse of hospitality his friend Jacques Derrida was developing around this time (partly in response to the same legislation),

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Hantaï’s words implicitly affirm his lifelong commitment to the immixing of otherness, including the whisperings of the “luminous parasite” lodged in the fantasy of automatism in “Démolition au platane,” the dreams of maternity and parturition that run through the pliage paintings, and the material and temporal disjunctions constitutive of his recently revealed Laissées. His expression reminds us, in other words, that the active acceptance of the unpainted—the idea at the crux of his oeuvre—resists understanding in strictly formal terms, opening instead toward the very question he believed was being repressed: how to acknowledge the claims of others upon oneself. Yet Hantaï’s comments also indirectly recall his own temptations toward clandestinity, in the very

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different sense of deliberate withdrawal or hiddenness: namely, the ways in which the desire for an exit from society—or from oneself, it is of a piece— might itself be the mark of a certain evasion or disavowal, less a resolution of the possibilities and impossibilities of the “with” than an attempt to cut the knot altogether. In that sense, his yearning for a “politics of ‘with’” implicitly reframes not just the painting but its showing, as if the latter were in some sense the work’s necessary prolongation or further unfolding. Remembering the future, Hantaï invites us to take up his painting where he leaves it—and is left by it.

SIMON HANTAÏ AND THE RESERVES OF PAINTING

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APPENDIX 1

“a Plantaneous demolition”1 simon Hantaï and Jean schuster

This appendix is a translation of “Une démolition au platane.” The footnotes and emphases are original to the text. The endnotes (marked here by asterisks) and bracketed text are additional commentary. The specifically surrealist opinion according to which art and poetry are autonomous means of interpretation and transformation of the world, this engaged opinion thanks to which merely occasional verse is from now on washed down History’s drain, deserves, at the hour at which we speak, to no longer be reduced to its local role and be promoted to the status befitting the first premise of a future poetics. To that end, nothing seems more urgent than to first enlarge the notion of “occasional” in the interest of refuting many of the criteria that presently orient the course of poetic and artistic production. We must reject as literary all art and poetry dependent upon any clearly discernible plot, whose 1. “Temptation to order a new refreshment: for example, a plantaneous demolition” (André Breton and Philippe Soupault, The Magnetic Fields).

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twists and turns unfold under the double yoke of supposed subjective reality controlled by the “ego” and supposed objective reality derived from a rationalistic interpretation of physical laws. We await messages that come from very far ahead of us, from a region without vestiges of the sociobiological complex that determines the human condition. It’s up to morality and revolutionary action to sort this out as best they can. But the point of poetic illumination is to escape this theater of the age-old subjection of Being and have done with the implacable rupture between Myth and History. They are oracles, the words of Rimbaud (“I is an another”), Lautréamont (“I have been told that I am the son of a man and a woman. That astounds me. I believed myself more than that”), Corbière (“I speak beneath myself”), and de Chirico (“For a work of art to be really immortal, it must completely exit the limits of the human”), as are also the words that preside over Roussel’s productions (“the work of art must contain nothing real, no observation of the world or minds, nothing but altogether imaginary combinations: these are already ideas of an extra-human world,” Dr. Janet). These considerations lead us to believe that the painter and the poet are, in a strict sense, haunted, that a luminous parasite has profited from the separation of the conscious and the unconscious to take up lodging in their unconscious and “whisper” to them the message that forms itself outside of all human control. Everything invites us to suppose that this message, localized as its source may be in the individual unconscious, aims at nothing less than return—beyond a hypothetical, collective unconscious that is of no interest to us—to a no less hypothetical, cosmic unconscious, from which, on the contrary, we have everything to hope, for it contains the absolute imaginary.

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A door swings in us, opening onto the memoryless spaces of a metahuman condition. The relations between art and poetry, on the one hand, and philosophy and science, on the other, are regulated by a dynamic economy. Art and poetry bring the irrational to light in prospecting the imaginary. But the irrational differs from the unreal in that it exists and becomes. The unreal does not exist because it does not become; it is not nothingness, it is what the mind has never conceived and never will conceive except in fear of itself: it is God, outside the dialectic. The imaginary and the irrational tend toward the real and the rational. No sooner is the irrational actualized by poetic vision than it, under the impulsion of philosophic intelligence, becomes rational. This dynamic economy of knowledge implies a perpetual overcoming of poetry by itself. Yesterday’s irrational is today’s rational. In consequence of this theoretical view, we ask that notice be taken within surrealism of the erosion of certain forms of investigation. Here it is necessary to insist on André Breton’s injunction: “But beyond this aspect of emotion for emotion’s sake, let us not forget that for us, in this era, it is reality itself that is at stake”—here is what will make up the clear deficit that has crippled our way of seeing.2 What we question in the 2. “It is reality itself that is at stake”—and we will permit ourselves to add, passionately or not at all. For surrealism, everything has depended and still depends upon the decisive passage of the knowledge-pleasure opposition from a formal, logical plane to a dialectical one. Knowledge for the sake of knowledge is worth no more or less than pleasure for the sake of pleasure. It’s libertinism in one case as in the other. The relation of reciprocal and ascending exaltation that it introduces between knowledge and pleasure defines the surrealist attitude. The negation of pleasure by knowledge provokes a negation of knowledge by a new and superior pleasure, 220

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persistence of certain procedures is not their continuing ability to move us but their ability to move us beyond emotion. While it is proper to genius to include in its creation all those objective conditions of emotion that remain constant and defy time, reality ceases to be at stake as soon as the inevitable process of rationalization arrives at its term. We maintain that where modern painting is concerned, this comes to pass with the unfortunate surrealist attempt to abolish the object’s internal-external duality. The monumental error is to believe that the image, which continues to be the poetic vehicle par excellence, can, by simple transposition, pass from verbal message to graphic message. There is a fundamental difference between naming an object and reproducing it: it amounts, in the one case, to poetic arbitrariness because the word that designates the object is generally an invention, a pure creation of the spirit; in the other, to sensory arbitrariness because [reproduction is] founded solely on physical perception. If the act of naming an object is no longer today a poetic phenomenon, the genesis of the image still rests on this ancestral intellectual function, and the poetic spark bursts forth from the encounter of two named objects. But in the pictorial register, it is illusory to hope to save the object from its duality by the rigid application of slogans from Lautréamont and Reverdy. All effort in this direction must begin with a transmutation of the base material: the abstractivizing [abstractivante] recreation of the object corresponds rigorously to the act of abstraction that, in language, constitutes etc., up to the sublime point that can only be the end of this diastolic-systolic play and the taking hold of reality by passion, a third term resulting from the ultimate opposition between pleasure and knowledge brought one and the other and one by the other to their paroxysm.

APPENDIX 1

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the designation of a thing by a word. Hegel, with reference to philosophy, wrote that it rendered concrete, and the “great minds” of the day cried paradox. Poetry—plastic or verbal—renders abstract. We believe that a new awareness—on the part of certain authentically surrealist painters—of the incompatibility that exists between their evident desire to act poetically upon the world and their submission to the authority of strict figuration is urgently needed.3 Even supposing that certain surrealist and figurative procedures did originally permit the liberation of the object from its Cartesian-Kantian characteristics and the engendering of an irrational circuit, this has long been rationalized as is sufficiently evidenced by the staggering inflation now rife in this domain. What is serious, what we cannot insist upon too much, is that the infinite repetition of the procedures in question is not at all stagnation of the spirit but retrogression: one participates, in effect, in the reactualization of Cartesian-Kantian characteristics with a modern décor. It is no longer a matter for those characteristics of falsifying the structure of objects in their extrinsic relations but of substituting themselves for their intrinsic relations. We see no paradox in the fact that an initially liberatory initiative should eventually reintroduce, with great pomp and in the circumstances most favorable to their expansion, ultra-reactionary philosophical elements.

3. Naturally, schizophrenic and mediumnistic productions escape this incompatibility—first because there is no consciousness of poetic action upon the world but also because they result from particular determinations unrelated to those that command artistic creation generally.

enough diversions of objects along beaten tracks Just as alchemy denies the symbol all virtue of significance because, in the formula H²O, for example, no account is taken of the spark that, after the addition of two volumes of hydrogen and one of oxygen, is in fact indispensable to the production of water, Gestalt theory—in accord on this point with modern phenomenology—opposes the “elementary reality” of associationist psychology with a “structural reality.” More precisely, Gestalt theory shows that every form, determined though it may be by its autonomous characteristics, is overdetermined by its potential for integration in a structure and that the real is not an association of composite elements but the internal logic (the spark) that organizes these elements in accordance with the so-called law of “good form.” In a major contribution, experiments by Koffka and Köhler have made it clear that it is at the level of perception—and not representation—that the real manifests itself as structure. With this, the causal link4 between perception and representation collapses, and one sees the vanity of all those artistic endeavors that presume to develop a structure from elements freed up by perception. This can only amount to the constitution of a false structure, at any rate one tinged by the emptiest subjectivism. As for the “trompe l’œil fixation of dream imagery,” this is of zero importance insofar as the dream image is under the sway of specifically nocturnal laws of organization (temporal, spatial, causal . . .), and the fixing of these images is limited to adjusting these laws to the taste of the day. This fixation cannot help but tend toward a rationalizing interpretation (no better or worse than another) of 4. Every causal link is, in fact, a break. “A PLANTANEOUS DEMOLITION”

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the dream, and it is in this sense that one must consider it, today, a counterpoetic demonstration. Finally, let us recall that Gestalt theory reduces considerably the role of memory in the organization of perception. Memory, whose true function is to unbind mental representation from physical perception and to subjugate language to the sickly glow of the already-seen. Never in human memory have there been so many artists, so many poets, content to hold back from those shores that would make them lose (forget) their familiar little bazaar. For them, every passing day is the murder of a child and the birth of an old man. To end at last the sign’s outliving of the thing signified, it is necessary that the sign strip itself of its temporal attributes until it is nothing other than the essence of the thing. From then on, the sign becomes the immanent eternity of the thing. Thus, language is a sign when liberated from the temporal conditions of the mental. It is then logical structure and sacred essence of the mental, its univocal hieroglyph. Against Hegel, still captive of a sensory psychology that precluded immediate knowledge, surrealism proposed automatism, a method of immediate knowledge insofar as it breaks with the traditional hall of mirrors of the senses. Eye, ear, nose, skin, tongue: all false witnesses. Thanks to them, man assembles a dossier and conceives the pathetic ambition to express himself. As early as 1871, Rimbaud writes: “The poet becomes a seer by a long, immense, and reasoned derangement of all the senses.” Fifty years later, surrealism will dialectically overcome the phase of the derangement of the senses to attain that of their reasoned negation through automatism. However, it is in the nature of the surrealist fire to burn its bridges—including, alas, those 222

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that lead to its own realization. The most dangerous consequence of the astonishing lucidity with which Breton, at the very moment he consecrated himself entirely to automatic experience, listed and analyzed its pitfalls, is the impossibility in that place of gaining the global view of the field that would have allowed automatism to appear for what it is above all: a total throwing into reverse, a one-hundred-eighty-degree turn of the needle— murmurings of a new language that, to affirm itself, needs to run a course opposed but analogous to that taken by the language of consciousness in its pursuit of its present perfection and passing by similar avatars. We must not dissimulate, in effect, that verbal automatism, although using the same matter (vocabulary) and the same extrinsic rapports (syntax) as the language of consciousness constitutes the opposite of the latter precisely to the extent that it tends to reveal an intrinsic rapport among words, a rapport that Breton has defined lyrically: “Words do not play anymore, they make love.” The dawn of the new language cannot also be the noon of its perfection. In any event, despite as ultrapessimistic a declaration as that “the history of automatism in Surrealism, I do not hesitate to say it, has been that of a continuous misfortune” (André Breton, Break of Day, p. 226, 1933), we believe that Breton never abandoned hope that the passage, despite the number and extreme noxiousness of the difficulties, should be practicable.5 5. “The descent in the diving bell of automatism, the conquest of the irrational, the patient forays into the labyrinth and back, the calculations of probabilities are far from complete” (interview with Charles Henry Ford, 1941, in Conversations, p. 232). “or runs a grave risk of exiting Surrealism if automatism does not at least advance under cover ” (Surrealism and Painting, 1941, p. 93.)

APPENDIX 1

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Automatism, whether pictorial or poetic, is the essential principle of surrealism because it is plugged in—as one says in electricity—to the very shores we hope to reach. It is a colossal “Even if automatism, assured of its resources, no longer feels the need to assert itself in the foreground, it goes without saying that Surrealism continues to hold it in esteem. Better, I consider it likely to take off in an unprecedented fashion, once we find the (mechanical) means of safeguarding it more durably from self-criticism, which leaves it vulnerable to negation” (interview with Dominique Arban, 1947, in Conversations, pp. 252–53.) “The whole point, for Surrealism, was to convince ourselves that we had laid our hands on the ‘prime matter’ (in the alchemical sense) of language. After that, we knew where to get it, and it goes without saying that we had no interest in reproducing it to the point of satiety; this is said for the benefit of those who are surprised that among us the practice of automatic writing was abandoned so quickly.” From this most recent explanation, which Breton delivers in this same issue of Médium, p. 2, we retain as especially clarifying the analogy between the “prime matter” of the alchemists’ and that of language—an analogy already expressed in a 1925 pamphlet: “You who have lead in your heads, melt it and make of it Surrealist gold.” Automatism, for us, aims to be a philosopher’s stone analogous to the one that will be obtained by the adept through adequate operations upon the prime matter. In any event, what we expect from automatism bears a strange resemblance to the powers conferred by the realization of the Great Work, especially from the point of view of “the deliverance of spirit and body.” In Aspects of Traditional Alchemy (Éditions de Minuit, 1953), René Alleau writes: “Not only does the alchemical ascesis declare the unity of matter, but it also bears witness to the union of matter and consciousness, as of the sovereign power of the “delivered spirit.” One would search in vain for another goal for the surrealist ascesis that is automatism. It is in light of that comparison that the opinion expressed by Breton seems to us to introduce a disadvantageous distinction between theory and practice. Where alchemy is concerned, René Alleau insists, time and again, on the necessity of manipulations and on the sterility of a spiritual quest deprived of complementary spagyric operations.

aberration to reduce it to the level of the procedures that happen to have sustained surrealism at various stages of its historical development. One does not class automatism between collage and paranoia-critique. These procedures are perishable and suffer the effects of rationalization described above. Not automatism, which is not a traversal of the mirror but already the other side. Once this is seen, the internal contradiction of the automatic message comes into view: it can have no sense but for he who transmits it and only for the duration of the transmission; for otherwise, it would be necessary either to admit the shattering of the mirror, to resuscitate the aesthetic criterion, or else to attribute extraordinary virtues to the wake of emotion this message is capable of leaving behind itself. Very well! It is precisely at the height of this contradiction and because it is, for us—as we have had the pleasure mingled with boredom to say before—a matter of exalting as much as possible that obscure part that, in the human [l’homme], begins to be human no more6 that we ought to reconnect brutally with automatic experience 6. And in the natural begins to be natural no more: “There is no reason not to think that one might arrive, in the course of a very free investigation, at a combination of action and matter capable of realizing a natural-looking form without the least reference. The possibility of an anticipation of the unfolding of natural creation can at least be glimpsed, and that view is likely to be confirmed by the appearance of some heretofore unsuspected means of action.” These lines are extracted from a remarkable article that appeared in 1950 in the Midcentury Surrealist Almanac under the title “Automatic Perspectives” and is signed by our friend Adrien Dax. Some of us know that, for fifteen years, Dax has been pursuing in his solitary way, relentlessly and in the greatest possible indifference to all “artistic success,” the transformative and disappointing adventure of graphic automatism, engaged along a path where, as he himself puts it, “one only ever advances over ruins.” “A PLANTANEOUS DEMOLITION”

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and that surrealists should study, individually and together, whether we might adopt new modalities of automatism and which ones. The most important point is to protect ourselves both from the seduction of momentary ecstasy and from the weariness provoked by the contemplation of a landscape where all the cats risk looking gray for a very long time. In any case, nothing could better contribute to the deep occultation of surrealism, a task rendered newly necessary and urgent as much by the scandal of the recent Venice Biennale as by the spectacle of the Parisian galleries in 1954, three of which are consecrated exclusively to “surrealist” exhibitions—a label applied indistinctly to whatever comes out of surrealism, whatever has ceased to draw upon it and whatever was never anything but lifeless knock-offs. We call for the circulation of automatic texts and tableaux in a superb indifference to criticism, as so many shattering enigmas as much for us as for the public, so much provocation to clairvoyance, so many incursions of the metahuman future into a human present. The golden key is still under the doormat of “ardent reason.” Poetry, as we have intimated, announces the end of the human species and presages a metahuman condition. It will be understood that we use this kind of neologism only with the greatest hesitation, distinctive mark as it has become in recent years of the foggiest minds and of theorists made anemic by the virus of “excess” [dépassement]—always, moreover, to purely verbal effect. That we have had to pass this once through this endless, cheerful jostling obliges us to offer this justification, which will suffice: lacking an already forged term to designate what succeeds on the human, we have 224

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had recourse not to circumlocution—but rather to the addition of the prefix “meta,” which in Greek signifies “after.” No one is less inclined than us to conjecture coldly and theoretically about this condition, which could be a thirty-third period according to the Fourierist conception. Here again, one knows, literature wreaks its havoc. A sort of backward imagination7 opens a workshop from which escape daily tiresome monsters, pitiful robots, machines to do whatever, all of it in a roaring of helicopters and rockets that indicates clearly enough the need for a flashy soundtrack to mask the sensational indigence of the genre. Let “science fiction” [in English in the original] continue to lead toward a “service marvelous” [un merveilleux de service] as one says of a flight of stairs, its public dumbfounded by so much audacity—the growing success it enjoys bears witness nonetheless to the fact that something is in the air. The hand passes, and it’s still too beautiful to believe that everything will disorder and reorder itself upon a few predictions. However, surrealism lives on this passionate belief, of which it would be enough to say that it is born of desperate hope and hopelessness and that it is also the end of these two great lines of the old human heart. Beyond that, it’s up to intuitive knowledge to find those lighthouses that will assure the passage. Among these, one will hardly be surprised to see us accord the work of Marcel Duchamp a place 7. [This imagination is one] that takes liberties with everything, save the most mediocre realism. A “science fiction” specialist told one of us that he had refused a manuscript because one of that novel’s heroes launched a rocket within seconds, simply by pressing a button. “It’s implausible!” concluded the censor with conviction. Isn’t it though?

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of the highest importance. Leaving aside the recent interpretations to which that oeuvre has given rise, it appears capital to us not to understand it but to admit it as an anticipation of the sublime point. That such an affirmation is in fact an act of faith is indifferent to us; everyone commits acts of faith all day long, even if only in crossing a street. On the basis of this one, we are sufficiently free to glimpse man’s final aspect [dernier visage]. And what a rather dry dialectic invited us to imagine as the ultimate term of an opposition between knowledge and pleasure is confirmed, here, by what we believe to be the integral fusion of the mental and the sexual. Afterward . . . in the game of the Bride, love is perhaps reinvented. Even as we restrain ourselves from lingering too long in these regions where intuition gives way rapidly to delirium, we have nonetheless to assert that, on a purely plastic plane, Marcel Duchamp appears to have defined a new space where previously unknown dynamic laws indistinctly codify and ultimately reduce to a single principle the organic and the inorganic. Contrary to de Chirico’s tableaux, which provoke a psychological disorientation, Duchamp’s pictorial oeuvre invites us to a logical disorientation. It gives a specific consistency to “the possible reality (obtained) by slightly distending physical and chemical laws.” “Le pendu femelle,” Duchamp explains, “is the form in ordinary perspective of a pendu femelle, of which one could try to find the real form. This follows from the fact that any form at all is the perspective of another, according to a certain vanishing point and a certain distance.” This formula, one hastens to note, simply states the obvious. It applies to all plastic expressions subjected to conventional perspective and sometimes acquires a lyrical objectivity (Voyage to Cythera, for example).

But if Duchamp leans here on the perspectival laws defined within the framework of Euclidean geometry, it is only to better transgress them in determining his vanishing point by nonspatial coordinates. There can be no doubt that the generative vanishing point of the pendu femelle is to be found on a purely mental line—more exactly, on a line mental in essence—whatever the eventual geometric existence of that line. By the same token, one is free to assume that the vanishing point in the Large Glass is situated on the line of sex of the malic molds, the pendu femelle being the synthetic projection of the individual desires, the distance obtained by the (imaginary) line resulting from the conjugated action of the nine (imaginary) vectors proportional to the intensity of each desire. The Large Glass could pass for an irrational exploitation of geometry, which ceases to impose its properties on the object in order to fold itself [se plier] in accordance with the unforeseen twists and turns of desire. If automatism manifests a throwing into reverse in that it is the language of the psychic unconscious, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even expresses an analogous reversal and constitutes the first word of what we will permit ourselves to name, elliptically, the physical unconscious.8 By automatism and by Marcel Duchamp, a mental disposition has been emancipated. In 8. What is the Standard Stoppage if not the unconscious aspect of a unit of measurement? (“If a horizontal thread one meter in length drops from a height of one meter onto a horizontal surface, deforming itself as it will, and provides a new figure of a unit of length.”) As we know, Duchamp envisioned using the Standard Stoppages as letters of a new alphabet. The expression “physical unconscious” was used by Hans Bellmer several years ago in a way that appears close to what we are proposing here. “A PLANTANEOUS DEMOLITION”

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painting today, nothing could possibly count but those dizzying swings of the glider that will uncover it. One man, according to us, is a passenger in the glider, and the truly vertiginous wake he leaves behind him trails off deep within the interior, toward the heart of that disposition. That man is Matta. That an imperious concern for moral health—first and intangible condition for an activity such as ours—necessitates keeping him at a distance does not in any way prevent us from recognizing that the lines of force of the modern adventure, such as it has the chance of being run in art, are inscribed in his painting. Deliberately substituting the psychophysical field for reassuring (Euclidean geometric) visual space, Matta begins already in 1943 to give us a glimpse of structural reality; this unveils itself bit by bit to the point of presenting itself as the endpoint of all differentiation among matter, form, and movement (Erotic Vertige, Revolt of the Contraries). With the Vitreur,9 Matta appears to call upon the dynamic laws of which we spoke with Duchamp and to prefigure perpetual erotic movement.10 The Silk of Consciousness, which the last “May Salon” gave us occasion to admire, raises the logical preoccupation to the highest intensity and seems to us the first pictorial demonstration of a unique faculty that would put paid the opposition between the affective world and the intellectual world. For thirty years, surrealism has been synonymous with the methodical exaltation of liberty. That liberty, in the present world, is in the most 9. Tableau destroyed. We know only the reproduction of the fragment published in Surrealism and Painting. 10. Art is called upon to provoke in practice the collapse of those “limit situations” (death, chance, impotence) that, according to Jaspers, define the human conditions. 226

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precarious state—a fact surrealism attributes straightaway to the exaggerated importance accorded the index of rationality governing human relations. From the first, it seemed to surrealists that if the balance were reequilibrated—that is, if the irruption in daily life of so-called paranormal phenomena (from the simple dream to prophetic signals, from “visions” to clairvoyance) ceased to be controlled and systematically devalued by the rationalist force that organizes the human spirit as badly as it does social relations—then the very key to the interpretation and transformation of the world would fall into their power. And so one finds, logically, that art is the most favorable terrain on which to stir up the power of the irrational, which is in any event still too constrained, and that it is necessary, on moral grounds, to negate the “odious precept” that the end justifies the means. For art really to be the terrain of liberty, it must begin by taking leave of the commercial circuit, which in the twentieth century has enlarged itself to the point of innervating practically all human activities—including, precisely, artistic activities. At Venice, this summer, victory went to the dealers. They succeeded in buying not only a painting but, among others, a painter—the living painter* in whom the signatories of these lines found their best reasons to open their eyes, the briefest and most serious act in the world. We don’t have time to be lyrical. May the good people of Venice know, however, that the man they applaud today once made something beat [fit battre] within in us other than our hands.** May they know as well that their laurel wreaths, in extinguishing that man’s revolt, inflamed ours all the more. We are of a youth that will grow old with such passions or will not grow old at all. simon hantaï and jean schuster

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APPENDIX 2

“notes, deliberately Confounding, accelerating, and the like for a ‘reactionary,’ nonreducible avant-garde” simon Hantaï

This appendix is a translation of “Notes confusionelles accélérantes et autres pour une avant-garde ‘réactionnaire’ non réductible” (see fig. 21). All emphases are original to the text. By way of introduction to the atmosphere that led to these works. Just as it was two thousand years ago, the world is looking for a global response . . . and so we get defeatism reminiscent of Nineveh and a rage for the indefensible. No polemics here, no desire even to persuade or explain. I affirm and negate categorically, with no concern for nuance, obscurity, confusion, or contradiction. Apparently. No one who examines himself, the Bible before his eyes, will contradict me. And what else is worthy of examination, today as it was yesterday? I am of an age (spiritually) to be unjust socially, which is to say that I can be truly just. I therefore affirm the absurd, knowing the price to be paid and received

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for exaggerating. The absurdity of the world is obvious, but nothing is more certain than the fact that it is not absurd. The intellectual and artistic avant-garde of the twentieth century is grappling with the secular idea of decline. What a limited conception divides simplistically into progressive avant-garde and reactionary rear-guard are an economic and anarchistic ecumenism, on the one hand, and a spiritualist and static ecumenism, on the other. Whoever doubts humanity’s progress is considered reactionary. Confronted with the ineffable, progress and history are bereft of meaning. Faced with the conditions of life and with regard to the decline of Western civilization, we must ask some hard questions. Those who adopt the humanistic-progressivist view are and will remain unable to understand the significance of the dissolution or to glimpse the compensatory tendency just below its surface, harbinger of a change that will sweep aside all habits of life and thought. We are all accomplices and enemies of the future. Every Manichean denunciation is blindly unilateral. The era of the consumer waits in vain for empirical answers to the profound upheaval. The problem is metaphysical. After six centuries of religious degeneration, Western civilization today has been pushed to a state of paroxysm and fraudulence and finds itself threatened with Babel-like syncretism. Tomorrow will bring about a reaction aimed not at a nostalgic restoration of past forms, mere illusion of a lesser disorder, but at the recreation of a mythical vision, one adequate to consciousness of the indivisible in all its polarity, of the simultaneity of all things in the transfiguration of every event. Fidelity to the past means: rediscovering the past through a dynamic process oriented to the future, the distancing of revalorization being a restitution of return. Memory of the future. Apparentness of the permanent. Beyond the humanists’ ethic, in

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the Christian disqualification of history, a passion for contradiction seeks its signification by way of dynamic eschatology. It takes all the blindness and ignorance brought about by the printed word not to see that there is nothing true in our civilization that does not come from Christianity and that everything detached from Christianity is false because it is detached from it. Secularism and what we have inherited from it— rationalist philosophy and science—have lost their way and must be made to serve new ambitions that arise in opposition to profane claims. Hegel’s historical providentialism having culminated in a somber order of technical efficiency, the trial of the temporal by and for the spiritual is the only question that deserves to be asked today. It is clear that surrealism is but one more form of secular deterioration: the latest in a line of heterodox Gnostic doctrines; a materialization of symbols with anthropomorphic tendencies; a mystical, erotic Christian heresy of the most degraded sort; a boundless, creeping negligence; a libertinism of pleasure; a sub-Catharian Angelism of the salvation of the flesh; an eruption of brutishness in the desert left behind by atheist rationalism. Dimly aware of wholly other needs, it remains mired in sensual attachments, utterly impotent as a spiritual effort. It is the recycling of the obsolete slogans of a revolutionary romanticism; a credulous incredulity to the point of superstition; an impoverished exaltation of the by-products of faith; an absurd degradation of the contestation of the transcendent absurdity of the fall; the uniformity of the shallows; a lack of distinction between depth and lowness; a submission of the spirit to sex; a literary idolatry of the sensible and the imaginary; a logical armature for the theocratic spirit, with all its characteristics inverted; a religion of animal desire, of voracity, 228

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of the divinization of the down-here and a search for powers by way of magic; the terror of the irreparable. It is no less clear that the adversary of that inversion can only be Rome, which by its absolute fidelity to the Revelation is more than the antipode of such aberrations. It comes as no surprise that libertinism declares it the prime enemy of free thought. The hatred of the spiritual, the recourse to psychic powers of dispersion, to rather ceremonial magic—dime-show mysteries, verbal subversion of the astonishing—still does not quite amount to conscious Satanism and remains limited to literary devilries. So long as the world had not yet arrived at the tipping point of the crisis of positivism, the question could neither appear in all its seriousness nor indeed be posed in a fully conscious way, the significance of that act being laid out for all eternity. The great costume party that, without requiring any true or deep sacrifice in return, provides spiritual excitation to the skeptical and the desperate is increasingly imitated by the masses. At any rate, it is not at the level of these more or less unconscious psychic powers that one might broach the metaphysical problem of God and Lucifer. All of that is but the illusion of a higher point, an all-dispersing degeneration rather than a liberation. That illusion leaves no possibility of resolving the contraries at stake. Quite the contrary. But the way is paved today for the crucial debate. On a personal level, I eagerly await André Breton’s conversion. To keep the joking to a minimum, I add simply: I hope for his awakening to a higher calling. On March 7, 1277, Étienne Tempier, bishop of Paris, issued a decree condemning 219 heretical theses. The date symbolizes the last great effort

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made to stop the development of a movement of thought that, under the influence of Aristotle and his interpreters, has opened the doors to the deadly fertility of the double truth and consequentially all humanist and other illusions. The superficial triumph of the Greek poison conveyed by Thomism having arrived today at its term, it brings forth in all their intensity the scholastic debates in light of the most advanced propositions of intellectual speculation and of art. At the very moment that knowledge gives way to nothingness, that irruption of scholasticism in the current debates and the highly suggestive significance of that utterly noncoincidental encounter is the most important event in six centuries of Western civilization; it sets out the central interrogation for tomorrow. What was obscured at that moment reappears now before eyes turned toward the future as the transfiguring sign of a Catholic universality to be accomplished. Our inquiry begins with this insurgence to find the final aspect [dernier visage] of the West. The maieutic attempt and its manifestation in the Ceremonies in Commemoration of the Condemnation of Siger of Brabant on March 7, 1957, the anniversary of the death of Saint Thomas Aquinas, should be taken as the de facto irruption of this debate in the current context—and as the day on which it became clear that this debate can no longer be taken off the agenda. According to a simplistic thesis, drawn from an upside-down view of history, it is possible to see a real convergence among diverse manifestations of revolt and attribute a unilateral meaning to them. This thesis would have the innovators spontaneously rejoin the revolutionary movement of their time and become the fellow travelers of the revolution. Such a view is not simply illusory; it has ceased to have any bearing on what is actually going on. The confusion regarding artistic and

political left and right—left as renewal, right as conservation—is a pure fantasy but not an innocent one. One can no longer entertain the least illusion about the kind of knowledge that is drawn from books. The static situation of exhaustion, the indefinite repetition of slogans from another century—these things conceal a change of orientation, beyond the well-established conformisms. The ill repute of the revolutionary myth can only increase, and the chaos that will result from it is entirely foreseeable. At the same time, the mystic sectarian tendencies of the interwar period—fruits of an exasperated anarchy of a spiritual need left unsatisfied by technology—will doubtless spread throughout the masses, but their intellectual attractions will pale in light of Catholic orthodoxy. We may expect certain subterfuges to become discredited definitively, notably: the degrading of the sacred to the status of mere recreation; the secularization of the sacred; the imminent supernaturalism of the bizarre; the empty mimicry behind seeming rigor that is in fact but passivity carried away by psychological enchantment; the amazement before strange and fantastic phenomena; the cult of the orgiastic for satisfaction; the reduction of rites to their social functions; the liberation of man by the suppression of all the limits of individuality by a dive into the unconscious; the passivity of libertinism. One should not be surprised that certain elementary truths still pass today in intellectual society for monstrosities. For example: that the church is the only vital milieu, by grace of the sacraments; that Christian marriage is the sanctification of love; that since the Middle Ages there has been nothing but an ever-greater decline of spirituality; that Marx built his system in the most “NOTES, DELIBERATELY CONFOUNDING”

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narrowminded way [avec une mentalité d’épicier: literally, “with a grocer’s mentality”]; or that surrealism is a collage, a compilation of disparate fragments, an assemblage lacking internal logic, an absence of structure, a syncretism plain and simple. As for the crowds, they have been inundated for some time now with money and sex, and they copy literary and cinematic models. Magic and possession. Against Christianity, which demands the subordination of psychic powers to a spirituality of universal communion, magic resists by sacrilege, by a corrupting hostility that submits spirituality to the possessive impulse of desire, by empirical egoism, bringing it down to a Luciferian level. André Breton’s recent book on magic art is the clear image of that inverted spirituality—a formless dispersal cut off from all transcendence. A literary aesthetic of the bizarre and the freakish. The unfigurable knows nothing of the Count’s umbrella. The unimaginable is not inconceivable. Let us admire, instead, the lucidity of Georges Braque, using the full force of his authority to run off Gauguin and exoticism. Enough with the “art” of savages, of the insane, of children, of mediums, of all manner of experimental phenomena; enough with imaginary delirium. A civilization in the process of disintegrating is easily taken up in aberrant superstitions and mysticisms and in attempts to construct various pseudo-religions—philosophical, political, economic, and other—in opposition to Catholicism. The relativism of experience turns its back on the absolute of dogma. Knowledge is commodified, and secular ignorance replaces true learning. One descends from the spiritual to the political. Utilitarian greed and enjoyment become the new horizon. Atemporal aspects are forgotten in favor of submission to humanist principles of the subhuman. One 230

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invents false hierarchies founded on money, power, or publicity. The natural wisdom of illiteracy disappears in favor of the press and its baseness. The time has come to reverse the trend begun in the thirteenth century. Modern gnoseologies having failed, the only remaining purity is the Church. I affirm that nothing will remain tomorrow of whatever defines itself against the cross or thrives under the sign of its deformations. In centuries to come, one will speak only of those who, whatever the difficulties and requisite sacrifices, struck the properly intransigent note. Religion is not morality. Moralists bore me. When all is said and done, libertinism remains within distinctly human horizons, and on this level there are plenty of options to choose from, each one according to personal fantasy. Choose between Camus and Homais or between Sade and François Mauriac, if you feel like it. Liberty is elsewhere. I look forward to the total discrediting of literature in all its exhausted forms. Posturing goes on, but poetic feelings are now utterly devoid of interest. Cioran is legible only because of Joseph de Maistre, Michaux because of Saint John of the Cross and, in the final analysis, because of the Cross. I underline as adamantly as possible the unique importance of “Infinite Turbulence.” In that book, Michaux tackles the great problem for tomorrow: the illegitimacy of the search for powers, the question of the adversary, of spiritual perversities, of rites turned upside down (and their illicit means), of false beatitude, of the sin of Angelism, of the inversion of effusion for strictly worldly aims, of the undeserved infinite. Art is the historically determined exegesis of the ineffable. Among all the arts, painting—as expression through matter and through the transformation of matter—today offers the greatest

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possibilities for expanding in the most subtle ways, with all the ambiguities such subtlety entails, and is therefore the field par excellence both of spiritual awareness and its counterfeiting. Its modalities of formalization in the nonformalized [l’informalisé] being sufficiently well known, I am content simply to indicate certain transintellectual problems posed by the medium. Tending toward the transformation and overcoming of contingencies via their detachment from the principles of the day, compensatory appearance of a double sense of that absence of principle, the nonformalized is the field of appearance the most open to all latencies. The problem of the incommunicable is more acute than ever. On the one hand, from the standpoint of manifestation, there are the lower registers of the cosmological order: dissolution of forms, lack of organization, a state of undeveloped potentiality, obscurity, inferior darkness; return to the nondifferentiation of the origin, manifestation’s point of departure. On the other hand, from the metaphysical standpoint: there is the return to the conditions of the beginning, to superior darkness, to silence as the ultimate act of speech, to the unmanifested that transcends all manifestations, transition beyond form. The crucial problem of painting is that of Incarnation, the central knot of the revelation of Christ. The opening toward the future becomes a conscious acknowledgment of the past [L’ouverture sur l’avenir devient reconnaissance consciente du passé]. Art is religious in essence. Secularized, it is but profanation. “Sacred” is inseparable from “consecrated,” and profane spheres are but profane views. This is an extremely serious situation for art, as for everything, in a contemporary civilization characterized by extremes in both directions. Never so well-known on the level of information; of such high, conscious aspirations; so stretched

with yearning toward the essential, the incommunicable. And never so little integrated in life, in communion; so submerged in unconsciousness cut off from above; so blinded by the accidental; so reduced to sensibility. Reaching out to the metaphysical All but chained by the spatial Nothing, crucified upon the two aspects of the indivisibility and the eschatological consciousness that results from it, dynamic or not. Art is no longer the reproduction of manifest reality and after the temporarily salutary triumph of all manner of exoticisms, it tackles the human condition in all its nudity. The last of these exoticisms, that of the East, still exerts a certain hold as it seems outwardly to offer an escape. Tomorrow it is the inner meaning that will prevail—namely, that which is Eastern at the heart of the West, a return to spirituality, to the cross. Amor est roma. The spiritual and its parodies, becoming a basic problem of civilization, precipitate an endless and ever-deepening crisis that nothing short of a paroxysm will dispel. Everything leads one to believe that language will resort more and more to religious references, whether founded on an apparent or genuine grasp of the future, a false or true recognition of the crux of the past: a confusion or fusion of languages, the Babel of the surface, a conquest of the earth with celestial vocabulary, or the Parousia. One can therefore expect an imitation carried further and further, a superficial assimilation, the last and most total offensive against the Church, and, as one can expect, also the sorcerous usage of metaphysical truths. Increasing references to Christian mysticism and above all to those aspects that are most extreme—because they are ambiguous—but total disdain for the revelation that founds them. The ultimate secrets scattered to the four winds and put at the disposition of sleeping brains to distract and excite them. The loftiest approaches “NOTES, DELIBERATELY CONFOUNDING”

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to the inexpressible furnishing literary and other pretexts. Even so, despite that and because of that, the vanguards of art, thought, and science are opening themselves to possibilities for spiritual integration, to the transcendental qualification of entropy. Painting has stripped itself of all things, the better to plunge into the all-encompassing. Wanting to say the essential, it tends toward silence; to fulfill liberty, it has dissolved every law that shackled it; it is gesture, fixed movement, ritual action in the absence of rites; the fixation of that which cannot be fixed, of the changeable in its perpetual burgeoning; the exteriorization of that which cannot be fixed in advance; detachment in attachment to the world; at once all and nothing; a totality at once impossible and always already realized; the union of contraries in contradiction; the refusal of certitudes and their acceptance; mobility and immobility at the same time; detachment from the world and engagement in the world; evasion and acceptance; differentiation and nondifferentiation; passive activity; objective subjectivity; particular and universal; the correspondence of extremes in constant exchange; a vision nonadditive but structuring of the accidental and the essential, of the part and the whole by their integration in lived knowledge. Opening to a supraindividual state, beyond name and form; the freeing up of values without adding significance to them, significance being inherent to them; a sign manifesting, encompassing, and veiling all at once. The act of painting is the putting at stake of painting and, parallel to that, of man by himself. Upheaval of an extreme seriousness, the seriousness of the act implicating all of eternity, which, beyond all categories, opens onto the ineffable, enunciating propositions affirmative in form but negative in content, redeploying the spiritual 232

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procedures of negative theologies in the impossibilities we experience by, paradoxically, endowing intellectual speculation about the void with the transcendent intensity of the instant of ecstatic subjectivity. In these conditions the indefinable instant is the signification, thus the impossibility of predetermined significations and the importance of the notions: absence of predetermined gestures and form, of the speed of execution (it is illusory to take that speed in a strictly chronometric sense; its signification is outside of time; it is at once the lived duration, filled to a maximum of intensity, and the contemplation of the interior void, the suppression of time as a modality of the corporeal world, the accelerating panic of loss and of transmutation to a superior power of the illuminated state of the ecstasy that transfigures consciousness, the negation of all sense of the given, a state manifesting itself by open signs, the support of transfinite interpretations, sign-structure, the particular expression of the totality reflecting itself by integration in that expression, the visible aspect of the dizzying consciousness of all simultaneities). The outer work is therefore inseparable from the inner work: the transformation of matter and oneself, the illumination of consciousness. The current state of painting—the nonformalized phase [phase informalisée]—has rendered the prohibition on separation as effective as it can be, but simultaneously, it opens the door to all the extreme forms of the spiritual and of its manifestations. Insurmountable difficulty and facility within everybody’s reach, total rigor and total absence of rigor, liberty mistaken for necessity, controlled total spontaneity [spontanéité totale contrôlée]. Abolition and accomplishment of the law. To be noted: the appearance in the foreground of the color black and its significance in the nonformalized as the pure potentiality of indistinctness

APPENDIX 2

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and initiatory sense of obscurity, the obscure night of the soul, of inner transformation, the luminous sense of black, as unmanifested. In an event of incalculable importance, a mysticism with aesthetic tendencies reaches across seven centuries to link up with an aesthetic with mystical tendencies—a plastic initiative that, analogously to mysticisms, aims to transcend the eyes of the body (even the inner eyes), and poses the problem of nonimaginative vision. It arises, visibly and invisibly [en surface et sous face], from the myth of the fallen angel. Beyond good and evil, in front of Good and Evil. The formulas of the secret having been found intellectually, the virtual state that encloses and manifests all contradictions must be overcome, as must intellectualism. Above all antagonisms,

above all justification, all discussion and speculation, there is spiritual integration: the merging of lived experience with mystery, free-slavery [libre-esclavage], grace. After centuries of art idealizing sensible reality, after the complete internalization of the reproductive attitude, a path is open, a path toward the accomplishment and abolition of art. The ultimate sign is the absence of sign. As for painting, in its appearances, it attempts the last valorization, at the limit of the impossible between its disappearance and the tomb of the Savior Malraux; between the nonimaginary tomb-void and the real tomb of the museum without walls. simon hantaï

“NOTES, DELIBERATELY CONFOUNDING”

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233

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notes

5.

Introduction

1. See, for example, Baldassari, Simon Hantaï, 38. Elsewhere, Hantaï positions pliage as inheriting from Matisse’s and Pollock’s respective uses of notionally crude implements to fundamentally transform painterly gesture: “les ciseaux” (the scissors)—in the case of Matisse’s late cutouts—“et le bâton trempé”—a reference to Pollock’s paint stick (Hantaï, “Don de tableaux,” 26). 2. For a useful introduction to Hantaï and the broader postwar French context, see Melville, “Simon Hantaï.” 3. I am referring to the curator’s famous chart, “The Development of Abstract Art,” on the cover of Barr, Cubism and Abstract Art. 4. Clair, Art en France, 164–65. B.M.P.T., as critics have tended to label the group formed in 1967 by Daniel Buren, Olivier Mosset, Michel Parmentier, and Niele Toroni, debuted in January of that year in a now celebrated showing in the Paris Biennale’s Salon de la Jeune Peinture. As for Supports/ Surfaces (I use what has come to be the most common orthography, while Clair deploys the form then used by

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6. 7.

8. 9.

10.

certain members of the group in their journal, Peinture, cahiers théoriques), although some of the painters involved began exhibiting together in 1969, the group (which included Viallat) first showed under that title in September 1970, at L’Arc. Two additional exhibitions followed in 1971, at the Cité Internationale in Paris and the municipal theater of Nice. The connection between Hantaï and Supports/Surfaces is made by virtually all the contemporary reviews. See, in particular, Pacquement, “Hantaï,” 53; Lévêque, “Hantaï,” 16; Pierre Mazars, “Hantaï: Les fruits du hasard,” Le Figaro, June 5–6, 1976, 16; and Jacques Michel, “Les gestes différés de Simon Hantaï,” Le Monde, June 10, 1976, 14. Millet, Art contemporain, 127–28. L’art du réel, USA 1948–1968 was held at the Galeries nationales du Grand Palais, Paris, November 14– December 23, 1968. I will say more about this exhibition in chapter 7. Clair, Art en France, 94. Clair’s introduction includes a section devoted to “La mort du sujet,” which concludes with a large claim about the importance of structuralism for the generation in question (ibid., 19–20). These references are to Barthes and Louis Althusser, respectively; see Barthes, Degré zéro de l’écriture, and Althusser, Balibar, Rancière, Establet, and Macherey, Lire le Capital. For an excellent introduction to Buren’s take on painting as a “theoretical practice,” see Melville, “Daniel Buren.” Singerman also provides a sophisticated overview of these negotiations in “Non-Compositional Effects.” For a more recent account of the “death of the author” topos in contemporary production that again

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18.

19. 20.

21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

positions Hantaï as a central reference, see Pugnet, Effacement de l’artiste. Clair, Art en France, 111 n. 12. Hantaï, quoted in Bonnefoi, Hantaï, 23. Michaud, “Métaphysique de Hantaï,” 14. For “pure visuality,” see ibid., 15. Donnadieu, “Simon Hantaï,” 43. Pacquement, “Painting with Closed Eyes,” 13. Clair, for example, does not mention them; Fourcade, one of the curators of the artist’s first posthumous retrospective and the primary author of its accompanying catalogue, explicitly brackets the totality of the artist’s discourse as an obfuscating and ultimately self-protective screen (“Hantaï,” 19). Hantaï, “Notes confusionelles,” 228. The phrase appears without attribution in Hantaï and Schuster, “Démolition au platane,” 224. For Breton’s original usage, see Manifestoes of Surrealism, 178. Hantaï, “Notes confusionelles,” 227, 233. For a powerful analysis of this passage in the context of American abstract expressionism, see Jachec, Philosophy and Politics. Blanchot, Unavowable Community, 5. See, for example, Tapié’s claim in a key work of 1952 that, henceforth, “Il n’est d’aventure qu’individuelle” (Art autre, n.p.). Hantaï, “Don de tableaux,” 34. For an alternate translation, see Hantaï, “Donation of Paintings,” 213. Cavell, World Viewed, 72. Ibid. Ibid., 104. Ibid., 103. Ibid., esp. 107 and 109–10. As Cavell makes clear, he takes the term from Fried.

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Chapter 1

1. For more on Schuster and the place of “Démolition au platane” within his life and work, see Duwa, Batailles de Jean Schuster, esp. 261–77. I shall note simply that he and Hantaï followed divergent fates, with Schuster remaining a member and indeed a key mover within the surrealist group until October 1969, when three years after Breton’s death, he announced the impossibility of continued collective action. 2. Schuster offers these precisions in a brief note appended to the reprinted version in Pierre, Tracts surréalistes, 367. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid. 5. See in particular Fourcade’s remarks in the 2013 Pompidou catalogue: “This was thus a strange moment in his history when he let himself be convinced by a means of expression and a code of references, Surrealism, which was all but played out in 1950, and which had nothing new or vital to offer. How can we explain this attraction? We can imagine Simon Hantaï as a young man, still unsure of himself, lacking a clear vision of modernism, and probably very isolated” (“Hantaï,” 24). 6. Nadeau, History of Surrealism, 220. 7. Ibid., 225. 8. Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, 26 (translation slightly modified). 9. Ibid. 10. There is a large literature on surrealist automatism and its divided legacies. Among those sources I have found most useful, see Jenny, Parole singulière; Lomas, “‘Modest Recording Instruments’”; Palermo, Fixed Ecstasy; and Ubl, Preshistoric Future. More recently,

11. 12. 13.

14.

15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24.

Michael Shreyach has fundamentally reframed the stakes of automatism in the work of Jackson Pollock (Pollock’s Modernism, esp. 97–146). Tapié, Mirobolus Macadam, 18. Jorn, “Discours aux pingouins,” 91. See, in particular, Charles Estienne, “Abstraction ou surréalisme,” Observateur d’aujourd’hui, January 29, 1953, 21, and Charles Estienne, “Une révolution, le tachisme,” Combat, March 1, 1954, 1–2. For more on Estienne, including Hantaï’s increasingly fractious relations with the critic, see Warnock, Penser la peinture, 63–70. For “repeated failure,” see Breton, Break of Day, 137. For the revived interest in automatism, see, in particular, Breton, “On Surrealism in Its Living Works.” Hantaï and Schuster, “Démolition au platane,” 219. Hantaï’s first explicit published attack on socialist realism dates from 1956, a point to which I return in chapter 3. Breton, Surrealism and Painting, 3 (translation slightly modified). Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, 9–10. Hantaï and Schuster, “Démolition au platane,” 220. Ibid., 220. Ibid., 220. Ibid., 220. One may wonder from where this excess can be introduced; apart from a passing reference to the “imaginary,” Hantaï and Schuster do not say. However, as it will be shown in the next two chapters, Hantaï’s work of the latter half of the 1950s tries out two successive lenses for thinking about the origins of excess. Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, 40. Ibid., 41.

25. Hantaï and Schuster, “Démolition au platane,” 220. 26. Ibid., 223. 27. Ibid., 223. 28. Ibid., 223. 29. Ibid., 222. 30. Maurice Blanchot glosses this point as follows: “Automatic writing is a weapon against reflection and language. It is supposed to humiliate human pride, particularly in the form that traditional culture has given it. But in reality, it is itself a proud aspiration toward a way of knowledge, and opens a new unlimited belief in words. Surrealism was haunted by the idea that there is, there must be, in man’s constitution a moment in which all difficulties are removed, in which antinomies no longer have any meanings, in which knowledge completely takes hold of things, in which language is not speech but reality itself, yet without ceasing to be the proper reality of language; in this moment, finally, man touches the absolute” (“Reflections on Surrealism,” 86). 31. Hantaï and Schuster, “Démolition au platane,” 222. 32. Ibid., 220. 33. Ibid., 220. 34. Ibid., 220. 35. Ibid., 220–21. 36. Ibid., 221. 37. Ibid., 221. 38. Ibid., 219. 39. Ibid., 219. 40. It is also suggestive, to say the least, that Jacques Lacan should have been rereading and critiquing the Phenomenology of Perception at exactly the time of “Démolition au platane” in his 1954–55 seminar. In some ways, the particular, as it were, antihumanist use to which Hantaï and Schuster put Gestalt theory brings them closer

notes to Pages 13–21

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41. 42. 43. 44.

45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

54. 55.

56.

to Lacan’s critique of Merleau-Ponty than to Merleau-Ponty himself. See Lacan, Ego in Freud’s Theory. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, x. Ibid. Ibid., xi. Hantaï and Schuster, “Démolition au platane,” 221. Like Merleau-Ponty before them, the two authors refer in particular to “experiments by [Kurt] Koffka and [Wolfgang] Köhler” (221). Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, 36 (translation slightly modified). Breton is quoting Baudelaire in this passage. Ibid., 36–37 (translation slightly modified). Ibid., 27. Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, 26. Hantaï and Schuster, “Démolition au platane,” 222. Ibid., 222. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 26. Hantaï and Schuster, “Démolition au platane,” 222. Ibid., 220. The figure of the swinging door appears borrowed from Breton, who once described Nadja as “un livre battant comme une porte” (a book swinging like a door) onto reality. For more on this figure, see Gracq, André Breton, 89–133. Hantaï and Schuster, “Démolition au platane,” 223. Michel Carrouges, author of one of the first systematic studies of the movement (approved by Breton himself), is particularly attentive to this point in his work André Breton. Perhaps the most striking aspect of this book as a whole is the extent to which Carrouges couches his discussion of automatism in quasi-therapeutic terms. Breton, Break of Day, 137.

236

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57. Hantaï and Schuster, “Démolition au platane,” 219. 58. Ibid., 219. 59. Ibid., 219. 60. Ibid., 224–25. 61. For a compelling and relatively early example of this rereading, see McDonough, “Hantaï’s Challenge.” 62. These notes are reprinted in Duchamp, “Green Box.” 63. Indeed, Hantaï claims to have owned an edition in the early 1950s (conversation with the author). My conversations with Hantaï took place regularly over the course of roughly four years, from September 2004 to his death in September 2008. Zsuzsa Hantaï, the artist’s wife, was almost always present during those conversations and participated in them. 64. See Breton, Surrealism and Painting, 85–99. 65. The phrase is from Rubin, Dada, Surrealism, 20. 66. Breton, Surrealism and Painting, 93. 67. Ibid. 68. Ibid., 94. 69. Ibid. 70. Here one might contrast a remark by Duchamp in his late discussions with Pierre Cabanne: “I had worked eight years on this thing [the Large Glass], which was willed, voluntarily established according to exact plan, but despite that, I didn’t want it— and this is perhaps why I worked such a long time—to be the expression of a sort of inner life” (Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, 18). 71. Hantaï and Schuster, “Démolition au platane,” 225. Like many of the terms deployed by the two authors throughout this essay, “sublime point” has a prior history within surrealism, having been used by Breton to denote a future

72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82.

resolution of contrary states. See, in particular, Gracq, André Breton, 80. Hantaï and Schuster, “Démolition au platane,” 220 n. 2. Ibid., 225. The “final aspect” is a figure to which I will return in chapter 3. Ibid., 225. Ibid., 225. Breton, Surrealism and Painting, 64. Hantaï and Schuster, “Démolition au platane,” 225. Ibid., 225. Ibid., 225. Ibid., 225. Ibid., 225. Ibid., 225–26. Traineau (glider) is a reference to one of the component parts of the Large Glass.

Chapter 2

1. Hantaï and Fournier had met in 1954, on the occasion of the painter’s last exhibition under an at least partly surrealist aegis, Charles Estienne’s Alice in Wonderland. For more on that meeting, see Fournier, interview with Jean-Paul Ameline and Harry Bellet, 175–76. For more on Alice in Wonderland, see Warnock, Penser la peinture, 63–70. 2. For more on Brisset and Hantaï’s interest in his decidedly unconventional “grammars,” see my extended treatment in Warnock, Penser la peinture, 112–18. 3. For example, there is to my knowledge no extant list of works included in the exhibition. Also lacking are sales records and installation photographs that might shed light on the contents. My attempts to recreate the installation with Hantaï and Fournier produced different estimates, but it seems fair to

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4.

5.

6. 7.

suggest the show contained between seventeen and twenty paintings. Françoise Choay—one of Pollock’s most incisive critics in France at the end of the 1950s—has written of “accrochages fragmentaires et fulgurants”: “Pollock nous apparaissait par bribes et fragments. On s’interrogeait sur la généalogie de l’œuvre, sur son ampleur, sa cohérence, sa dynamique. . . . Il fallait la mort de Pollock (1956) et que le Musée d’art moderne de New York organisât en 1957 la première rétrospective, pour qu’enfin nos certitudes soient confirmées par une vision d’ensemble” (“Pollock vu de Paris,” 82–83). Chapter 4 returns to this watershed event and what I take to have been a consequent deepening of Hantaï’s relation to Pollock’s art. For example, Bonnefoi characterizes an early scraped painting as a “tableau de pure poésie d’où toute ‘littérature’ est enfin bannie” (Hantaï, 8–9), while Baldassari casts Hantaï’s raclage more broadly as a method by which “la peinture peut se faire sans métaphore” (Simon Hantaï, 31). Hantaï, Sexe-Prime, n.p. In a letter to the author, Hantaï recalls questioning Breton and his followers about the painting they had seen in America, “puisqu’ils y ont vécu des années. Toujours la même réponse que Duchamp résumait ainsi: La peinture pensante s’arrête avec Gorky. J’ai tout de suite vendu la boîte verte signée que j’ai achetée pour 100 francs d’alors” (May 12–18, 2008). The remark Hantaï attributes to Duchamp reflects Breton’s contemporary appropriation of Arshile Gorky as a “surrealist painter,” a label that Gorky himself rejected. See Breton, Surrealism and Painting, 199–201. For Duchamp’s view of

8.

9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

postwar painting, see the artist’s comments in Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp: “When you see what the Abstractionists have done since 1940, it’s worse than ever, optical. They’re really up to their necks in the retina!” (43). See, for example, Fourcade’s grudging treatment in the Pompidou catalogue (Fourcade, “Hantaï,” 49). For an important exception, see Berecz, “Continuité et rupture.” While I share Berecz’s sense that Mathieu is a more important figure in the French 1950s than recent commentators acknowledge, I also want to insist on certain distinctions between Hantaï’s and Mathieu’s respective practices and theories that her account seems to me to collapse. Hantaï, Sexe-Prime, n.p. For more on Mathieu, see, in particular, Abadie, Ashton, Kawasaki, and Stella, Georges Mathieu, and Berecz, “Grand Slam.” Tapié, “Confrontation of Vehemences,” 545. Mathieu, De l’abstrait au possible, 38. This text is from a conference held in Brussels on November 27, 1958. Mathieu, Abstraction prophétique, 35. Ibid., 54. Ibid. Mathieu, De l’abstrait au possible, 33. Buchloh describes Mathieu’s painting as a form of “accelerated automatism” (“Hantaï/Villeglé,” 249). Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, 29–30. For more on Masson’s automatic drawings, see Rubin and Lanchner, André Masson, esp. 21. Abadie also discusses the relationship between Mathieu and Masson, with an emphasis on what he sees as Masson’s more “physical” (as opposed to “psychic”) deployment of automatism,

20.

21. 22. 23.

24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

in Abadie, Ashton, Kawasaki, and Stella, Georges Mathieu, 21. Mathieu’s most famous maxim by far, this phrase recurs throughout his interviews and essays since the 1950s. See Mathieu, De l’abstrait au possible, 14. For an English-language translation of an excerpt from the text most commonly cited as the original source of this thought, see Mathieu, “Note sur le poétique.” Mathieu, Abstraction prophétique, 15. This approximate dating is based on conversations with Hantaï. Again, it cannot be confirmed that this painting or indeed any of the following examples (apart from Sexe-Prime) were included in the Sexe-Prime exhibition. But they all are of the sort that would have been included in that show or produced in its immediate wake. For this reason, my references to Sexe-Prime should be taken to mean the general moment and ambiance of that show and not its precise contents. This conception of the body as mere conduit, coupled with the predominantly graphic impetus of Hantaï’s painting at this point, appears profoundly rooted in the surrealist conception of the “author” as a simple recording device. See Lomas, “‘Modest Recording Instruments.’” Hantaï and Schuster, “Démolition au platane,” 222. Mathieu, Abstraction prophétique, 29. For a more detailed reading of this work, see Warnock, “Acting the Part.” Mathieu, Abstraction prophétique, 31. Mathieu’s critics often reinforced this connection. See, for example, the following remarks by Herbert Read: “Mathieu is inimitable because he does not even imitate himself. Each painting is an unpremeditated paroxysm, as unselfconscious as a child’s scribble, or as the autograph of

notes to Pages 32–40

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30. 31. 32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

40. 41.

42.

a caliph. The sign is elaborated into a signature: a personal symbol . . . it has the inky intensity of a sepiaceous ejaculation, and the complexity of the serpent’s nest. A painting by Mathieu has power because it registers a direct current of sensibility, and because its calligraphy exposes depths hitherto unknown even to the painter” (quoted in Grainville and Xuriguera, Mathieu, 59). For more on the photos, see Warnock, “Acting the Part,” esp. 355, as well as Stiles, “Uncorrupted Joy.” Hantaï and Schuster, “Démolition au platane,” 225. Again, I translate from “Démolition au platane”: “But if Duchamp leans here on the perspectival laws defined within the framework of Euclidean geometry, it is only to better transgress them . . .” (225). Breton, Surrealism and Painting, 87. Ibid., 85–86. Ibid., 87. Ibid., 90. Gustafson, “Är du levande?” 35. Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, 18. This sort of dating appears on occasion among the many small works on paper that Hantaï produced in the years 1950–51. Yet while it is easy to imagine Hantaï producing a diminutive work in a single day, the gesture signifies quite otherwise when applied to a canvas with Sexe-Prime’s dimensions. Grainville and Xuriguera, Mathieu, 32. Here, too, it is impossible to say whether these paintings were included in the exhibition itself, for, as Hantaï noted in conversation with the author, the brochure had to be prepared in advance of the final selection. Of the three paintings, two have been lost or destroyed. Hantaï, Sexe-Prime, n.p.

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43. See, for example, Baldassari, Simon Hantaï, 30. 44. The phenomenon is recurrent in photographs of Hantaï in his studio. Already in 1976, Marcelin Pleynet called attention to this aspect of the shot in question: “Remarquez comment dans ce manifeste ‘Hommage à Jean-Pierre Brisset,’ l’artiste est photographié, représenté en angle sortant d’un trou noir de sa peinture” (“Levée de l’interprétation,” n.p.). 45. Asked about the studio photograph, Hantaï confirmed that he chose the picture’s point of view: “Ça ajoute une dimension de regard liée à la question de la modernité de la peinture, et l’action de la peinture” (conversation with the author). 46. Hantaï, Sexe-Prime, n.p. 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid. 49. Ibid. 50. This perceived proximity suggests a reading of Duchamp’s notes as themselves a certain form of “action writing,” scribbled down hastily as thoughts occurred to him—and therefore as indexes of a mode of making other than the state of total premeditation and conscious willing emphasized by Duchamp in his remarks to Cabanne on the Large Glass (see Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, 18). It would thus be another instance of Hantaï picking up on a possibility that is latent in an artist’s practice but not finally embraced or indeed actively resisted by its author. For more on Duchamp’s notes, see Le Penven, Art d’écrire. 51. Tellingly, these lines incorporate an unattributed quotation from Tapié, who had described art as rien (nothing) insofar as it is not

52.

53. 54.

55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

“totalement et passionnément vécu” (Art autre, n.p.). “Enforced redoubling” was among Hantaï’s privileged strategies throughout his life. In his 1976 retrospective at the MNAM, for example, visitors to the exhibition were forced to retrace a path through pliage after having toured the pre-pliage production. Significantly, Sexe-Prime marked the turning point. Vaché, Lettres de Guerre, 20. Hantaï’s relay to Vaché is itself another way of underlining “out-ofuseness.” Here it is important to note that Hantaï seems to have received Vaché by way of Breton’s 1947 Anthologie de l’humour noir. There, in an important introduction to Vaché’s writings, Breton characterizes his old friend’s attitude toward World War I in terms of a willed “non service”: “Ce n’est même plus le défaitisme rimbaldien de 1870–71, c’est un parti pris d’indifférence totale, au souci près de ne servir à rien ou plus exactement de desservir avec application” (Anthologie de l’humour noir, 376). Vaché’s famous indifference at times approaches Duchamp’s, as in a letter to Breton of May 9, 1918: “l’art est une sottise—Presque rien n’est une sottise—l’art doit être une chose drôle et un peu assommante— c’est tout” (Lettres de Guerre, 37). Bataille, Absence of Myth, 49. Bataille, Erotism, 29. Ibid., 17. Bataille, Inner Experience, 9. Ibid., 4. Ibid., 42–43. Ibid., 60–61. Hantaï and Schuster, “Démolition au platane,” 223, 219. Bataille, Erotism, 112–13. Hantaï, Sexe-Prime, n.p.

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Chapter 3

1. Hantaï, “Notes confusionelles,” 231. 2. In one important recent exception, Duwa picks these events up from the point of view of the surrealists and Schuster, in particular (Batailles de Jean Schuster, 293–300). See also Berecz, “Emerging and Withdrawing,” 24–26. 3. Sjölin, “Writing the Painting,” 143. 4. See, for example, Baldassari, Simon Hantaï, 10. Hantaï also returns to the religious and cultural milieu of his childhood in letters published in Hantaï, Derrida, and Nancy, Connaissance des textes; Cixous and Hantaï, Tablier de Simon Hantaï; and Hantaï and Nancy, Jamais le mot ‘créateur.’ 5. “La culture, c’était l’Église le dimanche” (Hantaï, conversation with the author). 6. Ibid. 7. Chances are very good that Mathieu attended Hantaï’s show at Fournier’s, although it has not been possible to confirm this. The gallery’s first livre d’or contains Mathieu’s name among the earliest signatures, and according to Fournier, the book probably was begun for Sexe-Prime (Fournier, conversation with the author). The show’s title, however, does not appear within the book, and none of the entries are dated. 8. For another account of these manifestations, see Harris, “Gaulish and the Feudal.” My approach differs from Harris’s in two main ways. First, I take Harris to ignore important overlaps between Mathieu’s mid-1950s discourse and the surrealists’ ideas, particularly around questions of automatism and irrationality. Second, I insist on drawing some distinctions between

9.

10.

11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

Mathieu’s and Hantaï’s positions, whereas Harris conflates them. Mathieu, conversation with the author, March 2005. Hantaï’s formulation need not mean this conversation took place before his official break with the group in March 1955; on the contrary, Hantaï believed it probably postdated the Sexe-Prime exhibition (Hantaï, conversation with the author). It would then stand as a sign of the painter’s desire for a more definitive rupture. The unabridged correspondence has since been published. See Hantaï and Nancy, Jamais le mot ‘créateur,’ esp. 71–73. Nancy, “Hantaï 1958,” 28. Ibid. Ibid. Abadie was at that point researching the Mathieu retrospective that would take place at the Jeu de Paume in 2002. See Abadie, Ashton, Kawasaki, and Stella, Georges Mathieu. Nancy, “Hantaï 1958,” 30. Mathieu, Abstraction prophétique, 52. Ibid. Grainville and Xuriguera, Mathieu, 61. Mathieu’s itinerary has many points in common with the trajectory drawn by American critic Harold Rosenberg from “action painting” to the “Happening”; indeed, Mathieu anticipates Rosenberg in suggesting that the former naturally gives way to the latter. See Rosenberg, “Concept of Action,” 217–18. I shall have more to say about Rosenberg in chapter 4. See, for example, Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, 9–10. Carrouges, André Breton, 178. Aragon, Peinture au défi. Pierre, Tracts surréalistes, 30, 31. Alyce Mahon devotes an important chapter to the exhibition in her revisionist history of postwar surrealism (Surrealism and the

24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

45. 46.

Politics of Eros, 107–41). For a useful overview, see Durozoi, History of the Surrealist Movement, 466–72. Breton, “Devant le rideau,” 15. Ibid. Mahon, Surrealism and the Politics of Eros, 119. Breton, “Projet initial,” 136. Breton, “Devant le rideau,” 19. Ibid. For more on Siger de Brabant, see, in particular, Voegelin, “Siger de Brabant,” and de Libera, Penser au Moyen Âge. That Augustinian faith did give way shortly thereafter with the ascent of scholasticism was a misfortune Mathieu never ceased to mourn. See, for example, Mathieu, Abstraction prophétique, 333–40. Ibid., 317. Ibid., 318. Ibid., 324. Ibid., 327. Ibid., 330. Ibid., 330–31. Compare Tapié, Art autre. Mathieu, “Lettre à Monsieur Lazslo,” n.p. Mathieu, Abstraction prophétique, 330. Hantaï, conversation with the author. Fournier, interview with Jean-Paul Ameline and Harry Bellet, 176. The unattributed photographs follow Mathieu, “Lettre à Monsieur Lazslo,” n.p. Ibid. In the words of the caption, the floor before the effigy is taken up by “une immense photo de Pasteur que l’on piétine” (ibid). Mathieu, Abstraction prophétique, 331. Ibid., 318–19. In the “Surrealist Manifesto,” Breton cites Thomas Aquinas among the historical figures most to blame for “the realist attitude, inspired by positivism,”

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47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

56. 57.

which he never ceased to denounce as “hostile to any intellectual or moral advancement” (Manifestoes of Surrealism, 6). Closer to the Cérémonies commémoratives, “Rupture inaugurale” returns to the need for a “réduction de l’ordre thomiste” that Marxism alone cannot ensure (Pierre, Tracts surréalistes, 33). Anti-Thomist sentiment is a widespread feature of post-surrealist thought, as evinced as well by Tapié’s writings. See in particular his 1946 text on Dubuffet, in which he bemoans “nos cerveaux pétris de grande clarté française cartésienne, positiviste, néo-thomiste et dialecticienne” (Tapié, Mirobolus Macadam, 13). Fournier, interview with Jean-Paul Ameline and Harry Bellet, 176. Hantaï, quoted in Nancy, “Hantaï 1958,” 28. See Pierre, Tracts surréalistes, 164–69. Ibid., 166. Ibid., 168. Ibid. Hantaï, Sexe-Prime, n.p. Ibid. For more on socialist realism in Hungary in the mid-1950s, see Fowkes, “Croatia/Hungary.” The manifesto says it this way: “La realité / du monde extérieure des / lambeaux visuels de la / perception externe ne / sont plus à l’ordre du jour” (Hantaï, Sexe-Prime, n.p.). See Breton, Free Rein, 274–77. Sakhiet is a Tunisian town across the border from Algeria. In February 1958 (that is, in the month leading up to the Souvenir opening), it was believed to serve as a base for Algerian militants and was bombed by the French air force. The international outcry resulting from the incident and the attendant turmoil in the French government precipitated

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the return to power of General de Gaulle in June of that same year. 58. See in particular Bonnefoi, “‘Avant-garde réactionnaire.’” Bonnefoi’s article includes a two-page “Témoignage” by André Breton. Both writers read the “Notes confusionelles” simply as prolonging “Siger,” and take Mathieu’s public views as the key to Hantaï’s motivations. Although neither Bonnefoi nor Breton mentions it specifically, it doubtless did not help Hantaï that Mathieu was associated with a monarchist weekly, La Nation Française, whose masthead bore a device by Mathieu’s design. Founded in 1955 by Pierre Boutang, this paper was strongly in favor of the French retention of North Africa. 59. For a useful and lucid synthesis of the Hungarian Revolution, see Judt, Postwar, esp. 313–18. 60. Judt sums up the aftermath in some stark figures: by 1961, when the last death sentence was carried out, 341 Hungarians would have been tried and executed for “provocation to strike,” with twenty-two thousand more sentenced to prison and a further thirteen thousand shipped off to internment camps for “counterrevolutionary” actions. In addition, Judt writes, “An estimated 200,000 people—over 2 percent of the population—fled Hungary in the aftermath of the Soviet occupation, most of them young and many from the educated professional élite and the urbanized west of the country” (Judt, Postwar, 318). All in all, this represents a staggering loss of men and women from Hantaï’s generation and younger. As for Imre Nagy, the former prime minister was subjected to a secret trial in June 1958 and then executed by Kádár’s government at dawn on June 16, 1958—a date that is important in

61. 62.

63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

68.

69. 70. 71.

part because it signals the extent to which Budapest 1956 remained a live issue throughout the time Hantaï was writing the “Notes confusionelles.” Pierre, Tracts surréalistes, 161. For more on the surrealists’ political thinking in the 1950s, with particular attention to their views on the Soviet Union, see Eburne, “Antihumanism and Terror.” Pierre, Tracts surréalistes, 161. Ibid. Ibid., 161–62. Hantaï, “Notes confusionelles,” 229. Ibid., 229. According to Duwa, Hantaï in a letter of December 27, 1956, would have told his old friend Jean Schuster that recent events in Hungary had rendered all forms of Marxist commitment dérisoire (Duwa, Batailles de Jean Schuster, 291). This view is consistent with the stance I take to animate the “Notes confusionelles.” I do not claim this possibility was wholly apparent to Hantaï at the moment of the Cérémonies commémoratives (though it very well may have been) nor do I maintain that it was necessarily a part of Mathieu’s thinking—and in any event, the two men had very different views on surrealism, as I have tried to show in chapter 2. But it is suggestive to say the least that by 1977, if not earlier, Mathieu drew a strong connection between Marxism and Averroism: “Admettre ou rejeter l’aristotélisme averroïste était le problème qui s’imposait à tout penseur—un peu comme aujourd’hui le marxisme—et de sa solution dépendait l’avenir de la science humaine en Occident” (Mathieu, Abstraction prophétique, 336). Hantaï, “Notes confusionelles,” 229. Ibid., 228–29. Ibid., 229.

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72. Hantaï and Schuster, “Démolition au platane,” 225. 73. If I am right, Hantaï’s critique aligns with Blanchot’s analyses in “Reflections on Surrealism,” an essay the painter could have known. There, the French writer also presents surrealism’s Marxist inclinations implicitly in terms of a thought of excess seeking its own domestication (esp. 93–94). 74. Hantaï, “Notes confusionelles,” 230. 75. Ibid., 228. 76. Ibid. One might also hear in this declaration a pointed reworking of an earlier instance of deliberately confounding and apparently contradictory avant-garde rhetoric, from Dada impresario Tristan Tzara: “I am neither for nor against and I do not explain because I hate common sense” (Tzara, “Dada Manifesto,” 80). Also notable, however, is that Hantaï deliberately eschews the mode of dialectical argumentation associated with Thomas Aquinas and scholasticism as defined succinctly by historian John W. O’Malley: “Dialectics is the art of proving a point, of winning an argument, and of proving your opponent wrong. It expresses itself in the syllogism, in the debate, in the disputation” (What Happened at Vatican II, 46). 77. Hantaï, “Notes confusionelles,” 227. 78. Ibid., 227. 79. Ibid., 227. 80. Hantaï might also be thinking of the biblical characterization of Christ himself as a “sign of contradiction,” a description found in Luke 2:34. 81. Hantaï, “Notes confusionelles,” 227–28. 82. Ibid., 232. 83. Ibid., 230. 84. Hantaï’s critique hooks back into an important, earlier attempt to think

85. 86. 87. 88. 89.

of surrealism as, first and foremost, a group: French writer Jules Monnerot’s La poésie moderne et le sacré. Summing up surrealism as the practice of “magie sans espoir,” Monnerot also charges the group with “le primat de l’obscur, du sulfureux, du bouillonnant, du pythique, le règne de ce démon, l’Inconscient, avec qui ‘l’on obtient ou non la communication’” (Poésie moderne, 41). Many of Hantaï’s hardest words in the “Notes confusionelles” resonate with Monnerot’s conclusions. Indeed by 1958, this critique was given new actuality by Surrealism in 1947, as well as by Breton’s recent publication of L’art magique (Paris, 1957), a book criticized directly in the “Notes confusionelles” as “l’image claire de cette spiritualité à rebours, éparpillement non-structurel coupé de toute transcendance. Esthétique littéraire du bizarre et de l’insolite” (Hantaï, “Notes confusionelles,” 230). Hantaï, “Notes confusionelles,” 230. Ibid., 231. Mathieu, Au-delà du tachisme, 172. Ibid. Mathieu, De l’abstrait au possible, 19. One might also note the earlier use of this same term by painter Jean Bazaine, who offers the following, highly suggestive criticism of surrealism: “Ne vivant que d’évasion, le surréalisme ne voulait pas, ne pouvait pas trouver son incarnation, sa chance de vie” (Bazaine, Notes sur la peinture, 16). In a 1951 review, Peter Selz cites Bazaine’s criticism as exemplary of broader sentiment, noting, “Today there is a general feeling among French artists and critics that Surrealism with its prime emphasis on subject matter and the anecdote was never really salient to the development of visual form, that it never evolved a satisfactory

90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95.

96. 97.

98. 99.

100.

language for its mystic content, that the whole subjective expression of the surrealists lacked communicability” (“Younger French Painters,” 10). Hantaï, “Notes confusionelles,” 231. Ibid., 232. Ibid., 230. Ibid., 231. Pierre, Tracts surréalistes, 168. Another formulation in the “Notes confusionelles” reasserts the being of the sacred for a community: “‘Sacred’ is inseparable from ‘consecrated,’ and profane spheres are but profane views” (Hantaï, “Notes confusionelles,” 231). In other words, there is no “private” sacred. Ibid., 228. The painting titles listed elsewhere in the dépliant provide clues to Hantaï’s reading in these years. Among the title dedications, one finds: “Pour Ornement des noces spirituelles de Jean Ruysbroeck”; “Pour Opus Tripartitum de Maître Eckhart”; “Pour la théologie mystique de Denys l’Aréopagite”; and “Pour l’esthétique mystique de Sainte Hildegarde de Bingen.” Over and above the content of those works, I think it significant that these titles refer to specific texts and might therefore be seen as reinforcing the emphasis on reading I take to define the Souvenir brochure as a whole. Hantaï, “Notes confusionelles,” 232. Ibid., 233. These lines rhyme with and indeed conflate aspects of Christ’s declaration in Matthew 5:17 that he is not come “to abolish the Law or the Prophets” but to “fulfill them”—and in so doing, they marry an old aspiration of the avant-garde to expressly biblical language. That Hantaï himself saw a close relation between the two documents is suggested by a number of formal rhymes. To take just one example, one

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might note the scratched cross in the upper right quadrant of the “Notes préparatoires”: not only does this recall the scraped cross of Souvenir, but it also appears in roughly the same area as the words “Souvenir de l’avenir” in the Sexe-Prime manifesto. In this way too, Souvenir appears as a further reinscription or unfolding of Sexe-Prime. 101. To expand on this point: as mentioned above, it is not clear at the outset that either the outside face bearing the reproduction of Souvenir de l’avenir nor the one with Hantaï’s signature can be properly described as a “front” or a “back.” But because the typography of both aspects is oriented in the same sense, the typewritten caption for Souvenir on the one face lining up with Hantaï’s signature and the typewritten exhibition information on the other, the first unfolding might be seen to move the painting atop the artist’s name to create a new, vertically stacked unit. The viewer might then unfold the vertical element on the other side, the list of painting titles, to consider all three components in one global view—a perspective that reveals an extraordinarily rich interplay between the different graphic registers of painting, typewritten page, and handwritten signature. Proceeding in this way gives the sense of a continuous spiral, as the viewer moves from a small, horizontal element to a larger, vertical composite, and then to a still greater, horizontal display encompassing the first two phases. But the viewer might just as well not consider these elements in concert, by flipping rather than unfolding the brochure to consider them in succession—or some combination of the two (i.e., by flipping from painting to signature without grasping them

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in vertical relation; or by considering painting and signature together but then flipping and unfolding simultaneously straight to the titles). 102. Hantaï and Schuster, “Démolition au platane,” 222. 103. Hantaï, “Notes confusionelles,” 233, 232. 104. Bataille, Erotism, 112–13. Chapter 4

1. Hantaï, conversation with the author. 2. Ibid. 3. Sjölin also sees Écriture rose as the third in a series of handwritten “manifestos” beginning with Sexe-Prime and continuing through the “Notes préparatoires” (“Writing the Painting,” 151). 4. Something of the obscurity surrounding this period of Hantaï’s work and Écriture rose in particular may be gathered from the first monograph on the artist, in which the painting is mentioned elliptically. There Bonnefoi describes the year 1958 as “la période qu’on pourrait appeler ‘mystique’” and notes, as if in passing, that “il lui arrive aussi de couvrir d’immenses toiles de sa minuscule écriture, ponctuée ça et là d’une tache ou d’un fragment de feuille d’or” (Hantaï, 13). 5. Hantaï frequently recalled the early resistance of former MNAM director Dominique Bozo and curator François Mathey during the preparations for the 1976 exhibition. Introduced to the work by Hantaï, Bozo and Mathey would have preferred not to include it in the retrospective, largely on account of its prominent cross (Hantaï, conversation with the author). Fourcade also remembers “la perplexité et les hésitations” of the two men (Sans lasso et sans flash, 11).

6. Pleynet, “Levée de l’interprétation,” n.p. 7. There does exist a short but highly intelligent review by Pierre Schneider in which the painting figures prominently. Writing in English for the New York Times, Schneider hails Écriture rose as “one of the great metaphysical statements of our times” and presents it as a visual summation of important aspects of Hantaï’s work and thought (“Paris: Paintings of Masson and Hantai [sic] are shown,” New York Times, August 23, 1976, 21). Not coincidentally, Schneider’s review decries what he sees as the considerable limitations of the then-dominant reception of Hantaï’s work in France. 8. Pleynet, “Levée de l’interprétation,” n.p. 9. Baldassari, Simon Hantaï, esp. 10–18. 10. Didi-Huberman, Étoilement. 11. Hantaï, Derrida, and Nancy, Connaissance des textes. 12. Cixous, Tablier de Simon Hantaï. 13. Fourcade, Sans lasso et sans flash. 14. See, in particular, Knobeloch, “Die Falten entfalten”; Franz, “Die aktive Neutralität”; Pleynet, “Perpectives du temps”; Didi-Huberman, Étoilement, esp. 32–36; and Melville, “Simon Hantaï.” 15. Baldassari, Simon Hantaï, 15. 16. Ibid. 17. “Happening provocateur auquel Georges Mathieu imprime cependant la marque d’une violente apologie d’un ordre social révolu” (ibid., 34). 18. Didi-Huberman takes from Baldassari the notion of “spiritual exercise,” but he is reticent about the nature of the copied texts, describing Hantaï’s sources simply as “un océan de textes écrits par on ne sait qui” (Étoilement, 35). Cixous’s Tablier de Simon Hantaï is in some ways an opposing

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19. 20.

21. 22. 23.

24.

25. 26.

case, repeating the list of texts copied onto the surface but largely ignoring the formal and material specificity of the painting as such. Hantaï, “Don de tableaux,” 24. These are not the work’s original dimensions. According to Hantaï, the painting was left unfinished (i.e., incompletely covered with gold leaf around the edges) at the end of 1959, and it was eventually cut down for its first public viewing (conversation with the author). See, for example, Melville, “Simon Hantaï,” 112. Mathieu, De l’abstrait au possible, 38. My description of this process is based on a conversation with MNAM chief conservator, Jacques Hourrière, in the spring of 2006, during an appointment to study Écriture rose in the reserves of the MNAM. I wish to extend my sincere thanks to all those who made this appointment possible: in addition to Hourrière, then-director Alfred Pacquement and the team who transported and unrolled this work, at that time unstretched, so that I might examine it at length. This show was in fact a parallel presentation of two exhibitions that had shown and toured separately. For more on these exhibitions and their role in promoting American abstract expressionism as an “existential art,” see Jachec, Philosophy and Politics, esp. 197–205. Ibid., 30. Recent years have seen fresh interest in Rosenberg’s criticism, much of it drawing upon and revising aspects of Fred Orton’s seminal essay of 1990, “Action, Revolution and Painting.” In addition to Jachec, Philosophy and Politics, see in particular Debra Bricker Balken, “Harold

27. 28. 29.

30.

31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

Rosenberg”; Slifkin, “Tragic Image”; and Robbins, “Harold Rosenberg.” Rosenberg, “American Action Painters,” 25. Alvard, “Potentiel américain,” 31. Guéguen, “Pollock et la nouvelle peinture,” 30. Guéguen refers explicitly to Rosenberg’s conception of action painting. See, in particular, Choay, “Jackson Pollock,” 42–47; Choay, “Jackson Pollock au pays de Descartes,” 20; and René Barotte, “Pollock et la nouvelle peinture américaine,” Paris-Presse l’Intransigeant, January 20, 1959. The reference to frénésie is drawn from Choay’s essay “Jackson Pollock au pays de Descartes,” which presents Pollock as “possédé par la frénésie des antiques sectateurs de Dionysos” (20). One can easily imagine the formula in a review of Sexe-Prime. Rosenberg, “American Action Painters,” 38. Hantaï, “Notes confusionelles,” 233. Rosenberg, “American Action Painters,” 26–27. Ibid., 31. Hantaï, “Notes confusionelles,” 231. Rosenberg, “American Action Painters,” 37–38. Hantaï, conversation with the author. See Jungmann, Liturgie de l’Église romaine, and Jungmann, Mass of the Roman Rite. For more on the derivation of this term, see Rouet, Art et liturgie. Although postdating Écriture rose by some three decades, this book provides an interesting (though doubtless unintentional) gloss on what I take to have been one of Hantaï’s chief recognitions in 1958, namely: “Les relations de l’Art et de la Liturgie ne sont pas d’abord d’ordre intellectuel, mais existentiel” (7–8).

40. Jungmann, Liturgie de l’Église romaine, 30. 41. Ibid., 72. 42. Ibid., 57. Other gestures and physical attitudes catalogued by Jungmann include: genuflection, inclination, the seated position, the joining of hands, orientation toward the east, the laying on of hands, and the sign of the cross. 43. For “la position à genoux,” Jungmann offers the following translation: “L’homme affirme sa petitesse et sa soumission devant le Dieu infiniment grand” (Liturgie de l’Église romaine, 57). 44. Hantaï, conversation with the author. 45. For more on that event, see, in particular, O’Malley, What Happened at Vatican II. As O’Malley makes clear, this assembly differed fundamentally from its predecessor events: unlike previous councils, which had convened to address particular crises, Vatican II had no specific issue on the agenda, commencing instead with an intensive “Ante-Preparatory” phase that called upon all those eligible to participate as voting members to propose items for the agenda (15–20). O’Malley also emphasizes the extent to which the meeting as a whole bore witness to an unprecedented sense of historical consciousness and, indeed, of the “inevitability of change” (8). We would do well to note the extent to which the latter sentiments, again in O’Malley’s assessment, derived impetus from many of the same sources and tendencies that appear to have drawn Hantaï in these years, particularly including Jungmann’s work on the history of the liturgy (77) and the relatively recent phenomenon of missals in the vernacular (74). 46. “Le titre aurait pu être: ‘Hommage à Fessard’” (Hantaï, conversation with the author).

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47. For an important recent exception, see Geroulanos, Atheism That Is Not Humanist. For a general introduction, the best source is a brief intellectual biography by Father Michel Sales, S.J., “Philosophe chrétien.” 48. Fessard’s preparatory notes for that critique are included in his book Hegel, 261–68. 49. See, in particular, Fessard, Main tendue? 50. Hantaï, conversation with the author. 51. Fessard, Dialectique des “Exercices spirituels,” 7. 52. Ibid. 53. Ibid. 54. “C’est la toile qui dit ‘oui’ ou ‘non’” (Hantaï, conversation with the author). With these words, Hantaï was not speaking specifically about Écriture rose but rather voicing one of his most persistent claims across his oeuvre. 55. Fessard, Dialectique des “Exercices spirituels,” 69. 56. Ibid., 79. 57. Ibid., 82. 58. Ibid., 102–3. 59. The new importance of Tobey for Hantaï toward the end of the decade is a potentially large topic. Tobey’s work was not included in Jackson Pollock et la nouvelle peinture américaine. His critical fortune in the later 1950s, however, is in many ways the inverse of Pollock’s, the former being far more revered in France at that time than he was in the United States. And as I mention in chapter 3, Tobey’s White Writings were among the principal moments commemorated in the final cycle of the Cérémonies commémoratives, a fact that reflects Mathieu’s then-close friendship with Tobey (he claimed to prefer Tobey’s work to Pollock’s and shared with him a certain calligraphic impulse). Importantly, Tobey was

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60.

61. 62. 63. 64.

65.

valued for very different qualities, his repetitive marking taken as the sign of a much greater impersonality—an “anéantissement des individualités” in the words of one French critic (Alvard, “Potentiel américain,” 31). Fessard, Dialectique des “Exercices spirituels,” 112. This Eucharistic formulation goes to the heart of Fessard’s difference from Hegel: namely, the former’s insistence on the priority of the chose visible over the latter’s notionally disembodied order of signs (for Fessard, the written word is itself a “visible thing,” bound to materiality in ways he charges Hegel with forgetting). For chose visible, see Fessard, Hegel, 76–78. There Fessard develops a sustained analysis of what he takes to be an unresolved conflict in Hegel’s writing between Catholic and Protestant conceptions of language, with a particular emphasis on the tension between sign and symbol. “L’impureté est la vraie situation” (Hantaï, quoted in Didi-Huberman, Étoilement, 105). Fessard, Dialectique des “Exercices spirituels,” 125. Ibid., 141. Ibid., 142. It may have been important to Hantaï that Fessard’s language inevitably conjures an episode long beloved of artists, the biblical story of “Doubting Thomas” (one famous depiction of which Hantaï could have seen among the mosaics of the Basilica of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna). For a fundamental rethinking of this story, see Most, Doubting Thomas. As mentioned previously, the inks used to write Écriture rose have faded considerably in the more than fifty years since its making. This very degradation offers a further reminder of the finitude and contingency of chromatic effects. I

66.

67. 68. 69.

return to this point and what I see as Hantaï’s later taking up of this discovery in chapters 6 and 7. This characterization recalls the liturgical association of the color green with the “ordinary time” between festivals. Here too, ordinary and extraordinary appear completely entangled rather than merely opposed. Fessard, Dialectique des “Exercices spirituels,” 177. Ibid. Ibid.

Chapter 5

1. The Galerie Jean Fournier opened its doors at 22, rue du Bac, in May 1964. It would return to this address in 1998, after one additional move in 1979 to the rue Quincampoix. For more on these displacements and the exhibitions realized at each address, see Rahard, “Chronologie.” 2. Indeed, this was the first time Hantaï had entrusted his preface to another party since Breton introduced his work on the occasion of the painter’s very first solo exhibition in Paris, held in 1953 at the surrealist gallery L’Étoile Scellée. See Breton, Surrealism and Painting, 237. 3. Hantaï and Schuster, “Démolition au platane,” 223. 4. Fessard, Dialectique des “Exercices spirituels,” 177. 5. According to Hantaï, each of the letters assigned the four subseries would correspond to a specific modification of the folding technique: “A pour les toiles régulièrement pliées, B pour les monochromes, C pour celles deux fois pliées, D pour les toiles préalablement éclaboussées de peinture” (Donation Simon Hantaï, 46). Yet as even the most cursory

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6.

7. 8. 9.

10.

11.

review of the paintings reveals, these classifications are highly relative, the canvases revealing at once greater continuity and greater diversity among and within subseries than these formulas seem able to capture. On more than one occasion, Hantaï also suggested the descriptions for the C and D subseries should be reversed—a thought confirmed, it seems to me, by the paintings themselves (Hantaï, conversations with the author). Fessard himself calls attention to the basic difference between Hegel’s tripartite dialectic and Ignatius’s fourfold exercises, citing this discrepancy as integral to his initial thinking about the project that would become the Dialectique des “Exercices spirituels” (6). Hantaï, “Don de tableaux,” 26. Ibid. My remarks on pliage as a play of spacing are indebted to Yve-Alain Bois’s analysis of what he, employing the writing of Derrida, calls “arche-drawing” in the work of Matisse. See Bois, “Matisse and ‘Arche-Drawing,’” esp. 22 and 63. There will be more to say about Hantaï’s relation to Matisse in chapter 6. With the move to pliage, Hantaï writes, “La toile descend par terre, devient matériau à interroger” (“Don de Tableaux,” 26). My translations pursue two possibilities equally available from his phrasing: if the former yields something like a strictly literal report on Hantaï’s shift to a new axis of production, the latter allows us to hear the continued centrality of the Incarnation to his imagination of painting, a point to which I return below. According to Hantaï, the choice of the French word saucisse, like

12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23.

panse after it, was in part an attempt to translate the Hungarian word bendö, which can refer to a stuffed sausage (or, more accurately, head cheese) or, as bendös, to the belly of a pregnant woman (Hantaï, conversation with the author). As with the painter’s religious references generally, this orientation has typically been treated as an essentially personal or narrowly biographical allusion to the painter’s Catholic upbringing. For Fourcade, for example, this suggestive designation simply reminds us that Hantaï came from a Catholic background, while his later reference to the “Cloaks of the Virgin” suggests the painter is paying homage to representations of the more specific iconographic type known as the Madonna of Mercy: the Virgin sheltering humanity under her mantle (Fourcade, “Hantaï,” 95–96). These observations are entirely valid but fail to go deep enough. Fessard, Dialectique des “Exercices spirituels,” 122. Ibid., 132. Ibid., 132–33. Ibid., 136. Ibid., 135. Ibid., 136–37. Ibid. Interestingly, Fessard takes that union to make itself manifest precisely as a kind of quiet, decidedly undramatic perseverance: “Les mystiques sont d’accord pour affirmer que les plus hauts degrés d’union ne comportent plus les extases, ravissements et autres manifestations merveilleuses par lesquels se signale aux degrés inférieurs l’emprise divine” (ibid., 138). Ibid. Ibid., 138–39. Fessard draws here, not uncontroversially, upon the

Catholic idea of the development of doctrine, which holds that tradition “progresses,” yielding new insights in time. As O’Malley has illuminated, this notion was a key idea in the run-up to and context of Vatican II, with many members of the council hoping for a further development of Marian doctrine in particular. For more, see O’Malley, What Happened at Vatican II, esp. 36–43. These conversations, widely reported in the extensive media coverage of the council, overlap Hantaï’s first public exhibitions of Peintures Mariales. 24. Fessard, Dialectique des “Exercices spirituels,” 139. Chapter 6

1. See Franz, Simon Hantaï: Werke, 42. 2. For an influential early version of this claim, see Fourcade, “Coup de pinceau,” n.p. One might also recall that the debt to Matisse is already formalized in Clair’s 1973 chart. 3. “Respiration” is a well-established trope in the Hantaï literature. For more on this, see Berecz, “Time to Knot,” 240. 4. Hantaï, quoted in Ghaddab, “Simon Hantaï,” 29, 30. 5. Hantaï, Sexe-prime, n.p. 6. The French term femelle typically is used in zoology to designate the female of a species; when used in place of femme to refer to a woman, it carries a distinctly pejorative connotation. I leave it untranslated throughout the following. 7. The coloration recalls that of the crucified Christ in Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece, a work Hantaï admired greatly and is known to have seen in person around this time. This resonance

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8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

helps qualify the picture’s overall air of quasi-religious dread—even as it provides an additional context in which to consider what I have described as Sexe-Prime’s “passion of figuration.” Hantaï dated his visit to 1953 (conversation with the author); while Daniel Hantaï, the artist’s son, believes it was more likely the following year, 1954 (email to the author, August 4, 2013). For a reading of these paintings that differs from my own, see Berecz, “Emerging and Withdrawing,” esp. 18. Berecz associates the paintings with postwar surrealism’s “interest in the libidinal and the bestial,” but she does not discuss the connection to the Breton poem I take as central to their meaning. Hantaï, conversation with the author. For a detailed account of this tendency, see Conley, Automatic Woman. Breton, “Free Union,” 283–84. Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, 36–37. Ibid., 37. Breton, “Free Union,” 283–84. Ibid., 284. This description might sound like a cadavre exquis (exquisite corpse), as practiced by Breton and other surrealists from the later 1920s. However, there is an important difference between that model of composite imagery and Hantaï’s aggregate figure. Precisely because the exquisite corpse requires that each participant work blindly relative to the preponderance of the figure-in-process, picking up only where the preceding participant has left off (supports typically were folded to prevent all but the most partial view), the procedure virtually precludes the systematic repetition and transformation of forms from

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17.

18.

19. 20. 21.

start to finish. Instead, individual contributions tend to be decidedly heterogeneous in style, with each segment marked by specific rhetorical flourishes (for example: realistic shading and muted color in one zone, calligraphic traits and bright spots of color in another). In their frequently striking specificity, these discrete contributions often are readily assignable to particular authors (Joan Miró versus Yves Tanguy, say), even as the resulting images typically cohere in the production of one master figure. The effect has more in common with what I have cast as Breton’s multiplication of highly individuated poetic images than with the uncanny echoes and formal rhymes of Femelle-Miroir I. For more on the popularity of the praying mantis in surrealist art and discourse, see Pressly, “Praying Mantis,” and Markus, “Surrealism’s Praying Mantis.” Krauss also has discussed the role of the mantis in the writing of Roger Caillois in particular in “Corpus Delicti.” Significantly for our purposes, Duchamp’s pendu femelle has also at times been described as a “mantis-like” form (see, for example, Naumann, Marcel Duchamp, 45–46). For more on Picasso’s relation to surrealism and as read by Breton and Bataille, respectively, see Miller, “Pablo Picasso,” 214–21. Hantaï and Schuster, “Démolition au platane,” 223. Ibid., 224. Indeed, the central figures in both paintings might even be read as displaced self-portraits. Supporting this view is the fact that Hantaï himself often used sponges of the sort conjured by the small purple form in Femelle-Miroir I to spread or remove pigment from his canvases

22.

23. 24.

25.

26. 27. 28.

(as he may have here, in preparing both paintings’ grounds), while the yellow phallus-form in Femelle-Miroir II might itself be understood as a metaphorical stand-in for the various scraping implements he used to “sculpt” the painted forms. Like both figures, Hantaï was right-handed too. My thinking about this aspect of both pictures is indebted to Michael Fried’s brilliant reading of Courbet’s art in Courbet’s Realism. Let this also be the occasion to acknowledge more general debts to Fried’s study, especially his account of “Courbet’s ‘Femininity’” (Courbet’s Realism, 189–222). More to the point, Breton professed an incapacity to see any painting as “being other than a window” (Surrealism and Painting, 2). Warnock, Simon Hantaï, n.p. Hantaï, conversation with the author. Zsuzsa Hantaï, the artist’s wife, also was present during that conversation and recalled with him their early encounters with Cézanne’s work and its visibility within the curriculum at the Budapest Academy of Fine Arts. See, in this connection, Hantaï’s reported response to a feature entitled “Ouvrez-vous?” and included in the “Numéro Simon Hantaï” of the new surrealist journal Médium, celebrating the young artist’s recent adhesion to the group. Asked whether he would receive a hypothetical visit from Cézanne, Hantaï replies: “Non, envie de rire” (11). Queried about this response in the spring of 2005, Hantaï noted simply: “Dire autre chose, ça aurait été claquer la porte” (conversation with the author). Rewald, Paul Cézanne, 146. See Golding, Cubism, 59. This aspect of Cézanne’s painting is particularly emphasized in a study Hantaï is known to have admired:

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Golding’s 1959 book, Cubism: A History and Analysis, 1907–1914. Jean-François Revel, in a 1967 preface, recalls Hantaï’s enthusiasm for Cézanne’s work and its importance for cubism as discussed at some length in Golding’s study (Revel, “Pour Hantaï,” n.p.; Golding, Cubism, esp. 64–77). Golding describes “the technique of small, flat, rhythmically applied brush-strokes which build up the forms” (67) and “parallel hatchings or small overlapping brush-strokes” (68) that help to produce the impression of “gentle declivities and projections” (69). 29. The desire not to advance “too quickly” is a major theme in Hantaï’s writing about the Panses. See, for example, his note on Panse, 1964, in “Don de tableaux,” 37. 30. “Tout, véritablement tout, est à recommencer par la base: par les cellules, de plantes, de moines, de proto-animaux: l’alphabet de la vie. . . . La cellule peut encore sauver le monde, elle seule, saucisse cosmique sans laquelle on ne pourra pas se défendre” (Michaux, Vents et poussières, 204). For more on Hantaï’s interest in this passage, see Bonnefoi, Hantaï, 16–17. I also address this at length in “Seventeen Cellules.” Interestingly, Golding quotes Roger de La Fresnaye on the “cellular” aspect of Cézanne’s work: “Each object, in one of the late canvases, has ceased to exist only in itself, and becomes little by little a cell within the whole organism of the painting. That is the really fruitful aspect of Cézanne’s painting and the reason for which it is at the root of all the modern tendencies” (Cubism, 76–77). 31. This aspect of Cézanne’s art was striking and discomfiting even to his admirers, such as the young

32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

41.

42.

43.

Émile Bernard, writing in 1904 to his mother: “Il voit par petits tons. Ses toiles sont faites de morceaux. Il y laisse partout des blancs” (Doran, Conversations avec Cézanne, 24). Duthuit, “Tailleur de lumière,” 23. Ibid., 24. The phrase occurs in Matisse’s 1947 notes on his book Jazz. See Matisse, Matisse on Art, 172. Duthuit, “Tailleur de lumière,” 24–25; emphasis added. Ibid., 26. Ibid. Ibid. For the designation Meun incertain, see Hantaï, “Donation of Paintings,” 38. As Matisse wrote, for example, “On a trop souvent tendance à oublier que les anciens ne travaillaient que par les rapports. La question capitale est là” (Matisse, “Témoignage,” 195). Didi-Huberman has written eloquently about the étoilement or “starring” effects in Hantaï’s later pliage work, which are produced by the gathering and subsequent dispersion of canvases painted in variously knotted states. Of course I am not suggesting that Hantaï produced these later effects in conscious, continuous reference back to Femelle-Miroir I; rather, I take the earlier explicitly threatening maw as allegorical of an entire paradigm of painterly practice in which those stars initially were experienced as similarly menacing. “Ou l’aplatir, ou la laisser en montagne” (Hantaï, conversation with the author). A similar formulation occurs in a late letter to Didi-Huberman, in which Hantaï describes the unfolded canvas as “the invaginated the involuted the flattened mountain” (Hantaï, “Lettres à Georges Didi-Huberman,” 220). Hantaï, “Don de tableaux,” 26.

44. “Qu’est-ce que la peinture veut de moi?” (Hantaï, conversation with the author). 45. And here we might note that, like femelle in French, the German Weib also carries a distinctly pejorative connotation. My thanks to Charles Palermo for pointing this out. 46. See, in particular, his dismissal of the movement’s “phénoménologie amoureuse,” “dont le moralisme coupe les bras” (Lacan, Séminaire livre XIX, 174). 47. Lacan, Encore, 78. My reading of this chart and its broader implications within Lacan’s psychoanalysis is indebted to Melville, “Psychoanalysis and the Place of Jouissance.” 48. Lacan, Encore, 79. 49. Melville, “Psychoanalysis and the Place of Jouissance,” 95. 50. In the “Surrealist Manifesto,” as we have seen, Breton refers to the properly surrealist use of language made possible by automatism as a “langage sans réserve” (Manifestes du surréalisme, 45). Seaver and Lane translate the phrase as “unrestricted language” (Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, 33); a more literal translation would be “language without reserve.” 51. “Tu vois bien que ce type est perdu” (Hantaï, conversation with the author). One might equally note the ways in which that title, like the immediately preceding La Porte, dits: Les Catamurons, strikingly includes an initial designation, followed by a reference to the same paintings being called or otherwise known by (dits) some other term, a form that seems in its own way to acknowledge painting’s absolute embeddedness in a field traversed by language, its being destined from the first for speaking subjects.

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52. Baldassari appears to have been the first to have quoted and glossed Hantaï to this effect, writing: “Et l’œil? L’œil du pliage est ouvert comme une coupe, translucide au monde bien que fermé, non voyant. ‘Se crever les yeux.’ La main qui plie doit être aveugle” (Simon Hantaï, 39). 53. The years immediately following the Meuns’ public début see the beginnings of a feedback loop linking Hantaï’s practice to the psychoanalytically inflected discourse around painting that was manifest in the pages of Peinture, cahiers théoriques, a journal closely associated with Supports/ Surfaces. As noted in the introduction, the painters—who came together for the most part ca. 1969–70—openly admired Hantaï’s pliage practice and presented themselves as drawing lessons from it; they may equally have encouraged aspects of Hantaï’s own, continued rereading of his work. For an early example of this discourse in which it is explicitly a question of “La femme—la mère (le drap),” see Devade, “Peinture et matérialisme II,” esp. 57. All of this is evidence, I think, of the continued hold of surrealism in post–World War II French painting. The unconscious, however conceived, remains a central concern and, in fact, figures crucially in the broader refusal of American “positivism,” a point to which I return in the next chapter. 54. The same photograph also appears in the catalogue for Hantaï’s 1981 exhibition at the Centre d’arts plastiques contemporains de Bordeaux, Entrepôt Lainé, where it is dated “vers 1918.” See Hantaï, Simon Hantaï: 1960–1976, 6. 55. In a 1976 film by Jean-Michel Meurice, Simon Hantaï ou les silences rétiniens, Hantaï describes the process of ironing this apron, concluding:

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“Et ma mère disait toujours que quand c’est bien fait, le travail, on se regarde dedans et on se voit comme dans un miroir” (quoted in Didi-Huberman, Étoilement, 45). 56. See, for example, Cixous, Tablier de Simon Hantaï. 57. Freud’s case study of Leonardo da Vinci is the classical source for this story in the context of art, but the basic structure of at least the initial stages in that narrative are consistent across Freud’s later psychoanalytic writings. For the child’s longing to see the mother’s genitals, “which he believed to be a penis,” see Freud, Leonardo da Vinci, 69. Chapter 7

1. For more on Hantaï’s materials, see Chevalier, “Conservation of Simon Hantaï’s Paintings.” A conservation expert, Chevalier worked closely with Hantaï in his later years. As she notes, the painter found traditional linen canvas “too thick and too rigid” for folding and replaced it with “a light and simple sheet with the quality Métis ‘Fleur Bleue’” (75). 2. For more on all of this, see Singerman, “Non-Compositional Effects,” esp. 145. 3. For more on the (largely negative) reception of the show in the French press, see Meyer, Minimalism, 253–61. 4. Goossen, Art of the Real, 7. The French translation of this phrase reads “une conception étroite et littérale du réel” (Goossen, Art du réel, 11). The complete list of featured artists includes: Carl Andre, Darby Bannard, Paul Feeley, Ralph Humphrey, Robert Huot, Patricia Johanson, Jasper Johns, Donald Judd, Ellsworth Kelly, Lyman Kipp, Sol LeWitt, Alexander Liberman, Morris Louis, John

McCracken, Agnes Martin, Antoni Milkowski, Robert Morris, Barnett Newman, Kenneth Noland, Doug Ohlson, Georgia O’Keeffe, Raymond Parker, Jackson Pollock, Larry Poons, Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko, David Smith, Tony Smith, Robert Smithson, Frank Stella, Clyfford Still, Robert Swain, and Sanford Wurmfeld. Scholars have tended to take this motley mix as evidence of Goossen’s perplexing insensitivity to the deep critical divisions that marked relations between high modernist painting and minimalist practice at the end of the 1960s—and indeed the essay that articulates that rift most fully and polemically, Fried’s “Art and Objecthood” of 1967, is conspicuously absent from the selected bibliography included at the end of the catalogue. 5. Goossen, Art of the Real, 7. Arnaud’s translation renders the phrase: “un objet simple, irréductible, irréfutable” (Goossen, Art du réel, 11). 6. See Greenberg, “Sur le modernisme.” This translation had been preceded in the same journal two years earlier by the first French versions of “Picasso at Sixty-Five” (1957) and “Master Léger” (1954); it would be followed several years later in the journal Macula by a selection of the critic’s writings on Pollock. See Greenberg’s essays: “Picasso à soixante quinze ans,” “Maître Léger,” “Dossier Pollock II,” and “Dossier Pollock III.” 7. See, for example, Devade’s “Peinture vue d’en bas,” published as an introduction to “Sur le modernisme”: “De façon plus précise, ce que la méthode kantienne de Greenberg découvre de nouveau et qui reste valable jusqu’à nous, c’est, à partir de cette critique, auto-critique, autonomie, spécificité, la mise à jour et la revalorisation de ce

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8. 9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

qu’il appelle le ‘médium’ . . . Revalorisation du médium qui pose l’indépendance de la peinture en tant qu’art vis-à-vis de la sculpture (relief, modelé, ombre et lumière) et la réduit à ses caractéristiques spécifiques: bi-dimensionnalité, surface plane, forme du support, propriétés du pigment coloré” (21). The signal text here is Pleynet’s 1969 “Peinture et réalité.” Judd famously describes repetition—a recurrent feature of the work he approves—as “simply order, like continuity, one thing after another” (“Specific Objects,” 184). Hantaï, conversation with the author. Hantaï mentions producing textile designs to support himself and his wife, Zsuzsa, in Paris in a letter of November 12, 1948, to his friend Péter Kuczka. For an English translation, see Monod-Fontaine and Ajac, “Chronology,” 267–68. I am not claiming that Hantaï was already aware of the relevant Matissean precedents, though it is not impossible that he should have been; it is equally possible that his predilection for such motifs rendered him particularly sensitive to their deployment by the French master. Although completed in Hungary, the work is titled in French— perhaps in reference to Matisse’s Le bonheur de vivre of 1905–6. Another variant on the connection between picture plane and table top appears in the so-called Young Boy in an Interior, 1946, a work I have not seen in person. In it, a radically tilted table appears almost parallel with the picture plane so that it also resembles a painter’s easel. Hantaï refers to his paintings as chiffons, or “rags,” in an interview of March 1998. See Philippe Dagen, “Les

15.

16. 17.

18.

19.

20.

confidences d’un peintre en retrait du monde,” Le Monde, March 16, 1998, 26. Given Hantaï’s admiration for Wassily Kandinsky in the early 1950s, it is possible that the latter’s Thirty of 1937—a work that also reveals an allover subdivision into rectilinear units—served as a precedent. For a masterful reading of Thirty in terms directly relevant to the present study, see Florman, Concerning the Spiritual, esp. 59–67. Hantaï, Peintures 1960–1967, n.p. For more on the Études and their relationship to the immediately preceding Meuns, see Warnock, “Manifold Address”; for the Blancs, see Warnock, “Hantaï’s Time.” Pleynet appears to have been the first to emphasize this point on which the preponderance of the literature remains confused (see “Series Known as the ‘Blancs.’”) A few Tabulas and Bourgeons date from as early as 1972. The majority of the Bourgeons, however, run contemporaneously with the Blancs (1973–74), whereas the Tabulas come to the fore as those two series recede (that is, from 1974). Broadly speaking, the fact that all three groups should have emerged nearly simultaneously only underscores the inherent multiplicity of Hantaï’s pliage practice in the early 1970s. (My thanks to Jérôme Hantaï for his help with the dating.) Further supporting our sense of the close relationship between the Bourgeons and the Tabulas—a relationship that, I am suggesting, turns importantly upon the role and placement of the constitutive knots—is the fact that Hantaï in some cases produced one kind of painting on the obverse of a previously completed painting of the other sort.

21.

22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30.

31.

In such cases, both the scale and the placement of the painted “buds” makes it clear that the knots used to produce the Bourgeons were not the same knots involved in the making of the Tabulas. As Pleynet notes, table à écrire and écrit de toute sorte are among two possible significations of Hantaï’s pluri-sémantique title (“Identité de la lumière,” n.p.) In a letter to Didi-Huberman, Hantaï claims that he wanted originally to call the paintings Tables (see Hantaï, “Hantaï: Briefe und Notizen,” 74). Another way of putting this would be to say that “excess” and “reserve” now appear fully bound in the fact of surface, an affair of topology rather than a localizable depth or (more or less enclosed) interior. Nancy, Inoperative Community, 1. Ibid., 9. Ibid. Ibid., 10. Ibid., 15. Ibid., 6. Nancy has carried this project forward in a number of subsequent writings, including, perhaps most notably, “Being Singular Plural.” Nancy, Inoperative Community, 28. This basic reorientation makes itself felt in the artist’s own retrospective comments on the Tabulas, as in a 1997 note on a biform canvas of 1980: “La différence chromatique des blancs à l’intérieur du noir et du jaune renvoie à la question de la couleur (Goethe, Buffon, Cézanne et Charcot, Matisse) que j’allais travailler explicitement avec les Tabulas lilas de 1982” (Hantaï, “Don de Tableaux,” 32). Hantaï, conversation with the author.

Chapter 8

1. Hantaï, Simon Hantaï: 1960–1976, 4–5.

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2. This image was first published, without a date, in Franz, Simon Hantaï: Werke, 73. 3. Hantaï, quoted in Millet, “Hantaï, tableaux récents,” 154. As numerous commentators have noted, Hantaï’s interest in immersive environments appears to have been inspired in part by his experience of Matisse’s Chapel of the Rosary in Vence. 4. Pacquement, “Ebbs and Flows,” 209. Pacquement has returned to the idea of the “strike” in a more recent text on the withdrawal (“1982,” 202). 5. See, for example, Wat, “Rencontre avec Hantaï,” 7–13. 6. For a representative recent example of this tendency, explicitly geared toward English-language audiences, see Gwenael Kerlidou, “Simon Hantaï’s Discontent,” Hyperallergic.com, September 7, 2013, https://hyperallergic.com /82507/simon-hantais-discontent. Writing about Pollock’s “descent into self-destruction” in his final years, a fall Kerlidou seems to link, via a series of questions, to a similar refusal to “participate in a game where he had become just a pawn,” the writer claims: “We are not very far here from the roots of Hantaï’s own decision. Both are signs that something is amiss in the private contract between a painter and his painting, and in both cases it comes down to exterior social pressures.” 7. Perhaps the most caustic contemporary account of the situation emerging in the years immediately leading up to Hantaï’s withdrawal, with a particular emphasis on the host institution for the artist’s 1976 retrospective, is to be found in Baudrillard, “Beaubourg Effect.” 8. For more on this, see Berecz, “Painting Lesson.” Concerned primarily with

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9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20.

the reception of Hantaï’s oeuvre, this text provides a useful analysis of the critical investment in his presumed “silence,” but it does not put forward a new account of the work itself. Élisabeth Lebovici and Hervé Gauville, “Hantaï est de sorties,” Libération, March 12, 1998, 28. Ibid. Philippe Dagen, “Les confidences d’un peintre en retrait du monde,” Le Monde, March 16, 1998, 26. Hantaï’s relationship with Renault began in 1977 with a commission to produce four walls for the company’s plant at Rueil-Malmaison. For more on that project, see de Chassey, “Simon Hantaï’s Luminous Walls.” Hantaï, conversation with the author. Millet, “Hantaï, tableaux récents,” 154. Ibid. Ibid., 154–55. Daniel Buren, Arguments topiques, CAPC / Entrepôt Lainé, Bordeaux, 1992–93. Millet, “Hantaï, tableaux récents,” 155. Ibid. “Cafeterias” seems to be a reference to the Renault project; it is unclear whether Hantaï personally expressed dissatisfaction with that commission in the course of their interview. This dating is based on publications of the photographs during Hantaï’s lifetime: some appear as illustrations in Millet, where they are dated to 1995 (“Hantaï, tableaux récents”); others accompany his collection of letters, where at least one is dated to 1994 (Hantaï, “Hantaï: Briefe und Notizen”). In the former source, the photographs are attributed to Hantaï’s friend and fellow artist Antonio Semeraro, who has exhibited and published closely related photographs of Hantaï at work. The latter, however, suggests that

21.

22.

23.

24.

25. 26. 27.

Simon and Zsuzsa Hantaï took many of the photographs currently held by the Archives Hantaï, including the selection that appears here (Semeraro, personal communication to the author, December 7, 2018). See, for example, the artist’s note on a Laissée of 1981–91 included in his 1997 donation to the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris: “Sur les coupes faites par la toile, la surcoupe (le surcoup) du cutter” (Hantaï, “Don de Tableaux,” 42). For more on scale in the Laissées, see Millet, “Hantaï, tableaux récents,” 156. In a very different context, Daniel Arasse has written brilliantly about scale disjunctions and perturbations of perspectival structure in the work of Fra Angelico, among others, and has notably framed these subtle formal disruptions as indexes of the Incarnation as, precisely, an event that exceeds all measure—a framing clearly resonant with Hantaï’s concerns (“Vierge échappe”). One might even see these runs as more specifically snakelike, thereby conjuring the Medusa and, through that topos, certain thematics of castration that are always at play in Hantaï’s thinking about the unpainted. For the Freudian telling and various responses to it, see Garber and Vickers, Medusa Reader. My thanks to Michael Fried for this suggestion. “La machine peint mieux que nous!” (Hantaï, quoted in Damisch, “Rencontre en champ/contrechamp,” n.p.). For more on this, see Fleischer, Simon Hantaï. Bozo, preface to Simon Hantaï: Venise, 6. As in the famous note, previously cited in chapter 5, that accompanied his donation to the Musée d’art

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28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

moderne de la Ville de Paris: “La toile descend par terre, devient matériau à interroger” (Hantaï, “Don de Tableaux,” 26). Fourcade and Michaud, “‘Tabulas lilas,’” 886. Ibid., 887. Ibid. Ibid. For more on this, see Fleischer, Simon Hantaï, and Didi-Huberman, “Replis de Simon Hantaï,” 46–48. Hantaï is referring in particular to Ecclesiastes 1:2–11 and to the Hebrew word typically translated into English as “vanity,” in the famous passage that begins: “Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity.” As the artist notes, the Hebrew term hebel can equally mean vapor or mist; Hantaï tended to mime the act of expelling air to underscore the additional meaning of the equally

ephemeral fog produced in certain conditions by human breath (Hantaï, conversation with the author). 34. This work might also be read as picking up on the indexical nature of pliage itself, a dimension that Fleischer in particular links to photography; see Fleischer, Simon Hantaï, esp. 17. The key texts on indexicality and on photography as an “operative model for abstraction,” remain Krauss’s essays, “Notes on the Index, Part 1” and “Notes on the Index, Part 2.” envoi

1. Élisabeth Lebovici and Hervé Gauville, “Hantaï est de sorties,” Libération, March 12, 1998, 29. The authors add: “C’est la grande

préoccupation de Hantaï aujourd’hui,” but they do not unpack this claim. 2. Ibid. Hantaï’s evocative phrase— “the politics of ‘with’”—recalls Nancy’s formulations on “the logic of ‘with’” in Being Singular Plural, the French version of which had appeared two years earlier in 1996 (see xvi, in particular). appendix 1

* Max Ernst was winner of that year’s grand prize for painting. ** One assumes that it is the heart that is made to beat (fit battre)— but one might also think back to the earlier figure of a door that “swings in us” (bat en nous), “opening onto the memoryless spaces of a metahuman condition.”

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Ubl, Ralph. Prehistoric Future: Max Ernst and the Return of Painting Between the Wars. Translated by Elizabeth Tucker. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Vaché, Jacques. Lettres de guerre. Paris: Mille et une nuits, 2001. Voegelin, Eric. “Siger de Brabant.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 4 (June 1944): 507–26. Warnock, Molly. “Acting the Part: Molly Warnock on Georges Mathieu’s Bataille de Bouvines.” Artforum 49, no. 10 (2011): 352–55, 430. ———. “Hantaï’s Time.” In Hantaï: Blancs, 23–32. New York: Paul Kasmin Gallery, 2015. ———. “Manifold Address: Molly Warnock on Simon Hantaï’s Étude, 1969.” Artforum 51, no. 2 (2012): 228–31. ———. Penser la peinture: Simon Hantaï. Translated by Patrick Hersant. Paris: Gallimard, 2012. ———. “Seventeen Cellules for Simon Hantaï.” In Simon Hantaï. Panses, 1964–1965, 13–28. Paris: Galerie Jean Fournier and Lienart, 2012. ———. Simon Hantaï. New York: Paul Kasmin Gallery; Paris: Galerie Jean Fournier, 2010. Wat, Pierre. “Rencontre avec Hantaï.” In “Hantaï,” special issue, Beaux Arts Magazine 582 (February 1998): 7–13.

BIBlIograPHY

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Index

Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. Artworks and writings are by Simon Hantaï unless otherwise noted. Dates have at times been added for disambiguation. Pliage paintings are grouped by named series rather than listed as individual entries. À Galla Placidia, 93, 94, 97, 111, 120 Abadie, Daniel, 65, 237n19 abandonment, 192, 202, 215, 216 See also contingency; exposure; withdrawal abstract/abstraction composition and, 23 Duchamp and, 24, 46, 237n7 Écriture rose and, 99, 101, 103, 104 individualism and, 6 language and, 20–21 Mathieu and, 33–34 psychologism and, 101, 104 Sexe-Prime and, 32–33 abstract expressionism, 1, 98–99, 108, 164, 243n24 abstraction lyrique, 2 automatism and, 35–36 in the Cérémonies commémoratives, 68 “Démolition” and, 35–36 Incarnation and, 76–77 informel compared, 34, 76–77 Mathieu on, 34–35, 41 Sexe-Prime and, 33, 36–38, 52 surrealism and, 35–36, 65–66 action painting, 98, 105, 239n18

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allover/alloverness Bataille and, 58 Écriture rose paintings and, 97, 108, 110, 114 Large Glass (Duchamp) and, 28 in the “Notes préparatoires,” 81 pliage and, 123, 126, 144, 181 in the Sexe-Prime dépliant, 49–50, 52, 55 See also impersonal/impersonality; metahuman condition; supraindividual state anonymous/anonymity. See impersonal/ impersonality anthropomorphism. See figuration Alvard, Julien, 98 Andre, Carl, 164, 248n4 Angélique, Pierre (pseudonym). See Bataille, Georges Aquinas, Thomas, 67, 69, 239n46, 241n76 Aragon, Louis, 66, 72 Arasse, Daniel, 250n22 Aristotle, 74, 111, 229 archaism, 95–97 Aron, Raymond, 102 Art en France: une nouvelle génération (Clair), 2, 3, 7, 2 The Art of the Real: USA 1948–1968 (exhibition, MoMA), 3, 161, 164–66, 248n4 art autre. See informel Art International (periodical), 166 art press (periodical), 166, 195 Artforum International (periodical), 166 audience, 5, 99, 100, 120 Augustine (saint), 67, 74, 90 automatism (automatic message, automatic writing) Bataille and, 57 Blanchot on, 235n30 Breton on, 14–16, 20, 23, 35, 141, 247n50 Cavell on, 8, 119 community and, 24 composition and, 23 “Démolition” and, 16, 19–24, 29, 76, 77 Duchamp and, 29, 225 Écriture rose paintings and, 9, 92, 104–5, 108, 120 Election and, 104

embodiment and, 16, 108 Estienne on, 16 exteriority of, 24 Gestalt theory and, 21–23 historical becoming and, 19, 123 as immediate knowledge, 19–20, 222 impersonality and, 57 Jorn on, 16 language and, 20 “luminous parasite,” figure for, 24, 57, 218, 219 Mathieu and, 35–36, 40, 46, 65–66, 237n17, 239n8 medium and, 8, 29, 123, 157–58 negative theology and, 77–78 painting and, 20–21 Pollock and, 144, 235n10 Sexe-Prime and, 57 speed and, 35 spiritual exercise and, 23, 66, 159, 236n55 surrealism and, 8, 29, 35, 235n10 Tapié and, 16 transmission, figure for, 9, 19, 36, 57, 120 See also medium; method, folding as; writerly marking/writing-likeness Averroes (Ibn Rushd)/Averroism, 67, 240n68 Az erkélyen, 167, 169 Baldassari, Anne, 91, 92, 237n5, 248n52 Barr, Alfred, 2 Barthes, Roland, 3 Bataille, Georges, 9, 14, 55–58, 82, 108, 215 Bataille de Bouvines (Mathieu), 39–40, 39, 40, 41, 46 Bazaine, Jean, 241n89 “Being Singular Plural” (Nancy), 249n28, 251n2 Berecz, Agnes, 237n8, 246n8, 250n8 Bernard, Émile, 145, 247n31 Berri, Claude (Claude Berel Langmann), 192 biographical wall, 189–91, 190 Biró, Zsuzsa. See Hantaï, Zsuzsa black, philosophic centrality of, 83, 232–33 Blanchot, Maurice, 6, 235n30, 241n73 Blancs (series), 176, 177 blanks. See unpainted

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BMPT (Buren, Mosset, Parmentier, Toroni), 2, 234n4 body/bodiliness automatism and, 16, 38, 57, 237n24 of Christ, 77, 100, 111, 181 femellité and, 141–44, 151 finitude and, 110, hope and, 111 identification with support, 173, 126, 153 pliage and, 126, 151, 153 Suaires, H.bl and, 213 writerly marking/writing-likeness and, 170 Bois, Yve-Alain, 245n9 Bonaventure (saint), 131 Bonnard, Pierre, 13 Bonnefoi, Geneviève, 237n5, 240n58, 242n4, 247n30 Bosquet, Alain, 34, 39, 65, 66 Bourgeons (series), 175–78, 178 Boutang, Pierre, 240n58 Bozo, Dominique, 242n5 Braque, Georges, 18, 230 Breton, André American painting and, 237n7 on automatism, 14–16, 20, 23, 35, 66, 247n50 cadavre exquis and, 246n16 Cérémonies commemoratives and, 65, 67, 69 Christianity and, 65, 66, 67 “Démolition” and, 5, 8, 13, 16–29, 236n53, 236n71 on Duchamp, 24–26, 44–45, 52 Femelle-Miroir paintings and, 139–44, 157, 246n16 femininity and, 139–41 “Notes confusionelles” and, 228, 230, 240n58 on paintings as windows, 246n22 psychologism and, 8 repetition and, 44–45, 46 Sexe-Prime dépliant and, 52, 55 on socialist realism, 72 Souvenir dépliant and, 61, 82, 228, 230, 241n84

on Le Surréalisme en 1947 (Surrealist group), 66–67 rupture with Hantaï, 13, 64–65 on Thomas Aquinas, 239n46 Vaché and, 55, 238n54 See also surrealism; and individual writings of The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (Large Glass, Duchamp), 25 Breton on, 24–26, 44 “Démolition” and, 24–29, 44, 224–26 Duchamp on, 236n70 “final aspect” and, 27, 74 geometry and, 28, 41, 180, 225 metahuman condition and, 28 physical unconscious and, 29 raclage and, 33, 44–46 Sexe-Prime dépliant and, 33, 54 space in, 27–8 “sublime point” and, 27, 41 See also “Green Box” (Duchamp) Brisset, Jean-Pierre, 31, 46, 50, 82 Budapest uprising, 72–74 Buren, Daniel, 2, 3, 195, 234n4 cadavre exquis (exquisite corpse), 246n16 Cabanne, Pierre, 236n70, 237n7 caesura hope and, 111 Écriture rose galaxy and, 114 pliage and, 120 in the Sexe-Prime dépliant, 55 withdrawal as, 91, 187 (and the Tabulas), 192, 208 See also opacity; withdrawal Caillois, Roger, 246n17 castration, 156–61, 250n23 Catamurons (series), 117, 129 Peintures 1960–1967 and, 173 seriality and, 121 Tabulas compared, 178, 184 titling of, 247n51 unpainted and, 126 Catholicism body and, 100

Cérémonies commémoratives and, 68 Hantaï and, 13, 62, 99, 230 impersonality and, 76 “Notes confusionelles” and, 74, 76 See also Christianity Cavell, Stanley, 7–8, 119, 175 Carrouges, Michel, 236n55 138 peintures de petit format. Jalons des années 1962–1965 (exhibition, Galerie Jean Fournier), 170 Les cérémonies commémoratives de la deuxième condamnation de Siger de Brabant (Cérémonies commémoratives; exhibition, Galerie Kléber), 64, 57–71, 68, 70 Fessard and, 102 Hantaï on, 64–65 Le Surréalisme en 1947 (Surrealist group) and, 66–71 “Notes confusionelles” and, 71, 74, 229 “Notes préparatoires,” and, 81 critical silence on, 92 Tobey and, 244.n59 Cézanne, Paul called color and, 249n30 Golding on, 246n28, 246n30 Hantaï and, 1, 135, 151, 189, 246n24, 246n25 Meuns and, 135 modeling by hue and, 144–45 unpainted in, 246n30 Chapel of the Rosary (Matisse), 147, 250n3 Chevalier, Aurelia, 248n1 Choay, Françoise, 237n4, 243n30 Christianity historicity and, 76 magic compared, 76 Mathieu and, 67 in the “Notes confusionelles,” 75–78 Souvenir de l’avenir and, 85 surrealism and, 65, 66, 67 time and, 75, 76 See also Catholicism; Incarnation

INDEX

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50 ans d’art aux États-Unis (exhibition, MNAM), 32 Cixous, Hélène, 92, 242n18 Clair, Jean, 2–4, 234n9 clandestine/clandestinity, 217–18 collective/collectivity/collectivist ideology Hantaï’s manifestos and, 5 Jachec on, 98 Large Glass (Duchamp) and, 28 liturgy and, 99 postwar painting and, 6 surrealism and, 6, 8, 16 Tabulas and, 10, 187 See also community called color, 113, 182, 194, 210, 215 See also color color Cézanne and, 145 Duthuit on, 148–49 Écriture rose and, 113, 215 Fourcade and Michaud on, 210 Hantaï, desire to inhabit, 191, 195, 208 liturgy and, 100, 182, 244n6 Matisse and, 147, 148–49 Meuns and, 149–51 raclage as “carving” into, 143 Tabulas and, 182 Tabulas lilas and, 210 See also black, philosophic centrality of; called color community/communication/ communion abstract expressionism and, 99 automatism and, 19, 24 Bataille on, 56, 58 Écriture rose and, 92, 113 manifestos and, 5–6 , Nancy on, 181–82 Peintures 1960–1967 and, 173 medium and, 7 “Notes confusionelles” and, 74–78 Sexe-Prime and, 33 pliage and, 6–7, 120 the sacred and, 241n95

260

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surrealism and, 16, 241n84, 241n89 withdrawal and, 5–6 writerly marking/writing-likeness, 38 See also collective/collectivity compearance, 182 composition/noncomposition, 3, 4, 23, 92 contingency automatism and/of materials and making, 57 chromatic effects and, 244n65 Laissées and, 202, 212 medium and, 10, 216 pliage and, 4, 9, 159 See also abandonment; exposure Corbière, Tristan (Édouard-Joachim Corbière), 24, 219 “Coup de semonce” (Surrealist group), 69–71, 77 Courbet, Gustave, 246n21 Le Couronnement de Charlemagne, 66 Critique (periodical), 210 cutouts (Matisse), 138, 147, 148–49, 153, 234n1 cuts/cutting canvas in pliage and, 123, 125, 153 digital prints and, 212 Laissées and, 196, 198, 200, 216, 250n21 “Dada Manifesto 1918” (Tzara), 241n76 The Dance (Matisse), 148 De Chirico, Giorgio, 24, 27, 52, 219, 225 deconstruction, Derridean, 181 déchirement (tearing, laceration), 56–57, 111 De Gaulle, Charles, 240n57 De Kooning, Willem, 33, 98 De la Fresnaye, Roger, 247n30 delay, 45, 132 “Une Démolition au platane” (“Démolition,” Hantaï and Schuster)

automatism and, 16, 19–24, 29, 76, 77 Duchamp and, 24–29 Gestalt theory and, 21–23 Mathieu and, 35–36 relation of visual art to language and, 19–21 writing and reception of, 13 dépliants, 5, 9, 90, 119, 123 See also manifestos, Hantaï/manifesto form; and individual dépliants Derrida, Jacques, 92, 217 See also deconstruction, Derridean Descartes, René, 21, 69 Descharnes, Robert, 40, 66 désœuvrement (unworking) effects, 182, 196 Dessin automatique (Masson), 35 detached/detachment. See impersonal/impersonality Devade, Marc, 248n53, 248n7 dialectic Bataille and, 56 Fessard and, 102, 104, 108, 122, 245n6 fourfold structure and, 122–23 Hegel and, 21, 56, 77, 104 Ignatius and, 104, 108, 122 of painted and unpainted, 126 pliage and, 122–23 of rationalization, 17–18, 27, 41, 76, 220 Thomas Aquinas and, 240n46, 241n76 La dialectique des “Exercices spirituels” de Saint Ignace de Loyola (Fessard), 102–14, 131–33, 245n6 Didi-Huberman, Georges, 92, 191, 202, 242n18, 247n41 digital prints. See H.b.l; Suaires doctrine, development of, 245n23 Don Judd: Structures (exhibition, Galerie Ileanna Sonnabend), 166 double truth, 67, 74, 229 Doubting Thomas, 244n64

INDEX

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12 peintres et sculpteurs américains (exhibition, MNAM), 32 12 peintures récentes de grand format (exhibition, Galerie Jean Fournier), 117 Dubuffet, Jean, 14, 16, 240n46 Duchamp, Marcel American painting and, 237n7 Bataille contrasted, 56 Breton on, 24–26, 44–45, 52 Cérémonies commemoratives and, 68 “Démolition” on, 24–29, 224–26 Femelle-Miroir paintings and, 141 Mathieu contrasted, 38, 40–41, 46 “Notes confusionelles” and, 74 physical unconscious and, 38 pliage and, 133 raclage and, 33, 44, 45–46 Sexe-Prime dépliant and, 33, 52, 54, 238n50 Tabulas and, 180 Vaché compared, 238n54 See also individual works duration. See time, temporality Duthuit, Georges, 148–49, 153 Duwa, Jérôme, 239n2, 240n67 detached/detachment. See impersonality Donnadieu, Marc, 4 dynamic eschatology, 75, 77, 81, 85, 113, 228 See also repetition Earthlight (Breton), 139 Eburne, Jonathan, 240n62 Écriture rose, 87–97, 88, 89, 90, 96, 101–14 alloverness and, 97 archaism and, 95–97 automatism and, 92, 104–8 called color and, 182 dépliants compared, 90–91 Fessard and, 101–14 hope and, 111, 113 Ignatius and, 102–14 indifference and, 108–10 liturgy and, 100

making of, 89–90 Pollock and, 100 reception of, 91–92 renovation of practice and, 93–95 repetition and, 113–14 Sexe-Prime compared, 87, 93 satellite paintings and, 93 spiritual exercise and, 92, 103–14 Tabulas compared, 180, 182 touch and 110–12 effacement. See impersonal/ impersonality Election, 104, 108 embodiment. See body/bodiliness L’Empreinte (exhibition, MNAM), 192 eroticism. See sex/sexuality L’Érotisme (Bataille), 56 Ernst, Max, 18 Espaces engourdis, 168, 172 Estienne, Charles, 16, 236n1 L’Étoile scellée (gallery, Paris), 244n2 Études (series), 151, 175–76, 176, 184 exposure Bataille and, 58 color and, 215 Duthuit and, 149 Écriture rose and, 114, 214–15 Laissées and, 196 Nancy on, 182 pliage and, 9, 216 Suaires, H.b.l, and, 212, 216 Tabulas and, 187, 215 See also abandonment; contingency; finitude Fables du lieu (exhibition, Le Fresnoy–Studio national des arts contemporains), 202–8, 208 Fautrier, Jean, 14 femelle/femellité, 245n6 Femelle-Miroir I and II, 140 cadavre exquis contrasted, 246n16 Courbet compared, 246n21 femellité and, 148, 151 “Free Union” (Breton) and, 139–44 Hantaï’s 1976 catalogue and, 159

Meuns compared, 151 Panses compared, 145 Fessard, Gaston career of, 101–2 on Election, 104, 108 Hegel and, 102, 244n60, 245n6 on history, 102 on hope, 111, 113 on indifference, 108 pliage and, 120, 133 on repetition, 113 on the Virgin Mary, 131–33, 245n20, 245n23 See also La dialectique des “Exercices spirituels” de Saint Ignace de Loyola figuration “Démolition” and, 20–21, 221 Femelle-Miroir paintings and, 139 Mathieu and, 34, 41 pliage and, 151, 175 Sexe-Prime and, 41–44, 47–48, 50, 57, 97, 246n7 “final aspect,” the, 27, 74, 225, 229 finitude color and, 244n65 cutting and, 212 digital prints and, 214 Écriture rose and, 114 Nancy on, 181–82 pliage and, 10 reading/writing and, 120 self and, 110, 113, 159 Souvenir and, 83 flatness, 143–44, 145, 149 Florman, Lisa, 249n15 folding. See pliage Fourcade, Dominique on Écriture rose, 91, 92, 242n5 on Hantaï’s Catholicism, 245n12 on Hantaï’s manifestos, 234n16 on Hantaï’s surrealism, 235n5 on the Tabulas lilas, 21 fourfould structure, 122–23, 245n6 Fournier, Jean on the Cérémonies commémoratives, 69

INDEX

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Fournier, Jean (continued) Écriture rose and, 91 Hantaï’s 1976 catalogue and, 159 Hantaï’s retreat and, 191 meeting with Hantaï, 236n1 pliage exhibitions and, 117, 170–73, 191, 208 Sexe-Prime and, 31, 236n3, 239n7 Souvenir and, 61 Fra Angelico, 250n22 Francis, Sam (Samuel Lewis Francis), 189 “Free Union” (Breton), 139–44 Freud, Sigmund, 90, 156, 160, 248n57, 250n23 French Communist Party (PCF), 14, 66 Fried, Michael, 7, 246n21, 248n4, 250n23 geometry, Euclidean, 28, 41, 225, 226 Gérard, Francis, 66 Gero˝, Erno˝, 72 Gestalt theory, 21, 22–23, 52, 221–22 Giacometti, Alberto, 141 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 113, 249n30 Golding, John, 246n28, 247n30 Goossen, Eugene C., 164, 166, 248n4 See also The Art of the Real Gottlieb, Adolph, 98 “Green Box” (Duchamp), 24–29, 33, 45, 54, 237n7 Greenberg, Clement Cavell and, 6–7 French reception of, 4, 161, 166, 210, 248n6, 248n7 Grünewald, Matthias, 245n7 Guéguen, Pierre, 98, 243n29 Gustafson, Ingmar, 45 Hantaï, Jérôme, 249n19 Hantaï, rétrospective (1976 exhibition, MNAM), 91, 159, 238n52 Hantaï, Simon on À Galla Placidia, 93 on automatism, 19–24, 57

262

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on black, philosophic centrality of, 83 on the Cérémonies commémoratives, 64–65, 69 on Christianity, 75–76 on dépassement, 54 on the destruction of his work, 191 on the dialectic of rationalization, 17–19, 76 on Duchamp, 24–29, 41, 74 on dynamic eschatology, 75, 77 on Écriture rose, 89–90 on Fessard, 101, 102 on Gestalt theory, 21–23 on history/historicity, 75–77, 78 on Incarnation, 76–77 on the Mariales, 138 on the Meuns, 122, 153 on the metahuman condition, 23 on painting, 4, 52, 78, 103, 153 on the Panses, 159 in Paris, 13–14 on pliage, 1950, 7 on pink, linked to hope, 113 on pliage, 4, 7, 119, 138, 153, 159 on the “politics of ‘with,’’ 217–18 on priests, 100 reception of, 1–4 on the relation of visual art to language, 19–21, 35 on self-expression, 19–20, 54, 57 on Sexe-Prime (painting), 50, 52, 138 on sexuality, 52–54 on Soviet influence, 71–72 upbringing of, 63–64 on withdrawal, 5, 192 See also individual exhibitions of; individual dépliants of; individual series of; individual techniques of; individual works of Hantaï, Zsuzsa, 196, 236n63, 246n24, 249n10, 250n20 Harris, Steven, 239n8 H.b.l (series), 212–16, 214, 215 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich automatism and, 19

Bataille and, 56, 103 dialectic and, 21, 56, 75, 77 Écriture rose and, 90 Fessard and, 102, 104, 244n60, 245n6 Ignatius and, 104, 245n6 Nancy and, 181 “Notes préparatoires” and, 82 temporality and, 76 Heidegger, Martin, 82, 90, 103, 182 history/historicity/historical becoming, 9, 18–19, 23, 75–77, 81, 102 History of Surrealism (Nadeau), 14, 139 Hofmann, Hans, 98 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 90 Hommage au Maréchal de Turenne (Mathieu), 46 “Hongrie, Soleil levant” (Surrealist group), 72–73 hope, 111, 113 hospitality, 217 Husserl, Edmund, 21 Ignatius of Loyola (saint) Écriture rose and, 90, 92, 103–13 Fessard on, 102–13, 131–33, 245n6 See also La dialectique des “Exercices spirituels” de Saint Ignace de Loyola image, Surrealist, 22 impersonal/impersonality automatism and, 57 Bataille and, 58 Catholicism and, 76 Écriture rose paintings and, 97 Femelle-Miroir paintings and, 143 Large Glass (Duchamp) and, 28 metahuman condition and, 29 Meuns and, 151 pliage and, 4, 119, 191 Sexe-Prime dépliant and, 52–53 Tobey and, 244n59 See also alloverness; indifference; metahuman condition; supraindividual state Incarnation, 62, 76–77, 126, 241n89, 245n10, 250n22

INDEX

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indifference Duchamp and, 238n54 Fessard on 108 Hantaï and, 108–10, 119 Vaché and, 238n54 individual/individuation/ individuality/individualism automatism and, 23 Bataille and, 58 Blancs and, 176 Bourgeons and, 176–78 Breton and, 246n16 cadavre exquis and, 246n16 Écriture rose and, 120 Espaces engourdis, 168 Fessard and, 104 Large Glass (Duchamp) and, 28 Marx and, 182 Mathieu and, 34 Nancy and, 181–82 Peinture, 1950, 168 Peintures 1960–1967, 171–75 Pollock and, 100 Rosenberg and, 98, 99 Tabulas and, 178, 215 Tapié and, 6, 14, 34, 234n22 Tobey and, 244n59 pliage and, 6–7, 175, 178 Sexe-Prime and, 48, 50–52 surrealism and, 14 See also supraindividual state informel, 2, 6, 34, 68, 77, 98 The Inoperative Community (Nancy), 181 intention/intentionality Laissées and, 196 Mathieu and, 34 invitational brochures. See dépliants Isenheim Altarpiece, 245n7 Jachec, Nancy, 98, 234n20, 243n24, 243n26 Jackson Pollock (exhibition, MoMA), 32, 97–98 Jackson Pollock et la nouvelle peinture américaine (exhibition, MNAM), 98, 244n59

La Joie de vivre, 167–68, 168 John XXIII (pope), 100 Jorn, Asger, 16 Judd, Donald, 164, 166, 249n9 Judt, Tony, 240n59, 240n60 Jungmann, Josef Andreas, 99, 100, 243n42, 243n43, 243n45 Kádár, János (Giovanni Czermanik, known as János Csermanek, then), 72, 240n60 Kandinsky, Wassily (Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky), 14, 249n15 Kant, Immanuel, 21 Kerlidou, Gwenael, 250n7 Kierkegaard, Søren Aabye, 90, 103 Kiesler, Frederick, 67 Klee, Paul, 14 knot/knotting Bourgeons and, 176–78, 249n20 Didi-Huberman and, 247n41 Incarnation and, 62, 76 Panses and, 126 Souvenir dépliant and, 81–82 Tabulas and, 173, 195, 249n20 Koffka, Kurt, 52 Köhler, Wolfgang, 52 Kojève, Alexandre (Aleksandr Vladimirovich Kozhevnikov, known as), 102, Krauss, Rosalind, 246n17, 251n34

abstraction and, 21 automatism and, 29, 157, 235n30, 247n50 in the dépliants generally, 5 in Écriture rose, 114, 123 Fessard on, 244n60 Lacan and, 157 medium and, 157–59 in the “Notes confusionelles,” 78 Catamurons, Panses, and, 247n51 in the Sexe-Prime manifesto, 52–54 Souvenir and, 83 visual art and, 19–21 Lautréamont (Isidore Lucien Ducasse, know as the Count of), 20, 24, 67 Leonardo da Vinci, 248n23 “Lighthouse of the Bride” (Breton) 24–26, 44–45 La liturgie de l’Eglise romaine (Jungmann), 99, 100, 243n42, 243n43 Liturgy, 64, 99 audience and, 100 called color and, 182 Écriture Rose and, 89, 113 Jungmann and, 243 Lomas, David, 235n10, 237n24 Louis, Morris, 7, 248n4 LeWitt, Sol, 164, 248n4 “luminous parasite,” figure for automatism, 24, 57, 218

Lacan, Jacques-Marie Émile, 10, 14, 156–59, 235n40 See also psychoanalysis Laissées (series), 199, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205 abandonment and, 215–16 exposure and, 196–98 intentionality and, 196 Meuns compared, 198 seriality and, 198 Suaires and H.b.l compared, 212–13 Tabulas and, 192, 196–202 temporality and, 200 unpainted and, 198, 200 language

Madame Edwarda (Bataille), 56 Magic/“magical-erotic climate,” 35, 50, 66, 76, 241n84 The Magnetic Fields (Breton and Soupault), 16 Mahon, Alyce, 67, 239n23 Major, Kamill, 202 Maman! Maman! dits: La Saucisse (series). See Panses (series) “Manifesto of Surrealism” (Breton) “Démolition” and, 14–15 , 17, 18, 20, 22–23 “Free Union” (Breton) and, 139 speed and, 35 Thomas Aquinas and, 239n46

INDEX

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manifestos/manifesto form, 5, 6, 29, 90, 120 See also individual dépliants; individual manifestos Mariales (series), 124–25, 127, 128 Catamurons, Panses, compared, 173, 175 color and, 124 development of doctrine and, 245n23 Duchamp and, 133 medium and, 123–26 sexuality and, 138 writing-like marking and, 125 See also Peintures Mariales (exhibition); Peintures Mariales (invitation card); Peintures Mariales (title, significance of) Marx, Karl Heinrich, 82, 181 Marxism Blanchot on, 241n73 Fessard on, 102 Mathieu on, 240n68 Nancy on, 182 “Notes confusionelles” and, 71–75, 240n67 Rosenberg and, 98 Thomism and, 240n46 Masson, André, 35, 237n19 Mathey, François, 242n5 Mathieu, Georges (Georges Victor Mathieu d’Escaudoeuvres) abstraction lyrique and, 34 American painting and, 33 Bataille contrasted, 56 Duchamp compared, 38, 40–41 on figuration, 41 Hantaï compared, 41, 57 projection and, 39–40 on the sacred, 65–67 speed (duration) and, 34, 46, 65, 71, 78, 95 surrealism and, 34, 65–66 titling, 46 writerly marking/writing-likeness and, 35

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See also Les cérémonies commémoratives de la deuxième condamnation de Siger de Brabant; and individual works Matisse, Henri on color, 194 Duthuit on, 148n49, 153 gridded motifs and, 167, 249n11 in Hantaï’s artistic education, 13 on the “biographical wall,” 189 Meuns and, 135–36, 149–53, 247n40 pliage generally and, 1–2, 234n1 spacing and, 245n9 Tabulas and, 163–64, 167, 195 See also individual works Matta, Roberto, 29, 67 Melville, Stephen, 157, 234n2, 234n10, 247n47 medium Cavell on, 7–8 Greenberg on, 7 Hantaï and, 29 pliage as a, 6–8 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 14, 21–23, 235n40, 236n44 See also automatism; method, folding as Metahuman condition alloverness and, 49, 108 automatism and, 23–24 Catholicism and, 76 Femelle-Miroir paintings and, 142 Large Glass (Duchamp) and, 28 pliage and, 161 Sexe-Prime and, 48 method, folding as, 6–8, 119, 121, 126, 133, 175 See also automatism; medium Meuns (series), 136–37, 150, 152, 153–55 Bourgeons compared, 178 Laissées compared, 198 Matisse and, 149–51, 153 in Peintures 1960–1967, 123 sexuality and, 135–39, 153–61 Tabulas compard, 166, 175 unpainted and, 138, 151–53, 175

Meurice, Jean-Michel, 248n55 Michaud, Yves, 4, 210, 213 Michaux, Henri, 64, 145, 247n30 Millet, Catherine, 3, 195, 250n20 Missarum sollemnia (Jungmann), 99 minimalism, 10, 161, 164, 166 modernism, 7, 139, 144, 167, 210, 235n5 “Modernist Painting”/“Sur le modernisme” (Greenberg), 166, 248n6 Monnerot, Jules, 241n84 Morris, Robert, 164, 166 Mosset, Olivier, 2, 234n4 Music (Matisse), 148 myth action painting and, 99 community and, 181 plurality and, 176 surrealism and, 66–67, 71, 142 Nadeau, Maurice, 14, 139 Nagy, Imre, 72, 240n60 Namuth, Hans, 50 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 10, 64–65, 92, 181–82 La Nation Française (periodical), 240n58 Nature morte, 167–68, 169 negative theology, 77 Newman, Barnett, 2, 98, 193, 248n4 Noland, Kenneth, 7, 248n4 “Notes confusionelles accélérantes et autres pour une avant-garde ‘réactionnaire’ non réductible” (“Notes confusionelles”), 5, 63, 71–78 on black, philosophic centrality of, 83 Budapest uprising and, 72–74, 240n67 Christianity and, 75–77 Duchamp and, 74 Écriture rose paintings and, 113 Fessard compared, 103 Marxism and, 71–75 Monnerot compared, 241n84

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“Notes préparatoires” contrasted, 81 reading and, 71 reception of, 61–64, 92, 240n58 Rosenberg compared, 99 Tzara compared, 241n76 “Notes préparatoires pour les cérémonies de la condamnation de Siger de Brabant et suites correctives non cérémonielles” (“Notes préparatoires”), 80, 81–92 Olitski, Jules, 7 O’Malley, John W., 241n76, 243n45, 245n23 opacity, 44, 120, 125, 198 Pacquement, Alfred, 4, 191 painting strike, 191 Palermo, Charles, 235n10, 247n45 Panderma: Revue de la fin du monde, 69 Panses (series), 118, 130, 146–49 castration and, 159 Cézanne and, 145 Femelle-Miroir paintings compared, 145–47 language and, 247n51 Peintures 1960–1967 and, 119, 173 seriality and, 121 unpainted and, 126, 147 papiers découpés. See cutouts Parmentier, Michel, 2, 234.n4 La Part de l’œil (periodical), 64 Pasteur, Louis, 239n44 Peinture, 1950, 168–70, 173 Peinture, 1950, 168, 171 Peinture, 1955, 36–37, 36 Peinture, 1955, 38, 38, 45 Peinture, 1956, 37, 37 Peinture, 1956, 41–42, 42 Peinture, 1956, 42–44, 43 Peinture, 1958–59, 93, 95, 97, 114 Peinture, 1958–59, 104–5, 105, 106 Peinture, 1958–59, 105–8, 107 Peinture, 1959–60, 108–10, 109 Peinture, 1959, 108–10, 110 Peinture, 1959, 112, 112

Peinture, cahiers théoriques, 166, 234n4, 248n53 Peinture (Écriture rose). See Écriture rose Peinture (Les baigneuses), 160, 167–68, 170 Peintures 1960–1967 (catalogue), 117–19, 118, 120, 121–23, 171 Peintures 1960–1967 (exhibition, Galerie Jean Fournier), 9, 117–19, 120–23, 122, 170–75, 174 Peintures Mariales (exhibition, Galerie Kléber), 117 Peintures Mariales (invitation card), 120–21, 121 Peintures Mariales (series). See Mariales Peintures Mariales (title, significance of), 126–33 Peintures récentes. Souvenir de l’avenir (Souvenir; exhibition, Galerie Kléber), 61, 75, 82–83 Peintures récentes. Souvenir de l’avenir (Souvenir; dépliant) 63, 79, 80 dynamic eschatology and, 81–83, 242n101 reading/writing and, 241n97 Sexe-Prime compared, 241n100 Souvenir paintings and, 85 pendu femelle, 26, 28, 141, 246n17 perspective. See geometry, Euclidean petites touches (little touches), 93, 95, 97, 105–8, 111–12, 145 Phenomenology of Perception (Merleau-Ponty), 21 photography, 216, 251n34 “physical unconscious,” the, 29, 38 Picasso, Pablo, 13, 18, 141–42, 143 pink, linked to hope, 113 Pleynet, Marcelin, 91, 166, 238n44, 249n18, 249n21 pliage American painting and, 1, 2–3 “as such,” 4, 119 castration and, 157–59 community and, 9, 120 composition and, 3 Duchamp and, 133

Écriture rose and, 92, 120, 123 failure and, 187, 195 fourfold structure and, 122–23 Hantaï on, 4, 7, 119, 138, 153, 159 Incarnation and, 126–31 Matisse and, 1, 234n1 as a medium, 7–8, 148, 157 as a method, 6–8, 119, 121, 126, 133, 175 reception, 1–4 seriality and, 120–22, 126 technique of, 1 Virgin Mary and, 133 See also individual series Pliage, 1950, 6, 7, 189 plurality. See series/seriality Pollock, Jackson action painting and, 98 alloverness and, 50, 52, 144 on the “biographical wall,” 189 Cavell and, 7–8, 119 French reception of, 6, 32, 97–98, 237n4, 243n30, 244n59 Écriture rose paintings and, 97, 108 Hantaï’s critical reception and, 5, 32–33, 135, 250n6 informel, and, 6 Laissées and, 196 liturgy contrasted, 100 Mathieu and, 33, 39 Peintures 1960–1967 and, 119 pliage generally and, 1, 119, 144, 234n1, 125 raclage and, 41, 45, 46 seriality and, 8, 120 Sexe-Prime and 31–33, 41, 45, 46, 49, 54 Tobey compared, 244n59 writerly marking/writing-likeness and, 125 See also individual exhibitions La Porte, dits: Les Catamurons (series). See Catamurons (series) projection in the Large Glass (Duchamp), 28 imaginary, 39–40 theoretical, 46, 54

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proliferation Bataille and, 58, 81 Écriture rose and 113, 120 Panses and, 147, 175 seriality and, 120 Sexe-Prime and, 47, 52, 65, 81 Tabulas and, 184 See also seriality protraction. See time/temporality psychoanalysis, 156–59, 248n53 See also Freud, Sigmund; Lacan, Jacques psychology/psychologism abstraction and, 101, 104 action painting and, 98 Christianity and, 76, 77 community and, 5, 24 Duchamp contrasted, 26–29 historicity contrasted, 76 Mathieu and, 40, 78 Souvenir and, 85 surrealism and, 21–24, 78 See also subjectivism raclage Bataille and, 56–57 Duchamp and, 33, 40–46 Écriture rose paintings and, 93, 96–97, 111 Mathieu and, 36–44, 46 Pollock and, 33, 45, 46 pliage compared, 33, 123 sculpture-likeness and, 143 technique of, 31, 33, 83, 237n5 See also Femelle-Miroir I and II; Sexe-Prime (exhibition); Sexe-Prime (dépliant); Sexe-Prime (painting); Souvenir (painting) Rákosi, Mátyás (Mátyás Rosenfeld, known as), 72 rationalism, rationalization Breton on, 17 dialectic of, 17–18, 27, 41, 76 Fessard and, 102–3 Marxism and, 75 Mathieu and, 66, 67 surrealism and, 17, 66

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Read, Herbert, 237n29 reading/writing Bataille and, 57–58 Écriture rose paintings and, 108, 112, 114, 120, 214–15 Fessard and, 120, 133 pliage and, 120–22, 123, 161 Souvenir dépliant and, 71, 81, 85, 241n97 Suaires, H.bl and, 208, 216 Mariales and, 125 Tabulas and, 180, 182 realism, socialist, 14, 17, 72, 235n15 Reinhardt, Ad (Adolph Dietrich Friedrich Reinhardt, known as), 33, 248n4 Renault, 250n12, 250n19 repetition Bataille and, 56–58 Breton on, 44–45 Duchamp and, 44–45 Écriture rose paintings and, 113–14 Femelle-Miroir I and, 246n16 Fessard on, 113 Judd on, 249n9 Laissées and, 215 liturgy and, 100 Peintures 1960–1967 and, 175 pliage and, 4, 122, 175 raclage and, 45–46 Souvenir dépliant and, 82 Suaires, H.b.l, and, 211, 215 surrealism and, 18, 73, 76 writerly marking/writing-likeness and, 38, 45 See also dynamic eschatology; reading/writing reserves. See unpainted respiration, 138, 148–49, 245n3 Restany, Pierre, 166 Revel, Jean-François, 119, 246n28 Reverdy, Pierre, 20, 22 La révolution surréaliste (periodical), 35 Rimbaud, Arthur, 20, 24, 67 Rosenberg, Harold, 98–99, 239n18, 243n26 Rothko, Mark, 2, 33, 98, 248n4

Rouan, François, 212 Rouet, Albert, 243n39 “Rupture inaugurale” (Surrealist group), 66, 73, 240n46 sacred, the, 65–66, 114, 241n95 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 14 Saucisse. See Panses Schneider, Pierre, 242n7 Schuster, Jean, 13, 69, 235n1, 240n67 See also “Une Démolition au platane” scraping. See raclage sculpture/sculpture-likeness, 143–44, 159, 249n7 Seated Bather (Picasso), 142, 142 “Secrets of Magic Surrealist Art” (Breton). See “Manifesto of Surrealism” self/selfhood, 56, 108–14, 119–20, 142, 153, 157–59 self-expression, 19–20, 39, 46, 54, 57 Selz, Peter, 241n89 Semeraro, Antonio, 250n20 Semin, Didier, 191 series/seriality (plurality) foregrounding of, in pliage, 120–23, 126 minimalism and, 163–64, 166, 178 modernism and, 8, 175 raclage and, 46 Tabulas and, 163, 175–78, 187, 195–96 See also proliferation; repetition Sexe-Prime: Hommage à Jean-Pierre Brisset et autres peintures de Simon Hantaï (Sexe-Prime; exhibition, Galerie Kléber), 31, 61 Sexe-Prime: Hommage à Jean-Pierre Brisset et autres peintures de Simon Hantaï (Sexe-Prime; dépliant), 48–55, 48, 49, 51, 53 Bataille and, 57–58 Duchamp and, 33 Laissées compared, 200 Mathieu and, 66 Souvenir dépliant compared, 81, 82

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Sexe-Prime: Hommage à Jean-Pierre Brisset et autres peintures de Simon Hantaï (Sexe-Prime; manifesto), 53 Bataille and, 56, 58 Écriture rose compared, 90, 214, 242n3 Mariales compared, 125 “Notes préparatoires” compared, 61, 241n100 pliage compared, 133 in the Sexe-Prime dépliant, 51–54 socialist realism in, 71–72 Sexe-Prime: Hommage à Jean-Pierre Brisset et autres peintures de Simon Hantaï (Sexe-Prime; title painting), 32, 33, 46–48, 57 Écriture rose paintings compared, 87, 97, 100, 104, 112 Meun, 1968, compared, 135 1976 retrospective and, 238n52 seriality and, 120 in the Sexe-Prime dépliant, 50–51, 55 Souvenir compared, 83 Tabulas compared, 194 sex/sexuality alloverness and, 49–50, 58 Bataille on, 56–58, 215 Femelle-Miroir paintings and, 141–43, 148 in “Free Union” (Breton), 139–41 Lacan on, 156–57 in the Large Glass (Duchamp), 27–28 Mathieu on, 40 Meuns and, 135–39, 151 in Peintures 1960–1967, 173 Sexe-Prime and, 47–48, 50–54 Shroud of Turin, 214 Siger de Brabant, 64, 67, 74, 102, 239n30 silkscreens. See Untitled 1981–96 Simon Hantaï 1960–1976 (exhibition, CAPC, Entrepôt Lainé), 192–93, 193, 195 singularity. See individual/ individuation/individuality

Sjölin, Hans-Gunnar, 62, 242n3 Smith, Tony, 164, 166, 248n4 socialist realism. See realism, socialist. Soupault, Philippe, 16 Souvenir de l’Avenir (Souvenir, title painting), 62, 83–85 space/spacing in the Large Glass (Duchamp), 27–8 pliage and, 125, 148, 178, 181, 245n9 speed automatism and, 35 Écriture rose (negation of), 95 Mathieu and, 34–35, 65 in the “Notes confusionelles,” 78, raclage and, 37 See also time/temporality (duration) spiritual exercise automatism and, 23, 66, 159 Écriture rose and, 92, 103–13 psychoanalysis and, 159 See also La Dialectique des “Exercices spirituels” de Saint Ignace de Loyola (Fessard) Stella, Frank, 7, 248n4 Story of the Eye (Bataille), 56 Studio Facchetti, 32, 46 Suaires (series), 202–14, 208, 212–13, 216, 216 subjectivism, 5, 21, 26, 101, 175 “sublime point,” the, 26–27, 41, 236n71 supraindividual state, 76, 78, 83, 108 surrealism Budapest uprising and, 72–73 Cérémonies commémoratives and, 69–71 Christianity and, 65, 66, 67 as collective, 6, 8 in “Démolition,” 16–29, 73 French Communist Party contrasted, 14, 66 Hantaï’s affiliation with, 5, 8, 13–14, 235n5

Mathieu and, 34–36, 65–66 medium and, 144 myth and, 66–67 “Notes confusionelles” and, 72–75, 76, 99 Rosenberg and, 98 in the Sexe-Prime dépliant, 52 in the Souvenir dépliant, 82 Le Surréalisme en 1947 (exhibition, Galerie Maeght), 66–67 Surrealism and Painting (Breton), 17 Supports/Surfaces, 2, 234n4 Sved, Étienne, 50 Tabulas (series). 164–65, 179, 183–86 Bourgeons, Blancs and, 176–78, 249n19, 249n20 change in, 182–87 community and, 181–82 Écriture rose and, 180–81, 182 Études and, 176 exposure and, 215 Hantaï’s Hungarian and early Parisian work and, 167–75 Laissées and, 192–202 Large Glass (Duchamp) and, 180 Matisse and, 163–64 Meuns and, 175 minimalism and, 164–66, 178 1976 catalogue and, 159–61 Peintures 1960–1967 compared, 170–75, 178 plurality and, 175–78 See also Tabulas lilas Tabulas lilas (exhibition, Galerie Jean Fournier), 208, 209 Tabulas lilas (series), 208–14, 215, 209, 211 tachisme, 2, 16 “Le Tailleur de lumière” (Duthuit), 148–51 Tapié, Michel, 166 automatism and, 16 on individuals, 6, 14, 34, 234n22 on the informel, 6, 68, 98 in the Sexe-Prime dépliant, 238n51 Thomism and, 240n46

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Tapié, Michel (continued) Véhémences confrontées and, 33–34 See also informel Tempier, Étienne, 67, 74 Thomas Aquinas (saint)/Thomism, 67, 69, 239n46, 241n76 time/temporality (duration, protraction) automatism and, 19, 20, 57 Christianity and, 75–76, 77 Écriture rose and, 93–95, 103–14 Laissées and, 200, 218 Mathieu on, 34–35 Matisse and, 148 pliage and, 120 Sexe-Prime and, 37, 55, 57 Souvenir and, 75–76, 77, 78, 81–82, 83 Suaires, H.b.l and, 214–16 Tabulas and, 180, 182 See also dialectic; speed Tobey, Mark, 33, 68, 108, 244n59 Toroni, Niele, 2, 234n4 touch, 44, 110–12, 113, 114, 131 See also petites touches transmission, automatism as, 19, 23, 57, 120, 123, 125 Tzara, Tristan, 241n76

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United States Lines Paris Review (periodical), 33 unpainted, the (blanks, reserves) in the Blancs, 176 in the Catamurons, 126 cutting and, 196 in the Études, 175–76 in the Laissées, 198, 200 in the Meuns, 138, 151–53, 159, 175 in the Panses, 126, 145–47 in pliage generally, 144, 187 resistance to understanding in strictly formal terms, 218 sexuality and, 138, 144, 151–53, 159 in the Tabulas, 182, 184, 187, 195–96 withdrawal and, 192 Untitled, ca. 1948–49, 167, 167 Untitled, 1981–96, 202, 206 Venice Biennale, 1982, Hantaï’s French Pavilion for, 4, 191, 208, 210 Vaché, Jacques, 55, 238n54 Vatican II, 100, 243n45, 245n23 Véhémences confrontées (exhibition, Galerie Nina Dausset), 32, 33 Vénus (Matisse), 153

Vermeille, Patrice, 211 vertige/dizzying swings, 29, 41, 52, 78 Viallat, Claude, 2, 234n4 Virgin Mary, the, 105, 131–33, 245n12 withdrawal from exhibition, 10, 191–92, 215, 218 in Hantaï’s manifestos, 5–6 See also caesura, painting strike Wols (Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze), 14 writerly marking/writing-likeness Écriture rose paintings and, 90, 105, 111–12, 114 figuration and, 144, 170 Mariales and, 125 Mathieu and 35, 36 Sexe-Prime paintings and, 36–38, 45, 46–48 Sexe-Prime dépliant and, 50, 52–55 Souvenir paintings and, 83 Suaires, H.b.l and, 213 Young Boy in an Interior, 249n12

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