Thought by Painting: The Early Work of Simon Hantai

My dissertation, "Thought by Painting: The Early Work of Simon Hantai," examines the development of Hantai's painting during the years 1950-59 and offers a new, historically specific account of the genesis of his autograph medium of pliage, or "folding." Until now, commentary on Hantai's art has tended to receive pliage within the framework of the "non-compositional" strategies of a younger generation of artists in France that includes Daniel Buren, as well as other painters associated with the group Supports-Surfaces. Without directly contesting that reception, "Thought by Painting" redirects attention to two other, formative aspects of Hantai's pre- pliage work and thought: his intense dealings with postwar Surrealism and his sustained engagement with religious tradition. The driving impulse that manifests itself in Hantai's paintings and writings throughout the period leading up to the adoption of pliage techniques is that of the necessity to "de-psychologize" desire, or to "free" painting from authorial control. During his early years, Hantai pursues this objective through the continual reinvention of painterly techniques, as well as through a searching excavation of what he eventually calls the "religious essence" of art. Drawing upon a range of objects long marginalized within or excluded from the literature on the painter-unpublished and unexhibited paintings, as well as his mid-fifties manifestos and elaborate exhibition brochures-I track the continually shifting relations among painting, writing, and folding in Hantai's early practice and theory, and suggest that all three operations participate in a sustained interrogation of the place or non-place left to painting under late modern regimes of secular "rationalism."