SIMON HANTAï (1922–2008)

Simon Hantaï, a famously reclusive French painter whose work explores ideas of absence and silence—and who took those ideas so seriously that he disappeared completely from view for fifteen very productive years—died on September 11 at his home in Paris, reports Margalit Fox in the New York Times, with additional reporting from Le Figaro in Paris. Born in Hungary, Hantaï was a major figure in European art from the 1950s onward. He was known in particular for abstract, often huge canvases with bold, saturated color punctuated by unfilled areas of pure white. Their singular appearance resulted from a method of folding and tying the canvas before applying paint, a process known as pliage, which Hantaï developed in the early 1960s. He was also known for his long, self-imposed retreat from the public arena in the 1980s and ’90s. In 1999, Art in America described this absence as stemming from “a streak of ethical obstinacy virtually unparalleled in contemporary art.” Hantaï’s work is in the permanent collections of the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris and other major European museums. His work is less well known in the United States, though it is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, among others. In 1982, Hantaï represented France at the Venice Biennale. Later that year, he withdrew from view, in what he described as a reaction against the rampant commercialization of art and the state’s unwelcome involvement in the making of art. Retreating to his home in Paris, he rarely left the house and refused requests to exhibit his paintings. But over the next decade and a half, Hantaï quietly produced what many critics believe to be his finest work.