Yielding to Touch: Simon Hantaï’s Late Reactivations of Pliage

At age 60, after a surge of recognition, Hungarian-French artist Simon Hantaï (1922–2008) radically retreated from the art world. Not only did he inhibit the organization of exhibitions, he also hardly made new works. Hantaï, however, did not abandon all artistic activity: he photographed and archived earlier work, and in the mid-1990s, actively returned to his earlier paintings. While he destroyed some, he buried others, leaving them to decompose in his garden and unearthing the remains afterwards. He cut up a number of works, submitting these fragments to photochemical, mechanical, and digital manipulations. In the early 2000s, Hantaï collaborated with philosophers Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy, reinventing the pliage method by copying the philosophers’ writings onto folded paper. This chapter examines a number of Hantaï’s returns to earlier pliage works, arguing that in these practices, Hantaï in a novel way reinforced tendencies that were already present much earlier, specifically the artist’s deep desire to relinquish his own control to other forces and materials, including paint, canvas, and the creations of other people, allowing himself to be touched by agencies outside of himself in a dialectic between individuation and connection.