Click here to enlarge

Click to order the image

Image

• 
• 

Simon Hantai

Manuscript

Author

Author André Breton
People cited Albinus, Caldini, Simon Hantaï, Scarpa, Soemmering, Marcel Walter

Description

Published in January 1953 in issue 3 of Médium, this manuscript text by Breton was drafted at the end of December 1952 to present Simon Hantaï for an exhibition at À l'Étoile scellée.

It was in January 1953 that this text by Breton, announcing an exhibition by Hantaï at the À l'Etoile scellée galley, was published as an inset in issue 3 of Médium. Drafted at the end of December, this preface compares the Hungarian painter to a kind of Apollo, followed in procession by a ‘retinue of fabulous beings which breath has endowed with life and which move miraculously, in these first days 1953, in the light of the never before seen’. The original, the never before seen and the unexplored are among the guiding principles for Breton in this era; in this context Hantaï, whom he met at the end of 1952, appeared to him both as a loyal inheritor, for example in his use of techniques such as grattage discovered by surrealism during the 1930s, and as an inventor capable of renewing vision. [Atelier André Breton website, 2005]

Signed handwritten manuscript, Paris, 28 December 1952.
- 1/2 in-4° page manuscript in ink on the back of headed notepaper for À l'Étoile scellée, titled, dated and signed by Breton, with deletions and corrections of a text devoted to the painter Simon Hantaï.
‘The mallet strikes alternately the male gong or yang and the female gong or yin, following the unerring rhythm which heralds true creation: it is Simon Hantaï, followed by his retinue of fabulous beings which breath has endowed with life and which move miraculously, in these first days of 1953, in the light of never before seen.’
- 1/4 in-4° manuscript page in ink by Breton, with deletions and corrections, of the central section of this same text.
New edition of Le Surréalisme et la peinture, Gallimard, 1965; preface for the Hantaï exhibition at À l'Étoile Scellée. [Auction catalogue, 2003]

Bibliography

André Breton (Édition publiée sous la direction d'Étienne-Alain Hubert avec la collaboration de Philippe Bernier et Marie-Claire Dumas), « Simon Hantaï », Le Surréalisme et la Peinture, Œuvres complètes, tome IV, Écrits sur l'art et autres textes, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Paris, Gallimard, 2008, p. 637, notice p. 1331-1333