Simon Hantaï Pliage: Folding as a Method of Painting

Simon Hantaï pliage is one of the most influential ideas in post-war French painting, and it sits right next to froissage in the family of crumpled and folded art. From 1960 Hantaï stopped composing pictures in the usual way. He folded the canvas, painted what was exposed, and unfolded it to discover the result. He called this le pliage comme méthode, folding as a method. This guide explains how it worked, what the main series look like, and what pliage shares with the crumpled-paper technique this site is about.

Who Simon Hantaï was

Simon Hantaï was born Simon Handl on 7 December 1922 in Bia, a village near Budapest, now part of Biatorbágy. He studied at the Budapest School of Fine Arts from 1942 to 1948. After the communist takeover he left Hungary, travelled in Italy and settled in Paris at the end of the 1940s; French Wikipedia says autumn 1948 and Universalis says 1949. He became a French citizen in 1966.

In Paris he was quickly drawn to Surrealism. André Breton wrote the preface to his first solo exhibition in January 1953. The relationship did not last: by 1955 Hantaï had broken with the group, criticising its approach to painting. He moved through a period of gestural, scraped abstraction, and in 1958-1959 completed a large canvas known as Écriture rose (Pink Writing), which both French Wikipedia and Universalis treat as a turning point.

Folding as a method

Universalis describes the procedure clearly. The canvas, no longer stretched on a frame, is folded, crumpled or knotted. The parts that stick out are painted “blind”, without the painter seeing the whole surface. The canvas is then unfolded, and the colour appears as imprints separated by the unpainted areas that were hidden inside the folds.

The method changes the role of the painter. Hantaï still chose the colours, the size of the canvas and the way of folding it, but the final distribution of colour and white came from the folds. Universalis also links the practice to folding traditions in Hungarian folk art. The point was not to create accidents for their own sake but to remove the painter’s skilful hand and habits of composition from the centre of the work.

The main pliage series

French Wikipedia lists the series in sequence:

• Mariales (1960-1962), also called the Manteaux de la Vierge (Mantles of the Virgin), with tight, multiple folds that leave a dense network of colour.
• Catamurons (1963-1964) and Panses (1964-1965).
• Meuns (1967-1968), named after Meun, the village where he moved in 1966; wider folds and knots leave white showing through.
• Études (1969-1971), monochrome works that apply the folding across the whole canvas.
• Aquarelles and Blancs (1971-1974).
• Tabulas (1972-1976, resumed 1980-1982), built on a grid, with the format enlarged in the later works.
• Laissées (1981-1997), the last series.

His works are protected by copyright, so we do not reproduce them. The museum and foundation websites listed below show many of them.

Recognition and withdrawal

The Centre Pompidou held a retrospective of Hantaï in 1976, and he received the French Grand Prix national des Arts plastiques in 1980. In 1982 he represented France at the Venice Biennale. He saw the event as a disappointment and, at the height of his fame, announced that he would stop public activity. For the rest of his life he lived largely withdrawn, continued to work privately, and destroyed or buried many works.

He gave 16 works to the City of Paris in 1997 and 19 works to the Centre Pompidou in 2003. He died in Paris on 12 September 2008. The Centre Pompidou held the first posthumous retrospective in 2013, with more than 130 works, and the Fondation Louis Vuitton marked his centenary with an exhibition in 2022.

Pliage, froissage and Supports/Surfaces

Pliage is a painting method on canvas; froissage is mostly a drawing and watercolour method on paper. But both start by deforming the support and let the resulting folds decide part of the image. The Fondation Gandur pour l’Art notes that Hantaï used crumpling in Manteau de la Vierge in 1962, which is why he appears on our list of froissage artists.

His influence on younger French painters was strong. Universalis notes that he was a reference point for the groups B.M.P.T. and Supports/Surfaces. André-Pierre Arnal, a member of Supports/Surfaces, made a large crumpled canvas titled Froissage in 1968 and later folded canvases called Pliages. In parallel, Ladislas Kijno was building paintings from crumpled paper and spray paint. The history of froissage shows how these French developments relate to the Czech tradition of Novák and Kolář.

A folding exercise inspired by pliage

You can explore the principle on paper without copying Hantaï’s works:

1. Take a sheet of thin cotton fabric or strong paper, about A3.
2. Fold it several times, crumple parts of it, or tie a few knots with string.
3. With a wide brush, paint only the exposed surfaces in one colour, without opening the sheet.
4. Let it dry slightly, then unfold it completely and flatten it.
5. Look at how the hidden areas create a pattern of white, and try a second colour with a different fold.

Compare the result with a froissage made by our step-by-step method. In pliage the folds hide the surface from the colour; in froissage the creases catch it. Both show how much a simple gesture with the support can do.

Hantaï and the Supports/Surfaces generation

Hantaï’s folded canvases opened a door that a whole generation of younger French artists walked through. The group Supports/Surfaces, active from about 1969 to 1972, took canvases off their stretchers and folded, knotted, dyed, stamped and crumpled them. Patrick Saytour revisited folding directly, and André-Pierre Arnal made both a crumpled Froissage (1968) and a long series of Pliages (see André-Pierre Arnal). Our page on the Supports/Surfaces movement explains the group’s exhibitions and ideas.

What Hantaï gave them was a method in which the artist decides the procedure but not the final image. The painter folds, paints and unfolds; only then does the picture appear. That logic links pliage to other procedures based on rules and chance, such as the numbered-slip collages Ellsworth Kelly made in Paris in 1951 (see Ellsworth Kelly’s chance collages), even though the results look nothing alike.