Born in Hungary, Simon Hantaï went into exile in France in 1948. The radical nature of his approach has made him one of the most important artists of the second half of the 20th century, and a major figure in abstraction.  

Best known for what the artist calls ‘folding as a method’, initiated in 1960, his work unfolds in successive moments of remarkable diversity. From Les Mariales (1960-1962) onwards, Hantaï painted ‘blindly’ a surface that only revealed itself when unfolded and stretched on its frame. From then on, he used this method in very different ways for each series of paintings.

In 2017, the Musée national d'art moderne deposited Mariale m.b.6, 1961 at the museum of Fine Arts of Lyon, the sixth work in the second group (b) of Les Mariales, known as the ‘monochrome’ group. The Mariales are the first simultaneous responses to two painters who preceded the artist: Henri Matisse and Jackson Pollock. Hantaï has always said that he came after ‘the scissors (of Matisse) and the soaked stick (of Pollock)’. From the former, he retained the construction of the surface through colour; from the latter, the invention of a new space, without composition or centre.

With the generous support of the Club du musée saint-Pierre, M.M.44, 1965 entered the collections in 2022. This work belongs to the Panses series (1964-1965). Made by knotting the canvas into a bag, before applying the colour and after folding, it presents an organic-looking form floating on a background.

In 2024, an exceptional Tabula (1975) was donated by the artist's wife. From 1972 until 1982, Simon Hantaï used a single process that allowed for infinite variations. He knotted the back of the canvas in a regular orthogonal weave, flattened it out and then used acrylic paint on the front without any particular effect. When he untied and unfolded it, he created tables, or tabulas. These paintings could reach gigantic dimensions, evoking ‘the background of Piero della Francesca's Madonna del Parto, the immense and massive blue-black dress of Giotto's Madonna’ (from the Uffizi in Florence), paintings the artist had seen during a trip to Italy in 1948, or his mother's ‘folded indigo-black apron’.  

The evocation of Simon Hantaï is reinforced today in the modern collections by a large deposit of works donated by his family, with paintings inspired by the folding method, or, preceding it, from the Surrealist period or the series of paintings in small brushstrokes.