Éric de Chassey on Simon Hantaï

This is a transcript of an interview with Éric de Chassey conducted by Mick Finch on the occasion of the Simon Hantaï exhibition curated by de Chassey at the Villa Médici in Rome between the 12 February to 11 May 2014. De Chassey is Professor of Art History at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Lyons and has, since 2009, been the Director of the French Academy in Rome, the Villa Medici. The Villa Medici exhibition took place after the major Hantaï exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in 2013 for which de Chassey had contributed an catalogue essay on Hantaï’s silkscreen work. The interview discusses the context of the Villa Medici exhibition and particularly the way Hantaï’s latter years were represented. The interview took place at the Villa Medici on Sunday 11 May 2014.

The article was for an edition of the Journal of Contemporary painting that discussed the work of the Hungarian painter Simon Hantaï (1922-2008) has gained increasing recognition in the last few years, particularly in terms of major retrospectives at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Villa Medici in Rome as well as an important exhibition at the Paul Kasmin Gallery in New York. After Hantaï moved to France in 1949, the series of paintings he made from the 1960s on – where processes of folding were materially at the heart of his practice – became a major and continuing influence on successive generations of French artists.

The article was a transcript of an interview made with art historian and the director of the Villa Medici in Rome, Éric de Chassey who curated an exhibition of Hantaï's work at the Villa in 2014.