Molly Warnock |
An assistant professor in History of Art at Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, Molly Warnock specializes in twentieth-century art, aesthetic philosophy, and theory, with a particular focus on post-WWII abstraction in Europe and the Americas. Prior to joining the faculty of Johns Hopkins in 2013, she held a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at Princeton University (2008-10), an ACLS-Mellon New Faculty Fellowship at the University of Chicago (2010-12), and an Assistant Professorship at Emory University (2012-13).
Her first book, Penser la peinture: Simon Hantaï (Gallimard, 2012), explores the foundational early work of the Hungarian-born French artist, and provides a substantially new account of the emergence of his signature practice: pliage, or the painting of crumpled, knotted, or systematically pleated canvases that Hantaï then unfolded and stretched for exhibition. Additional writings—on figures as diverse as the Italian painter Giorgio Griffa; the French artists Georges Mathieu and Michel Parmentier; and the American abstractionists James Bishop, Agnes Martin, Joan Mitchell, and Ellsworth Kelly, among others—have appeared in Artforum, Art in America, Les Cahiers du Musée National d’Art Moderne, Journal of Contemporary Painting, and nonsite.org, as well as in European and American exhibition catalogues. The recipient of fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, the American Council for Learned Societies, and— most recently—Eikones NFS Bildkritik and the Clark Art Institute, she is currently at work on two book projects. The first is a significantly revised and expanded English-language version of her Hantaï monograph, tentatively entitled Simon Hantaï and the Remains of Painting; the second, already substantially underway, is a comprehensive study of James Bishop's paintings on canvas and paper. |
simon hantaï, from the margins |
The Hungarian-born French painter Simon Hantaï (1922-2008) is well known for the abstract, often very large-scale canvases that he produced between 1960 and 1982 in the medium that he called pliage, or “folding.” These paintings are central to Hantaï’s reputation as one of the earliest and most important artists in Europe to have noticed and responded powerfully to the work of Jackson Pollock. Yet the painter, for his part, often expressed his desire to remain “marginal,” something like a “gutter rat,” and for the final quarter-century of his life, he famously withdrew from exhibition, refusing all but a select few invitations to show his art. This talk will explore the deep, orienting role of the trope of marginality—as well as closely related figures of dislocation, dispossession, and dissociation—in Hantaï’s work and thought, with particular attention paid to his final body of new canvases: the “Laissées,” or “Leftovers,” that he produced in the later 1980s and 1990s and first revealed in the winter of 1998. Comprised in part of selected remains or vestiges of previous abstractions, and characterized by clearly discernible disjunctions between the older, repurposed fragments and newly added margins of virgin cloth, these paintings appear decidedly “out of joint.” Precisely in so doing, however, they propose a complex, temporally charged meditation both on the limits and lacunae of painting as a medium and, folded within that reflection, on the decidedly finite and contingent communities this art might hope to gather. Integral to this exploration, I will suggest, is Hantaï’s profound attunement to the deconstructionist discourse of hospitality that came to the fore in France during roughly the same period in which he produced these works, and that attempted to confront such contemporary crises as, for example, the plight of the “sans papiers,” or undocumented migrants. At once steeped in the artist’s own sense of personal, art-historical, and indeed geopolitical décalage relative to the cultural scene in Paris (a sentiment manifest in, among other phenomena, his adamant self-identification as an immigrant) and suffused by then-current debates about the very shape and nature of the social, these late, decidedly under-studied, and oft-excluded works ask us to rethink the stakes and aims of Hantaï’s oeuvre as a whole. |