Sunday, July 18, 2010

Simon Hantai at Moma



The rehang of Moma's contemporary galleries on the first floor ids full of work that hasn't been shown there before and much of it is new to me. I loved this piece by Hungarian artist Simon Hantai. It seems at first like a generic abstraction but it emphasizes the fact that it's a record of it's own making, that's a quality I love in art. It's always there to some degree but often we get caught up in the image without paying too much attention to how it got there. This piece perfectly synthesizes process and result.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hantai was born in Hungary but painted in Paris for his entire career. There is a retrospective at the Pompidou going on now, and it is the most impressive art exhibition I have ever witnessed. His work is powerful, beautiful, and demonstrates a fertile intellectual mind on the same plane as Pollack and above most. Simply put, Simon Hantai is the most unrecognized genius of the modern art world.