“Warnock makes forays into the intellectual world of Hantaï’s postwar Paris and then uses her findings to guide us across and into the complex surfaces of the paintings themselves, many of which are buried in vaults and seen far too rarely. The focus is tight, which is arguably appropriate for the first scholarly monograph on the artist in English, and her command of the material is impressive.”

—Harry Cooper nonsite.org

“Warnock’s monograph makes a signature contribution to the study of Hantaï’s body of work and to the wider history of modernism. She explicates the fundamental theoretical and practical concerns of an understudied artist whose work, while important, is not well known to a broad audience. Without a doubt, her scholarship provides the most sophisticated art-historical analysis of Hantaï’s thought and practice to date.”

—Michael Schreyach, author of Pollock’s Modernism

“With this book we finally have a beautifully written, deeply researched, and comprehensive account of one of postwar Europe's most significant artists. Far from the cliché of Simon Hantaï and his folded (‘pliage’) paintings as detached and impersonal, Molly Warnock reveals the artist’s full investment in a ‘deep context’ of ideas, historical issues, and major artistic movements: from surrealism to minimalism via abstract expressionism, traversing the terrain of the Catholic liturgy, philosophies of community and phenomenology, and questions of writing and legibility, while never forgetting the techniques and fundamentals of the practice of painting.”

—Natalie Adamson, coeditor of Material Imagination: Art in Europe, 1946–72

“A beautiful monograph . . . focused, exquisitely written and illustrated in colour, with lots of careful meditations on the artworks themselves.”

—Victoria H. F. Scott 21: Inquiries into Art, History, and the Visual