Exclusive program: Lecture by Molly Warnock

Research and teaching span topics of Molly Warnock in European and North American art and critical theory from early twentieth-century modernism to the present, with a special interest in the stakes and claims of abstraction. In her dissertation and the resulting book Penser la Peinture: Simon Hantaï (Gallimard, 2012), she explores the work of a Hungarian-born French painter who is just beginning to be recognized as one of the most important figures in later twentieth-century painting—a reputation based principally on the abstract, often large-format canvases he made between 1960 and 1982 in the medium he called pliage, or “folding.” Molly Warnock sets the historical genesis and development of that body of work in a remarkably rich context conditioned by the Surrealist discourse of “psychic automatism,” the French philosophical reception of G.W.F. Hegel, and the first stirrings of interest in the work of Jackson Pollock. Her current book projects include a significantly revised and expanded version of her Hantaï monograph for English-language audiences as well as a study of artistic practice and theory in the context of the Paris-based journal Tel Quel. Both singly and together, these projects aim to provide a sustained and fundamentally new account of the practical, theoretical, and philosophical situation of painting in France since Surrealism. In so doing, they also interrogate the continued and perhaps surprising centrality of that medium in a period of extraordinary theoretical ferment and the proliferation of new practices.