Drouot Estimations closed a dedicated Paris sale of five major paintings by Simon Hantaï on 13 October 2026 with a combined total of €1.04 million, a firm result for postwar French abstraction on the domestic market. The five monumental works all came from the collection of Jean Fournier, the Paris dealer who championed Hantaï throughout his career and handled his estate after the artist's death in 2008. The sale was led up by a Drouot announcement the same week positioning the group as the sale's centrepiece. Hantaï (1922–2008), born in Hungary and settled in France after the Second World War, became one of the defining abstract painters of his generation through his invention of pliage — painting on folded, pleated or rolled canvas without touching the surface with a brush, then unfolding it to reveal chance-governed compositions. His market has been under active reconstruction in recent years: Gagosian has represented the estate since 2019 and a large centenary exhibition at the Fondation Louis Vuitton drew fresh institutional attention to the work. For Paris, where Drouot remains the historic auction centre, a seven-figure group result from a dealer-estate provenance carries weight beyond the number itself. It signals continued depth of bidding for French postwar abstraction outside the London-New York axis, and suggests that carefully sourced, single-owner groups with scholarly backing still find confident buyers during the busy autumn season. Hantaï's market standing has been rebuilt over the past decade after a long period of self-imposed withdrawal. At the height of his reputation in 1982, having represented France at the 40th Venice Biennale and been given a retrospective at the Centre Pompidou, he broke with his dealer Fournier and refused exhibitions for nearly twenty years. Since 2019, Gagosian has represented the estate, and a centenary exhibition at the Fondation Louis Vuitton drew fresh institutional attention to the work. Sales like the Fournier group are the market's counterpart to that rediscovery: they turn scholarship and institutional validation into competitive bidding for the large-scale folding paintings collectors prize most.