Hans Hartung
1904 - 1989 French
Hans Hartung is one of the most pioneering and greatest painters, although under appreciated of the Twentieth Century. At the forefront of the Art Informel movement, his pre-war career as an artist in Paris was interrupted by the rise of Fascism in Europe and the outbreak of WWII.
Despite being born in Leipzig and growing up in Dresden, studying Philosophy and History of Art at University there, his battle with the Nazis led him to ultimately renounce his homeland and assume French nationality. This fraught period in the 1930’s included removal from Menorca where he was building his life and studio, separation from his artist wife Anna-Eva Bergmann and culminated in his serving in the French Foreign Legion, where he lost a leg in the fighting.
During the 1920’s his work featured the use of purely gestural marks, prefiguring the work of the Abstract Expressionists across the Atlantic by 20 years. Following the war, he re-engaged with the art scene in Paris and soon was exhibiting alongside other painters such as Zao Wou-Ki (1920-2013), Georges Mathieu (1921-2012) and Pierre Soulages (b.1919). These painters together utilised calligraphic and expressive brushwork and were informally known, amongst other artists, as Les Tachistes. His groundbreaking and experimental techniques of previsaged developments by artists in America such as de Kooning and Kline and he held life-long friendship with Mark Rothko since their meeting at Hartung’s Paris studio in 1959.
He was also reunited with his wife Anna-Eva Bergmann immediately after the war and they built a home and studio together at Antibes in the South of France where they continued to work together until his death in 1989.
His paintings are now considered among the great masterpieces of the Twentieth Century but it is also as printmaker that he has an immense legacy. In recent years his photography has also become the subject of critical acclaim, although not published extensively in his lifetime.
Tool maker
Hartung preferred making his own tools, or adapting those available like his friend and painter Pierre Soulages, whom he met and exhibited with in Paris immediately after the war. In their search to break free from the constraints of traditional techniques of applying paint to canvas, they both found the traditional brushes available insufficient. They would fashion and develop their own spatulas, scrapers and brushes and Hartung particularly would bring this experimental approach to tools in his printmaking.
For Hartung, colour and shape did not serve merely for the accumulation of form and movement as they may have for Soulages, but in his work were allowed more expression of the human spirit. Like Soulages, he too had a strong preference for the use of black as he favoured its immediacy and expressive starkness, but rather than colour serving to activate and define the black forms, Hartung sought to engage an emotional response from his colours.
Hartung’s printmaking tools. Ekker-Presse, St Gallen, 1973
Although in his later years his mobility became more limited his desire for creation remained undiminished. At his Antibes studio he, not unlike Matisse in his suite at the Hotel Régina, continued working in a wheelchair. The need to wield his tools and work on large scale forced him to innovate and adapt: his was no problem for someone who already had survived the previous decade’s events.
As he grew older he made large scale spray works and used long handled utensils of his own design. The late paintings are of monumental size: his ambition unconstrained.