HANS HARTUNG

(1904-1989)

T1962-E5
1962

Footnotes

This work is registered in the archives of the Fondation Hartung Bergman, Antibes and will be included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné being prepared by the Fondation Hartung Bergman, Antibes.

Provenance
Galerie de France, Paris
Galleria Gissi, Turin
Private Collection, Europe
Sale: Sotheby's, London, Contemporary Art Evening Sale, 26 June 2002, Lot 23
Applicat-Prazan, Paris
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 2002

Exhibited
Milan, Galleria Seno, Hans Hartung, 1987, p. 9, illustrated


With the dynamic, beguiling rhythm of its vertical brushstrokes, T1962-E5, (1962), is a consummate example of Hans Hartung's postwar calligraphic abstract style. Monumental in size, the present work showcases Hartung's innovative approach to abstraction and powerful self-expression, shaped from his experiences in Europe at the outset of the Second World War. Hartung's oeuvre has left an indelible mark on the canon of art history, reifying him as a leader in the field of 20th Century abstraction. His work would have a profound influence over subsequent generations of artists globally, proving particularly relevant on the other side of the Atlantic to the Abstract Expressionists in the 1960s and 1970s.

Born in 1904 into an artistic family in Leipzig, Germany, Hartung developed an early appreciation for the Old Masters, finding inspiration in the works of Rembrandt van Rijn and Francisco de Goya. His influences would later extend to Emil Nolde, Oskar Kokoschka and Wassily Kandinsky. From his late teens he experimented with gestural abstraction, boldly omitting the figurative form in his body of work. Years later he would inform critics that his fascination with abstraction emanated from his childhood, where to allay his fear of lightning during thunderstorms, he would fill notebooks with frantic linear lines, illustrating precisely the electrical flashes he dreaded, which are now so emblematic of his mature calligraphic style.

Hartung enrolled in the Universität Leipzig in 1924 to study philosophy and art history but left to concentrate on painting at the Kunstakademie in Leipzig. He opted against further training at the Bauhaus, choosing instead to study at the Kunstakademie in Dresden. It was in Dresden where he was first exposed to Cubism and the other avant garde movements emerging in 1920s France. By 1926, Hartung had been encouraged to move to Paris, where he would ultimately obtain French citizenship and settle permanently in the aftermath of the Second World War.

It was in Paris that Hartung emerged as a leading figure of the Tachisme movement; a group of lyrical abstractionists that notably also included Pierre Soulages, Jean-Paul Riopelle and Nicolas de Staël. This French style of abstract painting was associated with the broader postwar movement Art Informel which abandoned geometric abstraction in favor of a more intuitive form of expression, and came to dominate Hartung's later stylistic practice. Painted in 1962 at the pinnacle of Hartung's career, the present work T1962-E5, is a thrilling articulation of this methodology.

The outbreak of the Second World War had a profound impact on Hartung, who served in the Foreign Legion and later in the Free French Forces. He was seriously wounded on the German Front, which resulted in the amputation of one of his legs. Constrained by the physical, Hartung came to see art as the purest expression of his freedom; a temporary respite from the burden of his injuries both physical and psychological. In his work he increasingly embraced spontaneity and freedom of form, never trying to control the creative process. This is evident in his rapid and consciously haphazard brushstrokes that evoke a sense of fleeting nature. The present work, T1962-E5, exemplifies a similar fascination with a more uninhibited and disruptive approach, demonstrated in the bold and liberally expressive linear lines that dominate the canvas. The artist once explained, "it is an emotional state which drives me to draw, to create certain shapes in order to try to transmit and provoke a similar emotion in the spectator... it is this desire which drives me: the desire to leave a trace of my movement on the canvas or on the paper. It is the act of painting, drawing, scratching, scraping" (the artist quoted in Hans Hartung – Autoportrait, Paris 1976, p. 180).

Hartung employed a variety of media throughout his career, working with acrylic paint, ink, chalk and pastels on canvas or cardboard, as well as spraying color onto canvas. He would use different tools to scratch, scrape and reapply pigment in the linear and thatched lines that came to be characteristic of his visual discourse. He employed a broad palette of translucent colors, creating a sense of ethereal and electric light to his usually large format canvases. "Always, always I looked for a law, the golden rule," the artist described, "an alchemy of rhythm, movement and color. Transmutation of an apparent disorder, the only goal of which was to organise a perfect movement, to create order in disorder, to create order through disorder" (the artist quoted in Geneviève Bonnefoi, Les Anneés Fertiles 1940-1960, Villefranche-de-Rouergue 1988, p.28).

Hartung is rightly considered as one of the foremost pioneers of gestural abstraction. His artistic legacy is clearly evident in the work of subsequent generations of artists, informing not only the Abstract Expressionists but arguably also perhaps seen in the splattered marks of Sam Francis or the systematic approach of Gerhard Richter, and today his works are fiercely sought after by collectors globally. 1947 marked his first solo exhibition in Paris, and by 1960 he was awarded the International Grand Prix for painting at the Venice Biennale. Today his works reside in the collections of many major public institutions worldwide, including collections of the Tate Gallery in London, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., among many others.