Hans Hartung

signed and dated Hartung 67 lower right in pencil

Galerie de France, Paris
Private French Collection
Private European Collection

Overall in very good condition. Framed without acrylic: 90.5 by 115.5 cm; 35.6 by 45.5 in.
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The work will be included in the Catalogue Raisonné from the artist, currently being prepared by the Fondation Hans Hartung et Anna-Eva Bergman.

“Scribbling, scratching, acting upon the canvas are human activities which, to me, seem as immediate, spontaneous and simple as dancing, or the gambols of an animal that prances, runs, frisks. A plant that sprouts, blood that pulsates, everything that germinates, grows, explodes with vitality, with the force of life, with sufferance or joy, all these things can find their peculiar incarnation - their own sign - in a drawn line which can be soft or flexible, curved or erect, rigid or muscular, and in blotches of colour, strident, joyful or sinister.”¹ – Hans Hartung  

Hans Hartung: Black is a Colour

Hans Hartung is arguably one of the most outstanding representatives of the Ecole de Paris  from the early 20^th century,  acknowledged as a pioneer of tachisme, which later became known as the European equivalent of American abstract expressionism. Hartung’s iconic style reveals a pursuit of ‘painting as meditative writing’ where each work places importance on line and the suggestion of movement.

As early as 1925, Hartung’s informal ink scribblings, drawings and watercolours were an exploration of automatism and a conscious counter-response to the German Bauhaus, popular at the time.  Exposed to the teachings of Russian painter Vasily Kandinsky—who taught at the Bauhaus from 1922-1933— and the Constructivist movement, Hartung was not purely convinced by the systematic analysis of art as a science and as a precocious art student sought another source of inspiration; “I wanted to do something new, to express all kinds of feelings.”² Thereupon, in response to his search for his own artistic processes, through the Cubist and Fauvist painters he encountered during his first stay in Paris in 1927, Hartung established the quintessential approach of his mature works – a calligraphic style twinned with an exploration of colour unbound by line.

Notably, Hartung’s highly sensitive brushwork and mark making is never attributed to the imitation of past teachers or popular master works of abstraction. As evidenced by his earliest ink blot and watercolour drawings made in high school, he was preoccupied with organic responses from his materials and exposure to natural forces from an early age. His subsequent paintings made in Paris before and after the Second World War, which were often included in the Informal exhibitions of abstract painting, were actually recreations of his early drawings that owed a stylistic debt to Emil Nolde yet departed from the figurative expressions to explore geometric signs and symbols. Sometimes known to paint with olive branches, spray paint and garden rakes, or to create an image with the back of a pen, pastel, oil, or acrylic, Hartung was not wed to his materials and is acknowledged as one of the few artists to understand painting as another form of language. Such expressions were greatly admired by his contemporaries, including Pierre Soulages and Zao Wouki, who also sought to reveal the intuitive language of colour and line through abstract painting. These efforts were followed closely by the abstract calligraphy movements in Japan, as widely discussed in Bokubi journals established by Shiryu Morita in 1954.  Yet Hartung had established his artistic language decades before, claiming no connection with Asian calligraphic and painting traditions from the outset.

This 1967 ink painting is emblematic of Hartung's deliberate exploration of space and recording of movement using bold brushstrokes and solid black colour. The luminous gradations of the drawing are formed by layered vertical strokes of black ink colours upon a light base of yellow acrylic, interrupted by white pastel marks at several intervals. As the colour which embodies all others, Hartung treated black as an especially nuanced tool. Indeed, his systematic use of it is evidence for his early ideas concerning the rejection of representation and forms.

Hailing from Germany and initially self-taught as an artist, Hartung studied philosophy and art history at Leipzig University in 1924. Hartung was invited to participate in the first Documenta at Kassel in 1955, which famously presented abstract art of the 1920s and 1930s as opposed to the contemporary art made after 1945. He gained international recognition upon receipt of the coveted Grand Prize at the Venice Biennale in 1960 and was the first living European artist to have a major exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1975. In 1989, Hartung passed away, leaving behind a masterful legacy of explorative abstraction, one that even anticipated the concerns of today’s most notable contemporary painters such as Julie Mehretu, Rudolph Stingel, Terry Winters and Christopher Wool.

¹ Oliva, Achille Bonito. Hans Hartung: Oficina Do Gesto, Centro Cultural Banco Do Brasil, Sao Paulo, 2014. Exhibition catalogue.

² “Interview with Hans Hartung”, Hans Hartung: A Vision into Abstraction 1923-1964, Fischer Fine Art, London, 1981