Hans Hartung

Me Loudmer, Paris, 12 October 1994, lot 226

Private Collection

Christie's, Paris, 7 June 2023, lot 3

Acquired from the above sale by the present owner

Executed in 1963, T1963-R43 belongs to one of the most accomplished periods of Hans Hartung's career, a moment at which the founding tension of his work, between spontaneous gesture and structural mastery, achieves an equilibrium of rare coherence. Vinyl, the medium Hartung adopted extensively from the 1960s onward, afforded him a velocity of execution that oil could never permit: applied in broad, repeated sweeps across the canvas, it retains the exact imprint of each movement of the arm, transforming the surface into a kinetic memory of the body that produced it. What one perceives here is not a result but a suspended event, the trace of a duration, the record of an energy traversing the pictorial space from end to end. 

The composition unfolds according to a logic of bundling: dense, closely grouped linear striations surge from a dark ground and propel themselves rightward with an almost vectorial directionality. The graffito technique, incising the pictorial layer to reveal the strata beneath, adds a further dimension to this temporal stratification: the image constitutes itself as much through subtraction as through deposit. 

T1963-R43 belongs to the larger project Hartung had pursued since his earliest abstractions of the 1930s; that of making painting the place where the time of action and the time of contemplation coincide. Where American Abstract Expressionism sought abandon and automatism, Hartung maintains an acute awareness of the gesture as decision. Each mark is issued from an intuitive calculation; a precision paradoxically contained within speed. It is this dialectic, between the instantaneous and the constructed, between the raw force of movement and the rigor of its formal resolution, that confers upon the work its singular density and its enduring power.