Hans Hartung German-French, 1904-1989

Hans Hartung was born in Leipzig in 1904.

He began creating abstract paintings as early as 1922, while still a teenager. They already featured the lines and colored patches that would become his signature style. In the early 1920s, he studied classical literature, philosophy, and art history in Leipzig. During his studies, he notably attended a lecture by Kandinsky. Around 1925, he enrolled at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts. It was there that he discovered French painting, ranging from Impressionism to Cubism—a discovery that would leave a lasting mark on his work.

In the summer of 1926, he traveled to Italy by bicycle before settling in Paris, where he remained until 1931. It was during this period that he met Anna-Eva Bergman, a young Norwegian painter whom he married in September 1929. He held his first exhibitions in Dresden and later in Oslo, alongside Anna-Eva.

In 1935, against the backdrop of the rise of Nazism, he was forced to return to Berlin before eventually settling permanently in Paris. During this time, he associated with Kandinsky, Mondrian, Miró, and Calder. He exhibited at the Salon des Surindépendants. He separated from Anna-Eva Bergman just as he was growing close to the sculptor Julio González and his daughter, Roberta. He married Roberta in 1939; that same year, he enlisted in the Foreign Legion. This service cost him his right leg, which he lost following a combat injury.

He was unable to paint during the Second World War; Driven by the frustration of those years of enforced inactivity, he returned to work in 1945. He became prolific and did not hesitate to experiment; colorful compositions and clusters of calligraphic lines began to enter his artistic vocabulary.

From 1949 onwards, Hartung gained increasing international recognition, with exhibitions in Paris, Brussels, Munich, and Basel. He mingled with artists such as Soulages, Rothko, and Mathieu, establishing himself as a leading figure of Art Informel. This acclaim culminated in 1960: at the 30th Venice Biennale, where he presented nearly fifty works in the French pavilion, he was awarded the International Grand Prize for Painting alongside Jean Fautrier; that same year, he was named a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French Republic. This dual recognition appeared to give him the confidence needed to break free from the use of preparatory sketches shortly thereafter.

From 1961, a new style became evident in Hartung’s work.
He adopted new tools and techniques: spraying, brushes he crafted himself, and scratching directly into the canvas. He also incorporated industrial materials—such as quick-drying acrylic pigments and aerosol sprays—to achieve mist-like gradients. From this decade on, Hartung abandoned preparatory drawing entirely in favor of working directly on the canvas. His works no longer bore any relation to the visible world; instead, in his view, they referred only to themselves.

Having settled in Antibes in 1961 with Anna-Eva Bergman—whom he had reunited with and married (his second marriage)—he continued to exhibit widely. Major exhibitions were dedicated to him at the Fondation Maeght in 1971 (where critic Jean Clair analyzed his work in the catalog) and subsequently at the Metropolitan Museum in New York in 1975. The opening of the Centre Pompidou in 1976 marked the entry of his works into national collections, followed by his first retrospective in 1980 at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.

Paradoxically, the 1970s and 1980s—despite his declining health—were a time of particularly intense painting activity; as the loss of his leg during the war made moving around increasingly difficult, Hartung worked while seated, attacking the surfaces of very large canvases directly with his tools. This final decade of his life, during which painting took precedence over printmaking and drawing, is considered one of the most powerful and expressive periods of his body of work. Hans Hartung continued to work until the very end of his life; he died in Antibes in 1989.