"It is an emotional state that drives me to draw certain forms, to let them emerge, in order to try to convey and evoke a similar feeling in the viewer."
Hans Hartung was born on 21 September 1904 into a bourgeois family in Leipzig - and his singular way of seeing the world announced itself early. As a small boy, terrified of thunderstorms, he decided to face his fear head-on: instead of hiding, he picked up a pencil and began tracing the zig-zag paths of lightning across the sky. It was a child's coping mechanism that became, by his own account, the seed of a lifelong method - drawing as an act of instinct, as fast and as decisive as the flash itself.
That instinct matured astonishingly fast. In 1922, at just seventeen, Hartung produced a series of abstract watercolors of striking expressiveness - reportedly without any awareness of what Kandinsky, Klee, or Mondrian were doing at the time. Whether or not he was entirely isolated from those currents, the work itself stands as a remarkably early and independent leap into abstraction.
Hans Hartung as a young artist
From 1924 he studied philosophy and art history at the University of Leipzig, while also enrolling that year at Leipzig's academy for graphic arts. A year later he moved on to painting proper, studying at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts through 1927. In 1928 he traveled to Munich to study painting technique under Max Dörner, the noted painter, restorer, and professor at the city's Academy of Fine Arts, whose textbook on artists' materials remains a standard reference to this day.
He had already made his first trip to Paris in 1926, drawn by the city's pull long before he could act on it. There he enrolled at André Lhote's academy - a formative experience - before a brief, unsatisfying stint in Fernand Léger's studio. Goya and Rembrandt became touchstones during these years; Hartung was fascinated by the moments in their drawings where line seemed to break free of form altogether, and he read those passages as a kind of proto-abstraction. He would not settle in Paris permanently for almost another decade, but the direction of his life was already set.
Years of upheaval
In 1929, Hartung met and married the Norwegian painter Anna-Eva Bergman. It was the beginning of a relationship that would - with a long detour - define the rest of his life. Through the early 1930s the couple worked with a distinctive method: Hartung would produce small, spontaneous works on paper, then scale them up onto canvas using a grid, transferring the composition point by point.
The marriage did not survive the decade. Bergman's health and family pressures strained the relationship, and the couple separated in 1937, divorcing in 1938/39 - before the outbreak of war. In 1939 Hartung married again, to Roberta González, daughter of the sculptor Julio González.
During the Second World War, Hartung joined the French Foreign Legion and was gravely wounded in 1944, losing a leg in combat. In 1946 he was granted French citizenship.
Postwar Reunion
Hartung resumed painting after the war and held his first solo exhibition in 1947 at the Galerie Lydia Conti in Paris. Recognition came steadily rather than quickly. Then, in 1952, his path crossed again with Anna-Eva Bergman's. He divorced Roberta González, and in 1957 he and Bergman married each other a second time - a reunion that lasted until her death thirty years later.
In 1960 the couple bought a plot of olive trees on the heights of Antibes; Hartung, with no formal training in architecture, designed the house and studios himself. Construction took over a decade, and in 1973 they moved into the finished property, the "Champ des Oliviers." Hartung would live and work there for the rest of his life, dying on 7 December 1989 in Antibes. The estate is now home to the Fondation Hartung-Bergman.
Legacy
Hartung is commonly regarded as a standard-bearer of Tachisme and Abstraction Lyrique, and is generally classified among the major postwar European abstract painters. Alongside the image of the gestural, emotional improviser, Hartung had a deep and lasting interest in mathematics, and much of his painting - the grids, the scaled transfers, the calculated "spontaneity" rewards being read through that rationality as much as through pure feeling.
He took part in the first documenta in Kassel in 1955, and in 1960 was awarded the Grand Prize for Painting at the Venice Biennale. Today his work is held in major collections including the Guggenheim Museum, MoMA, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, as well as the Tate in London and the Centre Pompidou in Paris - a lasting footprint for an artist who, as a small boy, once tried to outdraw a thunderstorm.
Interested in acquiring a work by Hans Hartung? We'd be pleased to discuss current market opportunities and guide you in finding the right work for your collection.