"Everything we feel deeply must be expressed."
Hans Hartung was a German-French painter and one of the leading figures of postwar European abstraction, celebrated as a pioneer of Art Informel, Tachisme, and Abstraction Lyrique. Born in Leipzig in 1904, he produced his first abstract watercolors at just seventeen - years before Kandinsky, Klee, or Mondrian's abstract work had reached him - and spent his life refining a signature style of fast, gestural lines that looked spontaneous but were often built on careful, almost mathematical, underlying structure.
He trained in Leipzig, Dresden, and Munich before settling permanently in Paris in 1935. During the Second World War he fought in the French Foreign Legion and became a French citizen in 1946. After the war his reputation grew steadily: he held his first solo exhibition in Paris in 1947, took part in the first documenta in Kassel in 1955, and in 1960 won the Grand Prize for Painting at the Venice Biennale, a high point of his international recognition.
Hartung's work is held in the collections of the Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, as well as the Tate in London and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. He lived and worked for the last decades of his life at the "Champ des Oliviers" in Antibes, a house and studio he designed himself, today home to the Fondation Hartung-Bergman. He died in Antibes on 7 December 1989.
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