Hans Hartung

Hans Hartung was born in Leipzig, and lived much of his life on the edge of catastrophe, but with the unshakable belief in the transforming power of art. He drew incessantly as a child, and his fascination from the very beginning was with abstract forms. Hans Hartung painted his first abstract works as early as 1922, but his work was only truly acknowledged by critics and his peers after the Second World War.

For many years, Hartung was to experience all the solitude and hardships that an artist breaking new ground is traditionally believed to undergo. In Paris, he countered lack of money and loneliness by copying at the Louvre and visiting the galleries. He married Anna-Eva Bergman, a Norwegian painter and they moved to the island of Minorca off Spain.

As World War II neared, German residents became suspect and they had to leave, even though they had very strong anti-Nazi convictions. He joined the Foreign Legion and survived most of the war without serious accident. Then, in 1944, while attempting to rescue a comrade behind enemy lines, he was shot in the leg, and eventually, the leg had to be amputated.

He obtained French nationality in 1946 and received several military decorations, along with the Légion d'Honneur.

Largely ignored before the war, abstract artists increasingly occupied center stage in Paris, especially in the 1950s. In 1947, the Galerie Lydia Conti in Paris organized Hartung's first personal exhibition, soon followed by several personal and group exhibitions with Georges Mathieu, Pierre Soulages or Willi Baumeister among others.

Hans Hartung was one of the beacon artists of Informal art and Lyrical Abstraction, artistic movements which can be considered as the European parallel to that of American Abstract Expressionism. In terms of approach, it is the creative process which is important, trying to translate on the canvas the act of painting in itself, rather than representing a preconceived idea. Hartung said: "It is an emotional state which compels me to act, to create some forms in order try to transmit and provoke a similar emotion in the viewer. Also [...] I enjoy acting over a canvas. This wish drives me: the desire to leave a trace of my gesture on the canvas or on paper. It is the act of painting, of drawing, of marking, of scratching."