Biographie

1904–1989

Born in 1904 in Leipzig, Ger­many, Hans Har­tung took an inter­est in paint­ing aged eighteen.
A series of water­colours dat­ing 1922 already showed his exper­i­men­tal approach in the use of stains, curves and lines, the build­ing blocks of his future paint­ings. Har­tung was equal­ly unsat­is­fied with the for­mal edu­ca­tion he received dur­ing 1925–1926 at the Dres­den Fine Art Acad­e­my, as with the lessons of André Lhote and Fer­nand Léger he took upon his arrival in Paris in 1926. Har­tung pre­ferred artis­tic free­dom and devel­oped as of the ear­ly 1930s his rev­o­lu­tion­ary tech­nique of ges­ture and cre­ation of spa­tial dynamism in order to ren­der the inex­press­ible onto can­vas. Har­tung went on to elim­i­nate all fig­u­ra­tive ele­ments and to use a vari­ety of non-tra­di­tion­al tools such as spray guns, brooms and tree branch­es. Har­tung described his method as a bal­ance between chance and con­trol: ‘At the begin­ning, I act in total free­dom. Work, by fol­low­ing its own course, con­strains me more and more, and I am less and less at lib­er­ty to choose’.

Despite his exhi­bi­tions, Har­tung remained rel­a­tive­ly unknown dur­ing the pre-War years, and faced con­sid­er­able finan­cial dif­fi­cul­ties. Hav­ing divorced his first wife, the painter Anna-Eva Bergman, he mar­ried in 1938 Rober­ta Gon­za­lez, daugh­ter of his Span­ish sculp­tor friend.
Con­sid­ered by the Nazi rule as a degen­er­ate artist, Har­tung con­script­ed in the For­eign Legion to defend France against Ger­many but had to exile him­self after the Nazi inva­sion of France in 1940. In 1943 Har­tung arrived in Spain where he was first detained in a refugee camp but sub­se­quent­ly was able to join the For­eign Legion again. Sad­ly, Har­tung lost one of his legs dur­ing the bat­tle of Belfort in 1945, leav­ing him to the con­stric­tions of a wheelchair.

Back in Paris in 1945, Har­tung took the French nation­al­i­ty in 1946. Post-War Paris proved more recep­tive to his art. Thus, Har­tung had his first one-man show in 1947, and in 1948 he was invit­ed to par­tic­i­pate in the Venice Bien­nale. Final­ly, Har­tung was recog­nised as a major rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the Post-War move­ment of Infor­mal Art.

In 1960, the Venice Bien­nale award­ed him the much-cov­et­ed Grand Prize for Paint­ing. At that time, Har­tung pro­duced large for­mats with acrylic or vinyl paints, which he scratched after­wards. Due to his inter­na­tion­al suc­cess, Har­tung was able to build a house and stu­dio in Antibes in 1968. Here he spent time with his first wife Anna-Eva Bergman, whom he had re-mar­ried in 1958. In 1973 Har­tung moved to Antibes full-time and con­tin­ued his pic­to­r­i­al research­es, this time look­ing for inspi­ra­tion in his large body of pho­to­graph­ic work. Har­tung also ded­i­cat­ed time to writ­ing. Har­tung died in Antibes in 1989.
Dur­ing the new mil­len­ni­um, Har­tung was final­ly inter­na­tion­al­ly recog­nised as an inno­va­tor and a key fig­ure of Post-War Art in gen­er­al and Ges­tur­al Paint­ing and Tachism in particular.
In 2019, the ‘Musée d’Art Mod­erne de la Ville de Paris’ host­ed a large ret­ro­spec­tive. La fab­rique du geste.