Petruschki's Journey Into The Blue - Chapter 8 - Hans Hartung seduces light and movement onto the canvas

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In December 2019 we went on a journey by bus and train through Spain, France, Germany, Belgium, Great Britain and Ireland. The aim was the exhibition Protest! by Derek Jarman in Dublin, there was so much to see on the way there. We visited 21 exhibitions and discovered many stories.

On September 3, 1939, France and Great Britain declare war on Germany. In France, Hartung is now a citizen of a hostile power. Like all Germans present in Paris, he has to go to the Colombe Stadium, from where he is taken to an internment camp. To get out of there he joins the French Foreign Legion and is sent to Algeria. It means he can barely paint. Some works on paper show his perseverance to keep working even under such difficult circumstances.

There are pencil and pastel drawings that are created during that time. Like the cover picture of this chapter. The works are reminiscent of the black charcoal drawings from 1923-24 in a similar format. These compositions are rigorous and precise, automatic and instinctive, but without referring to the unconscious or to any symbolism.

After the French surrender in 1940, he joined the family of his wife, the Gonzales, who had sought refuge in Lot in Lasbouygues. During the invasion of the free zone, he flees to Spain from the German fascists in April 1943. He is arrested and is for nine months detained in a camp in Miranda de Ebro. In order to escape the conditions of the concentration camp, he joins the Foreign Legion a second time. In September 1944 he takes part in the landing in Provence with a medical department. When he tries to rescue an injured man on the battlefield during the liberation of Belfort in November, he is hit in the leg and seriously wounded. He has two operations and his right leg is amputated below the knee. In July 1945 he returnes to Arceuil to paint again after six disturbing years of war.

Partisan Review 1941

Partisan Revue September / October 1941 with an article by George L.K. Morris The Mechanics of Abstract Painting, including pictures of Hartung and his father-in-law Gonzales.

Hans Hartung Sans Titre 1940

Hartung painted more than eighty heads during the war. Especially in 1940. They are guaches in small formats. With their mouths open, tongues outstretched and eyes wide, they show despair and anger, madness and horror, similar to the faces in the painting Guernica by Pablo Picasso or like the sculptures on the subject of Montserrat, which Julio Gonzales created after the war. They testify to the horror and violence of this time and the fear of losing everything. Hartung later relativized their meaning: “he only painted them to do something good for his closest persons. He more or less didn´t care much.”

During the war he mainly worked with pencil and ink on paper. When he found refuge with the Gonzales in Lot in 1942, Hartung worked with calligraphic motifs, some of which served as a source for the works of the immediate post-war period. These drawings were daily exercises for him, like doing writing exercises or practicing scales in music.

After returning to Paris as a war invalid, he worked with great devotion in the former studio of Julio Gonzales, who had died in 1942. He continued work that he had begun in 1939 by taking up the principle of raster transfer and building on earlier drawings. His new works were initially larger in format, partly in a kind of wide calligraphic style and an increased use of black characters on a colored background. Because of his missing left leg, he adapted and carried out his work directly in small formats. This turned into hundreds of ink drawings in the mid-1950s. They have the size of a hand and create a diverse catalog of shapes. He later transferred some of these drawings to canvas.

A reflection in the exhibition La fabrique du geste Hans Hartung

A reflection on a barely recognizable picture of Hartung.

Here you could see the short film “Visite à Hans Hartung” by Alain Resnais.

T 1948-17

This is an example of transferring a drawing to an oil painting.

T 1956 – 15

T 1956 - 15

In the late 1950s, Hartung mainly worked on paper and produced a number of pastels with fast, restless lines. This heralded the scratch technology of the 1960s. The few paintings he created were the last ones he painted in oil using the raster transfer technique.

T 1955 – 18

T 1955 - 18

Found again forever

Hartung met Anna Eva Bergmann again in 1956. After 15 years of separation, the two divorced their partners and married 5 years later. They stayed together until her death. They moved into a joint studio in the 14th arrondisment. At that time, the Kunsthalle Basel showed the first major exhibition of Hans Hartung's work. A quiet, fruitful period of work followed. Anna Eva Bergmann created her own work. In 1973 the painters couple moved to Antibes: They founded the Hartung Bergmann Foundation. The works of both painters can be viewed on the Fondation's website.

From October 22nd, 2020 to April 4th, 2021 the exhibition “Anna-Eva Bergman - From North to South, Rhythms” will be shown in the Velasquez Palace in Madrid.

Hartung´s and Bergmann´s house in Antibes

“The ideal house for me is a white cube with clear lines, like the houses of the Spanish fishermen on the island of Menorca. The windows are my pictures. Through them an immobile landscape emerges, but with a constantly changing sky that shimmers through the silver leaves of the olive trees. "

from his autobiography Autoportrait, 1976, Grasset publisher

P 1958 – 91 pencil and pastel on paper, P 1958 – 239 pastel on paper

As mentioned above, between 1957 and 1961, Hartung concentrated mainly on works on paper. His pastel pictures are characterized by great freedom and flexibility, in countless variations. There are more than three hundred works of this type. The play of lines, which is sometimes condensed into balls, sometimes loosened and unconnected, heralded the paintings at the beginning of the 1960s. With this work, Hartung created a creative laboratory or workshop in order to be able to make himself independent of the grid transfer method.

Hans Hartung

Rising light - movement like in the wind. As so often in the case of Hartung's paintings, tenderness and strength meet.

P 1961 – 86 Scratch on scratchboard

Scratching techniques

“Scribbling, scratching, acting on the canvas, finally painting, human activities seem to me, also immediate, spontaneous and simple, like singing, dancing, playing like an animal that romps around, hops in place, shakes itself. ”

Hartung 1976

T1962 - E1

At the beginning of the 1960s, Hartung discovered for his work and with great delight industrial paint that was used for painting cars.

T1962 - U8

Another of my favorite pictures - that is touch and dance in a blue promising room. The softness smiles in spite of all the darkness.

Hans Hartung Petits formats - Small works 1960

Single piece from Petits formats - Small works 1960

Petits formats - Small works 1960

Single piece from Petits formats - Small works 1960

In the second half of the 1960s, he increased his favorite colors blue and yellow to flashy and extreme shades. His painting gestures became more and more free. In the early 1970s he took some of the motifs in these small formats for new works. He then no longer enlarged them with the grid system, but with his painting gestures. He used huge brushes, some 40 centimeters wide, and sometimes just a broom.

Hans Hartung had been taking photographs since his youth. But it was not until 1960 that his photographs were shown publicly. They were always in dialogue with his painterly works.

“… I photographed everything that interested me in this world: people, clouds, water, mountains, cracks, spots, and all kinds of light and shadow effects that - sometimes - have a more or less close relationship to my painting. "

There are 35,000 negatives in the photo archive at the Hartung-Bergmann Foundation.

Interesting article about an exhibition of his photos in 2016

Hans Hartung Jean Tardieu

An Unknown World seen from Hans Hartung, poems and captions by Jean Tardieu

With 35 photos by Hans Hartung

Jean Tardieu (1903-1995) wrote surrealist absurd poems and plays. But also essays and art reviews. He was a French radio pioneer.

T 1966 - E25

The formats got bigger and bigger now. This picture measures 154 x 250 cm and was made with vinyl paint, an industrial material that dries very quickly. It belongs to the so-called cloud phase that Hartung developed between 1965 and 1967. A gloomy and misty surface, an opaque canvas is broken up by luminous, radiant rays. Since the early 1960s, Hartung has been using other tools to replace the brush. With the compressed air gun he creates atmospheric effects through the finely sprayed paint without having to touch the canvas directly.

Hartung with a spray gun

Since the 1960s he continuously developed his work techniques. He became even more daring and continued to follow his avant-garde path.

Text from exhibition catalog Kunstmuseum Bonn:

“In 1973 Hartung retired to Antibes in the south of France, where his highly experimental late work was created. Hartung no longer needs the precise draft drawings, which until then were the specifications and design guidelines for his paintings. With the help of devices and tools that he made himself or that have been modified for painting purposes, such as spray guns, brushes or rubber whips, he now sprays and shoots the paint on the ever-growing canvases. He produces so much that he often doesn't get to sign. In this way, within two and a half decades, the furious finale for a rich, in many ways still undiscovered and unexplored artist's life was created. "

Perspectives T 1966 - E25

Perspectives - T 1966 - E 25 seen through a narrow passage from the side

Hans Hartung

A monstrous pair of wings against a poisonous yellow turquoise or wash blue sky. It is light in all its massiveness, moving, dancing like a feather and the colors of the background can also be those of spring, still weak sunlight and the color of the flowers and the hazy sky ...

"With these large brownish or black masses, I tried to identify from within, with the cosmic or atmospheric tension, the energies or the radiation that govern the universe."

Hans Hartung

Hans Hartung

Moving light and shimmering shadows. Energetic restlessness. The fraction of a standstill in motion.

T 1987 - E 26

T 1087 - E 26 So much white and a blue moving stream

Infinite creativity

Between 1986 and 1989 Hartung was because of a stroke physically already very weak, but he did not slow down in his creative power and painted huge pictures, up to 3 x 5 meters. In the year of his death, the 5 meter long painting "Energies that rule the universe" was created. It can be seen today in the Fondation Hartung - Bergmann.

His way of working without contact with the canvas is reminiscent of Jackson Pollock's technique of the drop. Hartung mainly worked at night, immersing himself in a world where painting merged with the baroque music he heard in the studio and with the nature that surrounded him.

"The true artist, knowing and clear that the engine of his art was his experiences as a child."

Hans Hartung

Oh ... and now I have no words, brilliant closing words for this first exhibition on our way. That was intensity. Being an artist, creating art is a task that one has in life. That you have to face, that you have to accept. It's a job that needs to be done. How to make hay, sell vegetables, assemble cars, research, teach, look after the children.

A little dizzy from Hartung's art and his fulfilled life, I stumble out of the exhibition. There is no time to go to the huge permanent collection and I am so full of impressions too ... But then I was looking forward to coming back the next day. Yes, the next day ... the next day there was a strike and it was over for me with the permanent collection.

And there was another miracle. A small signpost was attached to a high white wall, pointing down the stairs: Matisse. Actually, it looked more like going to the toilet rooms in the basement. So I hopped down and a great hall opened up for me. I was there all alone and was allowed to watch:

Matisse - 1931, La danse inachevée (The Unfinished Dance)

Matisse La danse inachevée 1931

And behind that was something else, namely this:

Matisse La danse

In 1930, the 61-year-old Henri Matisse met Dr. Know Albert Barnes, an American billionaire with a passion for modern art. Barnes was a great admirer of Matisse and commissioned him to decorate the wall for the main hall of his house. Matisse chose dance, one of his favorite subjects, as the subject. Between 1930 and 1933 he worked almost exclusively on this monumental work. He created three versions of La Danse.

With the first version, La Danse inachevée (1930-1931), Matisse was not satisfied. He developed a second version in gray, blue, pink and black using the paper cut technique. So he could rearrange the elements again and again. However, this version did not have the correct dimensions for Barnes' hall. So Matisse created a third version that was then installed in the Barnes Foundation.

It wasn't until 1990 that La Danse inachevée was found in Matisse's Atelier in Nice. Also an interesting story like such a huge picture is only found in his studio 36 years after the artist's death. I would like to know ...

The two “remaining” versions now hang here in this beautiful high cellar room dedicated to Matisse.

And I step happily into the golden Parisian afternoon light. But before I tell you about this afternoon, the next chapter is devoted to the pioneer of abstraction Hilma af Klint.