Petrushki's Journey Into The Blue - Chapter 7 - Hans Hartung, banning lightning from child to man
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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.
This picture in the title is one of my favorites from Hans Hartung. Although I really, really like all of them. I see so much light and movement in them. Something human, natural, narrative. His pictures inspired me immediately. When I first saw a paintings from him, I immediately thought: I want to look at this longer and I want to see a lot more of him. It was like a miracle, his work had such an immediate, powerful effect on me.
Explosif- Violet Intense- Aquarelle barrée- Bleu au centre 1922.
The miracle of early recognition and courageous implementation ...
In 1922 Hans Hartung painted around 50 watercolors in which he freely juxtaposed surfaces of primary and secondary colors. The colors were mixed on the paper to create new shades. In between there were white open spaces.
He was just 18 years old and had never seen an abstract painting before. These watercolors anticipated the Art Informel that did not emerge until 20 years later in the 1940s / 50s.
In a diary entry in February 1924, young Hartung wrote:
“I want to achieve something good. Bloody hell. Something powerful. And if someone thinks that's rude and stupid, I don't care. Always stronger, bigger and truer. Even if they find it stupid and pointless. I create for myself. .... Music, shape and color. "
T1936-11
The visionary's miracle
Blossom - bird flight - still life. The beautiful blue and the little yellow. Spun threads and a mild green -blue background. I don't have to give it a name. It's movement, music, form.
Hartung is together with the artist Wols named as the founder of Arte Informel and Tachism, but Hartung painted like this 20 years earlier.
The term Informel denotes "no uniform style, but rather characterizes an artistic attitude that rejects the classical principle of form and composition as well as geometric abstraction". Quote
Tachism (from French la tache "color spot") is a direction of the Art Informel. It was created in Paris in the 1940s and was active until around 1960. Pierre Guéguen, a French art critic, called the works disparagingly tachisme, english: stain, and thus coined the name for this art.
In Tachism, the artist tries to represent his spontaneous feelings and his unconscious by applying paint stains to a canvas without this process being rationally controlled or directed. Action painting in the area of abstract expressionism emerged in the USA around the same time. Both terms are used for this type of painting.
Incidentally, Hartung called the watercolors of 1922 “stains” (taches).
T 1955 – 25.
The miracle of finding something that saves from the destructive self-doubt
When Hans Hartung came to Paris in the 1930s, he had little money and it was extremely difficult for him to finance the things he needed to paint. One day his friend Jean Hélion, who was also a painter, gave him a piece of advice: he should always be true to his sketches and accept his mistakes. From this time until the 1960s, Hartung reproduced all of his sketches true to the original on canvas using a grid. This process enabled him to save on canvases, paint and brushes.
As wild and dynamic as his pictures may appear, they were actually meticulously and consciously prepared.
T 1966 - E25
This picture from 1966 has the impressive size of one and a half by two and a half meters. That's an incredible amount of pulsating movement.
Hartung has continuously developed his methods.
The miracle of the child who could dispel his fear by painting
Hartung himself wrote in his memoirs that this was his way of painting
"…simply a new means of expression, a different human language - and more immediate than the earlier paintings".
Even as a child it was clear to him that he could express himself with art, that he could transform fears into something else. As a six-year-old he "freed himself from fear" by painting. Before thunderstorms, for example. He ran to the open window to catch "the twitching lightning in flight".
"They had to be on the page before the clap of thunder, so I conjured the lightning. Nothing could happen to me if my line was as fast as the lightning."
T 1987 – H 5
The miracle, when the strength to work increases
During 1989, Hans Hartung, now 85 years old, created 360 works. He worked mostly at night under neon lights. He immersed himself in a universe in which painting combines itself with nature and the environment. In his studio he listened mainly to baroque music by Bach and Vivaldi and sometimes Stravinsky in later days. The work ended when the floor of his studio was completely covered with the drying canvases.
The exhibition “La fabrique du geste” was curated by Odile Burluraux and took place from October 11, 2019 - March 1, 2020 at the Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris.
Bettina Wohlfarth writes in her article “The best means to defeat death” from October 20, 2019: “Hans Hartung's intensive work with fifteen thousand works has not only done his afterlife good. (…) It is time to get to the bottom of the Franco-German painter of an expressive, lyrical abstraction and to place his obsessive search for the emotion of light, color and the painterly gesture in the art-historical context of the twentieth century. ”
Watercolours and facsimiles, 1922
Here we see again some of the aquarelles from 1922, which Hartung called “spots”. Tache in french. Later his style was called Tachismus / Tachisme / Fleckwerk. Hartung was very attached to these fragile pictures and published them in facsimile in their original size in a book in 1966. In 1980 he exhibited them, framed and hung in a row, next to the original watercolors in the Musee d´art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. In doing so, he reflected on the relationship between the image and the copy in his very own way.
T 1989 – K32
The painting has very large dimensions of several meters. It is from 1989, the year he died. After a very eventful life. And as a painter he went down a tremendously exciting path. He researched and further developed many methods.
Quote from Hans Hartung:
“For me, the love of life mixes with the desire to paint. If someone has devoted his whole life to painting, if someone has always tried to take one step further, then it is impossible for him to stop. "
Hans Hartung 1933 Foto: Anna Eva Bergmann
This is a photo of the 29-year-old Hans Hartung taken from his wife Anna Eva Bergmann. At that time the painter couple lived in Menorca.
Hartung was born in 1904 and grew up in a family for which art and culture were important. Hartung was fascinated by light and its phenomena from an early age. He filled whole school blocks with drawings of thunderstorms. His father called them “lightning books”.
Selbstportrait 1922
Self-portrait 1922
Selbstportrait 1923
Self-portrait a year later in 1923. Both show a young man with an unbreakable self-confidence.
In 1912 the Hartung family moved to Basel. Hartung discovered photography and astronomy for himself. 1924-25 he studies philosophy and art history in Leipzig. He already painted non-representational and abstract. In 1926 he saw the large exhibition of international paintings with Matisse, Léger, Braque, Picasso in Dresden.
In 1927 he went to Paris and studied art there.
Postkarte von Hans Hartung an Anna Eva Bergmann 1929
Postcard from Hans Hartung to Anna Eva Bergmann sent from Anvers on June 11, 1929
Anna Eva Bergmann, Paris 1929
In May 1929 he met the Norwegian painter Anna-Eva Bergmann. Soon after, they got married..
Anna Eva Bergmann and Hans Hartung moved to the island of Menorca in 1933. Together they build this studio house in 1933/34. Due to financial difficulties and accusations of espionage, they had to leave the island and go to Berlin in 1935.
And there the Gestapo became more and more threatening and Hartung fled to Paris. Anna Eva Bergmann ill, remained in Berlin. They divorced in 1939.
Around 1924
Hans Hartung painted these pictures in 1923/1924 with red chalk and charcoal on paper. He was 20/21 years old. The drawings with charcoal and red chalk fascinate me with their clarity. I called this place in the exhibition the Clarity Corner. Here Hartung develops a sign language that reminds me of Penck, even Haring.
T 1937-1
Quote Hartung:
"In painting everything has to be right, the lines, curves, shapes, angles and colors to form an image that can endure, (...) that is the definitive expression of a phenomenon, an emotion."
T 1937-17.
Through the mediation of the sculptor Julio González, he met his daughter, the artist Roberta González They married in July 1939.
T 1936 - 2
T 1936 - 2
Hartung made quick, spontaneous sketches and then transferred them to the canvas using a grid system. This method fascinated me because it brings the spontaneous, the immediate emotion into an almost meticulous order. The contrast between authentic chaos and molded control is united.
It is a touching blue entity in front of the most magical green. Unfortunately I don't know the title or the year. It must have been from the 1930s though.
T 1938-12
T 1938 - 12
T 1938-2
In chapter 8 we see how Hans Hartung seduced movement and light onto canvas.
