Hans Hartung - Buy or sell works
21 September 1904, Leipzig (Germany) - 8 December 1989, Antibes (France)
The German-French painter and graphic artist Hans Hartung discovered his abstract style at a very early stage. After WWII, he was one of the School of Paris artists who developed Tachisme, part of the Art Informel movement. The artists Wols, Jean Fautrier and Hans Hartung all lived in Paris and were pioneers of Informel, this abstract form of painting with no unified style.
Born on 21 September 1904 in Leipzig, Hartung was involved with abstract art even during his schooldays in Dresden. From 1924, he studied philosophy and art history in Leipzig. Impressed by the works of Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, a year later he decided to study painting in Leipzig and Dresden. Hartung was a pupil of Max Doerner, the painter, restorer and professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich from 1928 onwards. He moved to France and married the Norwegian painter Anna-Eva Bergman in 1929.
Hartung’s mother-in-law was violently opposed to the match, and the marriage was annulled shortly afterwards. He moved in to the home of Spanish sculptor Julio González, who was living in Paris, and in 1939 Hartung married González’s daughter Roberta. That same year he joined the French Foreign Legion, losing a leg in battle in North Africa in 1944. After WWII, Hans Hartung became a French citizen, and started to paint again. In 1947 he held his first solo exhibition in Paris. In 1952, he met his first wife Anna-Eva Bergmann once again, and married her for a second time in 1957.
Hartung was a participant in the first Documenta in Kassel in 1955. He was awarded the Grand Prize for Painting at the Biennale in Venice in 1960. With his abstract works, Hartung became an important representative of Art Informel and an important influence on younger painters. Hartung’s clear, linear, reduced, and even minimalistic art is strongly influenced by his graphic training. The delicate lines are reminiscent of Chinese ink painting or calligraphy.