The world of Hans Hartung

By Cindi Cook

PARIS (AA) - As the art world goes, abstractionists seem near a dime a dozen. Names like Jackson Pollak and Willem de Kooning are easily recognizable in the pantheon of giants who have impacted the genre.

The women, too, have staked their claim, everyone from Helen Frankenthaler to Lee Krasner stand out as artists who grounded the 20th-century movement with a fan base that now is multitudinous in number.

Hans Hartung is lesser-known when it comes to his artistic compatriots but his work deserves just as immense praise as the Jasper Johns and Robert Motherwell of the world, for its potency, its might, and its unapologetic nature.

The art is not only bold, but it is also abundant -- a testament to a man who could not stop working.

Hartung's paintings, ink on paper, photographs, and grattage are easily recognizable to doting fans and make the unaffiliated sit up and take notice.

On view at the Musee d'Art et Moderne until March 1, "La Fabrique du geste" is a show not to be missed.

Room after room of the cavernous museum, part of the Palais du Tokyo in Paris's 16th arrondissement, reveals a huge body of work by the artist, said to be the forerunner to American Lyrical Abstraction.

Just when one thinks the exhibition is over, a hallway leads to another small room which leads to another corridor, filled with canvasses large and small, personal notebooks, films of the artist at work, and press materials with photos of the same.

"La Fabrique du geste" translates loosely to "the gesture factory," a jocular phrase which rightly sums up Hartung's technique, one that from the mid-1930s was represented by bold swaths of black in every form and calligraphy-like elements against pops of color.

An early preponderance with abstract watercolors -- and what he called taches, or patches -- and charcoal helped Hartung to hone and define his style.

Many, like this writer, may readily recognize his small ink on paper pieces, produced in the mid-1950s when Hartung was at his height, but which were made more as a result of physical limitations with the loss of his right leg during WWII. Hundreds were made, all the size of a hand, in many depictions.

Born Sept. 21, 1904, in Leipzig, Germany, Hartung started his artistic schooling at Leipzig University in 1924 as a student of philosophy and art history. He then moved on to the Fine Arts Academy of Dresden for further concentration on the classics.

Hartung had a lifelong fascination with aesthetics and mathematics, particularly the harmony of the Golden Ratio, or a division of a line wherein the longer part divided by the smaller part equals the sum of both of them. It was much of this play of line that would dominate his aesthetic development.

After 1926, Hartung moved to Paris to pursue a more serious professional path. He straddled his native and his new country early on, exhibiting for the first time in Dresden in 1931 but ousted from Germany a year later, deemed a "degenerate" by the Nazi regime who increasingly persecuted any artist who did not fit their narrow mold. In 1935, Hartung was nearly arrested in Berlin for simply trying to sell paintings.

He returned to Paris as a refugee broke and struggling, aided by friend and sculptor Julio Gonzalez -- father to Hartung's second wife, artist Roberta Gonzalez -- who would let Hartung work out of his studio.

When the war came in 1939, Hartung signed onto the French foreign legion, earning the Croix de Guerre, the French cross, a military decoration, for his service in combat in North Africa. He returned to Paris at the end of the war and despite his handicap, pressed on.

It was then that the "gesture" took hold -- his large brushstrokes of ebony against colorful backdrops, all large format, which gave way in his later years to much bigger scale canvasses and more pop art influences.

Hartung's first Paris exhibition was in 1947, by which time he had earned French citizenship and was becoming established as a figure of note in the artistic community.

Hartung's grattage, or scrapings, are his most distinctive, produced in the aforementioned hand-size works and those that practically cover a wall.

Aerosols and sprays became new tools in his workshop too, helping him extend material onto the canvas since the lack of a leg hindered him. Practicing grattage meant he would remove material, paint mostly, and cemented his oeuvre into a striking declaration, in and of itself.

Hartung was recognized for his work with the Grand Prix at the Venice Biennale in 1960.

It was the south of France though that would capture Hartung's eye, with the port city of Antibes serving as the location for his last studio and residence, and where Hartung would live out his final years with wife, artist Anna-Eva Bergman, whom he married prior to and after a divorce from Gonzalez.

The two built their home and workspace in this southern locale, deeming it "Champs des Oliviers," as it had been constructed on the grounds of a former olive grove.

Their plans even reached into the future, with the couple laying the groundwork for the foundation of Hartung Bergmann, the museum that stands upon the grounds today.