“My childish flashes have had, I am sure, an influence on my artistic development, on my way of painting. They have given me a feeling for the speed of the line, the desire to seize the instantaneous with the pencil or the paintbrush, they have made me aware of the urgency of spontaneity.” Hans Hartung

“Painter of flashes”, Hans Hartung became committed to abstraction as early as 1922.

With him, the expressivity of the mark and free gestures characterised his work, a volatile oeuvre that took form between black graphics and coloured planes.

It is in Paris in 1935 that he met other abstract artists, Alexander Calder, Jean Hélion, Julio Gonzalez; encounters that reinforced his investigations that until then had been pursued in isolation.

After the war and with the advent of abstraction on the world artistic scene, Hans Hartung became close to Gérard Schneider and Pierre Soulages, a trio formed by the greatest pioneers of Lyrical Abstraction.

Always anxious to carry out other experiments he was urged to use new tools in the 1960s, such as a spray gun, broad brush and roller, as well as new media: vinyl, acrylics which dry more quickly allowing him to work with speed and immediacy.

“What I like is action on the canvas. Action? This is scratching, tearing, staining, invading the canvas with colour, in short everything that is not “painting.”” Hans Hartung

1960 was the peak of his fame: Hans Hartung received the International Prize for Painting at the Venice Biennale. He was elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts of Paris in 1977.

“Hartung’s canvases are thus analyzed much less in relation to content than in terms of dynamism and radiance. What is most remarkable about them is the tension reconciled with an extreme degree of refinement.” Conil Lacoste

The Fondation Hans Hartung et Anna-Eva Bergmann –his wife, a painter– was established in 1994, based at Antibes.

Fondation Hans Hartung & Anna-Eva Bergman