(Leipzig 1904–1989 Antibes) T 1948–36, signed, dated Hartung 48, oil on canvas, 50 x 65 cm, framed, (PP)

Provenance: Léon Hardy, Paris, 1960
Galerie de France, Paris, 1973
Private Collection, USA

The work has been registered by the Fondation Hans Hartung and Anna-Eva Bergman and will be included in the catalogue raisonné de l’oeuvre de Hans Hartung currently being compiled by the Fondation Hans Hartung et Anna-Eva Bergman, Antibes.

The year 1948 is decisive for the recognition of Hartung’s art. This is due primarily to a document until then unknown to the public: a film by Alain Resnais. Resnais understood that Hartung liked to paint in silence and isolation, so he filmed him precisely like this. His lack of money forced him to use simple means and omit sound; that is the commentary by Madeleine Rousseau and music by Antoine Duhamel. Despite this, the film is no less shocking and constitutes a historical point of reference. Descargues, who discovered it in 1948….describes how stunned he was to see the painter drawing simultaneously with both hands:”It becomes clear that the violence and fury scratching the paper stem from the most mysterious inner forces, but are at the same time the elements of an organised system just like the figures in Poussin’s compositions”.
The comparison with the great French classic is completely relevant, because this controlled conflict between measured order and excess and passions is clearly perceptible in Hartung. To those who watched it, this film revealed that the change in abstract painting originated in a change in the practice of painting itself. (Pierre Daix, Hartung, Garzanti/Galerie Daniel Gervis, ed., 1990)

“In my opinion the painting which is called abstract is none of the “isms” of which there have been so many lately, it is neither a “style” nor an “epoch” in art history, but merely a new means of expression, a different human language - one which is more direct than that of earlier painting”
(Hans Hartung)