Hans HARTUNG

Hans Hartung: Biography, Etchings and Original Lithographs

Hans Hartung (born 21 September 1904, Leipzig; died 7 December 1989, Antibes) was a German-born French painter and printmaker, and one of the pioneers of gestural abstraction in Europe. A Foreign Legion veteran who lost a leg in 1944, he became a central figure of Lyrical Abstraction and the School of Paris, and in 1960 won the Grand Prize for painting at the Venice Biennale. His original prints – etchings, aquatints, lithographs, woodcuts and linocuts, catalogued by Rainer Michael Mason in more than five hundred entries – are among the most direct records of the slashing, scratched line that made his name.

Le Coin des Arts offers a selection that spans much of Hartung’s printmaking: the colour etchings and aquatints G 7 and G 19 (1953); four autographic lithographs of 1957, L 20, L 22, L 23 and L 32; the zincographs L 1971-2 B and L 1971-4; three prints of 1973 – the linocut Lino 1973-I, the etching G 1973-2 and the woodcut H 1973-23; L 1977-4 (1977); and an original pastel, P1961-41 (1961). Each sheet has been chosen for the quality of the impression, the edition, its provenance and its condition.

A Childhood of Lightning: Leipzig, Basel and Dresden (1904-1926)

As a boy Hartung filled his school exercise books with drawings of lightning – his ‘Blitzbücher’. The family lived in Basel from 1912 to 1914, where he built a telescope and took up photography, then moved back to Leipzig and on to Dresden. Encounters with the work of Kokoschka and Nolde in 1921 were followed, in 1922, by a remarkable series of wholly abstract watercolours. After studying philosophy and art history in Leipzig and attending the Dresden Academy, he saw French modernism at the 1926 International Exhibition in Dresden and decided to leave for France.

Paris, Minorca and the Road into Exile (1926-1939)

Hartung settled in Paris in the autumn of 1926, briefly attending André Lhote’s academy. In 1929 he married the Norwegian painter Anna-Eva Bergman, and in 1931 held his first solo exhibition in Dresden. From 1933 to late 1934 the couple lived on Minorca, near Fornells, before poverty drove them away. Harassed by the Gestapo in Berlin, Hartung left Germany for good in 1935. It was then that Britain took notice: in 1936 he was in contact with Ben and Winifred Nicholson, and in 1938 he was included in the Exhibition of Twentieth Century German Art at the New Burlington Galleries in London, the show mounted in answer to the Nazi campaign against ‘degenerate art’. In 1939 he married Roberta González, daughter of the sculptor Julio González.

War, the Foreign Legion and a New Nationality (1939-1946)

When war broke out, Hartung, still a German citizen, joined the French Foreign Legion and served in North Africa. Demobilised in 1940, he sheltered with the González family in the Lot. Crossing into Spain, he was arrested and held for seven months in the camp at Miranda de Ebro, then rejoined the Legion. Badly wounded near Belfort in 1944, he had his right leg amputated. He became a French citizen in 1946 and was awarded the Légion d’honneur, the Médaille militaire and the Croix de guerre.

Recognition in London, Basel and Venice (1947-1960)

His 1947 exhibition at the Galerie Lydia Conti in Paris established his reputation, and he befriended Pierre Soulages. London followed quickly: an exhibition of drawings, Abstractions, at the Hanover Gallery in 1949, and a solo show at the Lefevre Gallery in 1953. The Kunsthalle Basel mounted a major exhibition in 1952, the year he was reunited with Bergman (they remarried in 1957). He took part in the first three editions of documenta in Kassel and signed with the Galerie de France in 1956. In 1960 he shared the Venice Biennale’s Grand Prize for painting with Jean Fautrier, and showed at Gimpel Fils in London the same year.

Antibes and the Late Style (1961-1989)

From 1960 Hartung abandoned his practice of squaring up small sketches and painted directly, with vinyl paints, scraping into the wet surface, later using spray guns and rollers. The Tate Gallery included him in 54–64: Painting and Sculpture of a Decade (1964), and the City of Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery gave him a retrospective in 1968, alongside his 1968–69 retrospective at the Musée national d’art moderne in Paris. In 1973 he and Bergman moved into the house and studios he had designed at Antibes; in that year alone he made 121 prints. He was elected to the Académie des beaux-arts in 1977. After Bergman’s death in 1987 he painted on a vast scale until weeks before his own death – a ‘very late style’ examined by Jennifer Mundy in Tate Papers (2008). The Fondation Hartung-Bergman opened in Antibes in 1994. In Britain his work is held by Tate – including the 1957 lithographs L10 and L36 and the painting T1963-R6 – and by the Courtauld; the Tate Gallery showed his works on paper of 1922–56 in 1996.

Hartung the Printmaker: Workshops and Catalogues

Hartung’s first known print is a small woodcut bookplate of 1921, but printmaking truly began in 1953 with a suite of colour intaglio prints on copper, printed by Lacourière in Paris and published by Hedwig Marbach in Bern in editions of 75 on Arches paper. In 1957 came the autographic lithographs, drawn in crayon and brush on transfer paper and printed from stone by Jean Pons. Later he worked with the Erker-Presse in St Gallen, Arte Adrien Maeght, the Crommelynck brothers, Polígrafa in Barcelona and Pierre Chave in Vence. Scoring a copper plate anticipated the scratched surfaces of his canvases, and in the 1970s lithographic rollers became painting tools.

The titles are Hartung’s own studio inventory numbers, not catalogue numbers: a letter for the medium (G for intaglio, L for lithography and its variants, H for woodcut, Lino for linocut), a sequence number and, from the mid-1960s, the year. Two catalogues raisonnés apply: Rolf Schmücking, Hans Hartung: Werkverzeichnis der Graphik 1921–1965 (Brunswick, 1965), cited ‘S.’, and Rainer Michael Mason’s catalogue for the Fondation Hartung-Bergman, cited ‘RMM’. So G 7 is S. 36 / RMM 66, L 32 is RMM 108 and H 1973-23 is RMM 396. The prints were the subject of a touring exhibition at the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin, the Bibliothèque nationale de France and Geneva in 2010–11.

Collecting Hans Hartung Prints: A Buyer’s Guide

Find the RMM number. The inventory title alone is not enough: some images exist in several versions, such as L 1971-2 A and L 1971-2 B.

Edition size. Editions are small – 75 for the 1953 coppers, 100 for L 22, L 23, L 32, G 1973-2 and H 1973-23, 200 for L 1971-2 B, only fifteen for Lino 1973-I. See the printing.

Signature and studio proofs. Edition impressions are signed ‘Hans Hartung’ in pencil. Unsigned studio proofs numbered in Roman numerals and blind-stamped ‘AHH’, identified by the Foundation from 1999, are genuine but not equivalent to a signed impression. See the signature.

Colour and condition. Hartung printed many states and colour variants; check the colours against the RMM entry. Blues and oranges fade in daylight, so insist on full margins and UV-filtering glazing; see our framing service.

Beware of look-alikes. Reproductions ‘after’ Hartung, posters and unsigned plates from books and magazines are common. Our guarantees are set out on the authenticity page.

Hartung’s prints sit naturally beside those of his peers in post-war abstraction: Anna-Eva Bergman, Pierre Soulages, Gérard Schneider, Nicolas de Staël and Serge Poliakoff. Explore the School of Paris and Lyrical Abstraction and our etchings and lithographs.

Sources and further reading

Rolf Schmücking, Hans Hartung: Werkverzeichnis der Graphik 1921–1965, Brunswick, Galerie Schmücking, 1965 · Rainer Michael Mason, Hans Hartung: Les estampes, catalogue raisonné, Fondation Hartung-Bergman · Céline Chicha-Castex, Christian Rümelin and Andreas Schalhorn (eds), Hans Hartung: Estampes / Druckgraphik, Paris, BnF, 2010 · Hans Hartung: Works on Paper 1922–56, London, Tate Gallery, 1996 · Tate – Hans Hartung · Jennifer Mundy, ‘The Very Late Style of Hans Hartung’, Tate Papers · Fondation Hartung-Bergman