12/12/2021
Throwback to expo in October 2019 in the pre-covid era
Hans Hartung (1904-1989) is one of the major protagonists in the history of modern art: abstraction. From his beginnings in 1920s Germany to his death a few days after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Hartung went through a turbulent period with a thirst for freedom commensurate with the phenomena that attempted to hinder him. He never stopped painting. retrospective, the first dedicated to the artist in fifty years, traces the uninterrupted unfolding of a fundamentally experimental work. The exhibition takes an original look at the painter's evolution, giving a new place to works on paper and photographs, of which he has taken thousands. This exhibition immerses us in the approach of the artist, who created and exhibited his works without a hierarchy of supports. He brings us closer to a gesture that has constantly recorded the rhythms and impulses of his inner world. We take the measure of Hartun's method8, which gradually released emotion in his painting, until the surge of energy in the last monumental works. The exhibition also presents works little seen to this day, such as the large paintings of the 1970s in pop colors; it gives an account of the speed of ex*****on of the works by presenting a series dated the same working day or small works then carried on canvas. Far from the stereotype of the solitary artist, Hartung is at the head of a veritable painting factory in his successive workshops. From the end of the 1950s, he surrounded himself with assistants and an archivist. His production method questioning received ideas on the notion of “originality” makes him an unclassifiable artist. Bringing together an unprecedented body of archival documents, this retrospective highlights the singularity of Hartung's work, between spontaneity and mastery. With the support of the Hartung-Bergman Foundation, the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris pursues its essential mission here: to revisit the great figures of modern art and to contribute to their visibility.