Hans Hartung
Galleria d'Arte Moderna, Turin
Through April 2
In reexamining
Hans Hartung’s works today, it is appropriate to emphasize
the influence that the social and cultural context
in which the artist grew exerted on his research.
The background of his youth was a European situation
as much destabilized from a historical and political
point of view as it was culturally stimulating. In
this light, his contacts with Brücke artists,
particularly Nolde, Kirchner, and Pechstein appear
very significant, as well as his studies of painting
and engraving at the Academy in Leipzig (where he
was born in 1904) and in Dresden, and, at the same
time, his theoretical studies of philosophy and religion.
His will to remain disassociated from camps and trends,
a constant during all his life, became apparent as
early as 1925, when he refused to accept Kandinskij’s
proposal to participate in the Bauhaus. The crucial
year in his life is 1933: as it happened to many German
artists and scholars, after his assets were confiscated
by the Nazi regime, he was forced to go into exile,
thus beginning an experience of cultural and intellectual
nomadism and of isolation leading him first to Minorca
and later to Paris, where he remained until his death.
Hartung approached art in the Twenties, and his production
from those years, comprising mainly drawings in ink
and red pastel, contains the fundamental elements
that will characterize his mature language: marks
and spots which, as the artist himself remembered,
were filling his school notebooks: pages and pages
of "lightning", giving him the feeling of
the speed of drawing, the desire to seize the instantaneous,
uniting man and universe in his work. From the very
beginning, the works seem like fragments of an inner
journal, manifestations of the need for taking action
to allow existential knowledge to be experienced and
communicated, as Walter Grohmann, one of the most
careful scholars of this artist, remarks.
It would be limiting, however, to consider Hartung’s
works as a instinctive production only, left to the
concreteness of the instant, in which his total experience
is concentrated, intense and immediate. Rather, his
language can be situated in a border area between
the unconscious and reason, two characteristics that
are indivisible from the man’s personality, let alone
the artist’s. Far from Capogrossi’s static nature,
Mathieu’s pure improvisation, and the stylistic exercise
of Oriental ideograms, Hartung’s stroke, as he maintains,
shows "a concentration on itself, on the essential,
captured through a unique, inimitable gesture".
It adopts agitated rhythms, it exudes vital energy
in space: sometimes it tangles up communicating a
feeling of anxiety, some other time it seems to be
born of the imaginary, as a glyph of a magic alphabet
(of which the title of the work is integral part,
marked by a letter preceding a date). Intuition and
speed are its essential characteristics: light illuminates
from within the deep color in which the characters
acquire life and body, extend vertically, cut with
surprising outcomes by diagonal lines, or, like wooden
"beams", they extend aggressively like prison
bars, they interweave taking the form of commas, dots,
crosses, drawing from an enigmatic silence.
The strong dramatic texture of his works, reflecting
the century’s problems from its beginning to the end
of World War II, is diluted after the second half
of the Fifties. The graphic and pictorial elements
become balanced in less agitated combinations, the
size of the works turns larger, and polyptics start
to appear. Almost as to stress the importance of an
open journey, the shadow acquires value, a sort of
alter ego of the stroke, which becomes smaller,
less intrusive.
In 1966 the Galleria Civica di Arte Moderna in Turin
devoted an anthological exhibition to Hartung, who
collaborated personally in the project. However, the
show mainly presented works created after World War
II, with the precise intent, as revealed by contemporary
documents, to stress the continuity and vitality of
a research that never became a sterile repetitive
stylistic exercise.
Today’s show at GAM, on the contrary, is motivated
by the desire to reexamine critically the entire production
of the artist, considering the profound influence
that he exerted on contemporary abstraction. One hundred
and fifty works are shown (watercolors, pencil sketches,
oils, acrylics on canvas, mixed media), almost all
coming from the Hartung Foundation in Antibes. Particularly
interesting is the choice of works from the Twenties:
small drawings, watercolors in which color spots open
up fluorescent on the paper, a self-portrait (T
1923, in black chalk on paper), charcoal drawings
done in nervous strokes, a mixture of spontaneity
and rational control.
The wide selection of works created between the Thirties
and the Fifties allows one to follow the development
of the graphic and pictorial language through the
progressive interaction of traces and spots (antithetic
forces in the beginning), marks resembling scratches,
quick improvisations, chromatic stratifications balanced
in space. See for instance T 1949-9: from the
dark background large red and yellow spots "come
out", dense black marks are superimposed on them,
like scythes or beams, infinite variations of an absolute
world.
The show ends with the works from the Sixties to the
Eighties. The strokes take the texture of hanks, they
lose in aggressiveness to acquire in softness, or,
similar to thin sheets, are placed on the canvas to
follow strategic paths. Spots are diluted into great
enveloping shadows invading the space and apparently
dissolving in a cosmic magma.
Tiziana Conti
Translation by Bruna Pegoraro Brylawski
