Hartung [antikvár]

Introduction It wasn't so long ago that the foundation that now houses a great part of Hans Hartung's work-the house, the studios and their inhabitants, many of whom were already there when the artist was still alive-emerged from the disarray and confusion into which the death of the artist had plunged it. The thousands of works the artist produced and kept from the 1920s until his death in 1989 weighed all the more since, at the end of the day, only very few of them had ever been shown, seen and analysed, much less understood. The team at the foundation worked intelligently and diligently at archiving, classifying, and understanding that body of work; they have also rearranged the spaces in order to give the ever-growing number of visitors-curators, critics, researchers and artists-the best possible access to this complex and neglected treasure. Thanks to their unflagging efforts, the works have regained life and meaning through new shows and interpretations. Slowly but surely, Hartung's hunch seems to have been connrmed. What would have become of his oeuvre, one wonders, had he not bet on the abilify of a foundation to prolong it, to restore what had been forgotten and to correct bad interpretations? Yes, Härtung is one of the most important European artists of the second half of the twentieth centuiy, and yes, he did enjoy thirty-five years of recognition and prosperity. And yet it is only a minute part of his vast oeuvre, namely his output in the 1950s, that seems to have gained any recognition. No-one would think of comparing his current stature-in critical and commercial terms, or in terms of museum space-with that of some of the artists who crossed paths with him, such as Kandinsky, Pollock or Rothko. The desire to put together different perspectives on Hartung's work didn't originate in the desire to raise it to the heights occupied by these giants of the history of twentieth-century art. Such an attempt, even if it proved possible, would not benefit Härtung in the least. The fact that he is not one of these giants is precisely what we must look at. If Hartung's production of the 1950s is what brought his work into the spotlight and secured for it a place in histoiy, it is because, as Christine Mehring has brilhantly intuited, that was the only time his work went hand-in-hand with the spirit of the times. Härtung was a German whose exile in France was indefinitely prolonged by the rise of Nazism, and his abstraction, it tumed out, could quite opportunely be claimed by the postwar politics of France and Germany, as is explained lirom the perspective of each of these countries by Laurence Bertrand-Dorléac and Chantal Eschenfleder. Moreover, the forms and the range of colours Härtung was using during that period mesh with the forms and colours favoured by the design that prevailed during the 1950s. And, as is also the case for design, the seeds of this production date back to the days right before fhe war. Hartiing's formal intuitions, which had come to full bloom by the end of the 1940s and which were to identify him from then on, had their roots in the confrontation with Cubism and, in particular, as Annie Claustres explains, with the work of González, who became, however briefly, his father-in-law. Härtung never stopped stressing the importance of his production of the 1920s, which already bore the marks of the specificity of his work and of his abstraction. The influence