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HARTUNG (1904-1989) Hans
HARTUNG (1904- 1989)
Hans Hartung was born in Leipzig into a German bourgeois family.
He was already finishing his first abstract water-colors in 1922. In 1924, while a student at the Dresde Fine Arts Academy, he would start to paint representational portraits. He would discover, at a Kandinsky conference in Leipzig, that he was not the only artist painting abstract forms.
In 1934, his paintings become more structured and the real Hartung appeared. His was a style born from a penchant for straight lines, flat surfaces and spots.
Fleeing Nazi Germany for Paris in 1937, Hartung enrolled in the Foreign Legion as an escape route from his homeland. He would return with an amputated leg. The artist would start painting again and would be crowned with success at the Two-Year Festival in Venice, Italy, winning First Prize in 1960.
Sometimes considered the precursor to abstract body movement, his work imposed itself as a “new trend” as early as 1950. All gestures can be materialized into a simple shape, a sign which is re-visited with spontaneous exaltation. His dark, straight lines, the poetry which escapes from his work and his mysterious representational figures all make Hartung one of the grand masters of the 20th century.
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