Hans Hartung was counted among the so-called École
de Paris. What did this refer to?
A classification of this
kind has more to do with a historian's understanding. It's not a "brand"
that emerged out of a debate among artists. To cite a current example: the "Leipzig
School" is a product of art journalism. Along with the École de
Paris, there was also the so-called New
York School of Abstract Expressionism at the time. The term "school"
actually stems from the 19th century. It still applied in the case of the Düsseldorf
School of painting, which was clearly defined by a location, an
institution, and a teacher-student relationship.
What
characterizes the style of the École de Paris, and who belongs to the
movement?
The Paris School is not a style, but the result of
innumerable encounters, meetings, and experiments in international
dialogue: there are the Frenchmen Manessier,
Mathieu,
and Soulage, the North
African Atlan, the Swiss Schneider,
the Russian Poliakoff, and
the German Hartung. These are all very individual styles that resulted in
paintings and not reproductions of a reality that is no more than a thin
film.
Hans
Hartung, T 1989-N10, 1989,
©Stiftung
Hans Hartung and Anna-Eva Bergman, Antibes
What
can be said about Hans Hartung's particular style, his very own kind of
abstraction?
His visual notations are reminiscent of Oriental calligraphy;
the tension between the sign and the surrounding pictorial space of the
canvas or paper corresponds to the concentration in Zen art.
To
this day, Markus
Lüpertz finds it particularly difficult that Hartung never
assumed a political position in art.
Yes, and this is very
interesting, because Hartung was not an unpolitical person. Joining the
Foreign Legion to fight against Hitler was a consistently political step.
But he never incorporated the visualization of a political position in his
painting. Hartung the artist was free expression; Hartung the person was
political involvement.
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Hans Hartung, CP, 1935,
©Stiftung
Hans Hartung and Anna-Eva Bergman, Antibes
Abstraction
has also lost importance in places where it was once highly regarded - for
instance as a front-line position against Socialist realism. Today, it's
considered difficult to explain or sell. How do you approach this
exhibition?
We show an overview of the decades and concentrate
on a few select areas. We begin with Hartung's paper works from the '20s,
which were made here in Leipzig. These works give you the feeling that
they could have been made by Blinky
Palermo. Hartung looked neither to the Dresden Expressionists nor to
the Bauhaus in Weimar and
Dessau. There's merely a strangely ambivalent relationship to Kandinsky,
somewhere between rejection and a deep preference - perhaps that's his
main model. And then we show Hans Hartung's photography, which has never
really been present until now. It constitutes an autonomous chapter that
is essential to an understanding of Hartung's work, because it's a kind of
photography that was implemented conceptually for painting. The thin, dead
branches, the games with light and shadow, the clouds that he repeatedly
photographed were then transferred into drawings and, in a third step,
into painting. This is why our exhibition is called Spontaneous
Calculation. We won't be following a strict chain of evidence, but we
want to make it clear that Hartung's impulsive brushstroke was
conceptually motivated. And painting as concept ties Hartung's position to
the current art discourse.
Hans Hartung
Spontanes
Kalkül
Museum der bildenden Künste
Leipzig
4. November 2007 - 10. February 2008
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