Hans HARTUNG (1904-1989) - Lot 100

Hans HARTUNG (1904-1989) T1965-H20 Vinyl and scratch on canvas, signed and dated 65 lower right. 35 x 22 cm Provenance : Former collection of Dr. Jean Girou (1889-1972). We would like to thank the Fondation Hartung - Bergman for kindly confirming the authenticity of this work and informing us that it will be included in the catalog raisonné of Hans Hartung's work. Produced in 1965, T1965-H20 is part of a pivotal period in the work of Hans Hartung (1904-1989), marked by a profound change in his pictorial language. From 1960 onwards, after winning the Grand Prix for Painting at the Venice Biennale, Hartung gradually abandoned the transfer of his preparatory drawings to confront the canvas directly. Yet this liberation of gesture did not mean a renunciation of rigor: Hartung, fascinated by the relationship between aesthetics and mathematics - notably the harmony of the golden ratio - retained a keen sense of structure and composition. T1965-H20 bears witness to this tension between spontaneity and control, between the painter's physical élan and the mastery of a rational mind. Our painting is distinguished by the use of technical tools unheard of at the time, reflecting Hartung's taste for experimentation. From the early 1960s, he adopted the airbrush and paint spraying, first to rapidly cover vast colored backgrounds, then to create atmospheric effects of rare subtlety. "Between 1961 and 1965, I got into the habit of scratching into the fresh paste of the colors... then I found a way to blow the color onto the surface of the canvas," he confided in 1976. To free his forms, Hartung used a variety of tools that he made himself (scrapers, pistols, rakes, engraving rollers, broom branches...). These innovations enable him to explore the very materiality of painting: shapes are no longer drawn, but revealed by the removal or diffusion of pigment. With its powerful contrast and slender lines, T1965-H20 reinvents the principle of glazing inherited from the old masters. With its powerful contrast and slender lines, Hartung reinvents the principle of glazing inherited from the old masters, and, thanks to his spray technique, rediscovers the "miracle of imperceptible passages where colors blend without getting dirty", recalling the work of Van Eyck and Rembrandt, whom he admired. This work, never before on the market, testifies to an essential stage in Hartung's career, when the painter, armed with his modern tools, succeeded in uniting the rigor of calculation and the lightness of gesture, revealing on canvas a mastered cosmic energy. T1965-H20 fully embodies the rare balance between lyricism and reason that defines Hartung's abstraction.