Pastel (modern), 1961

49.00 cm. x 64.00 cm. | 19.29 in. x 25.2 in. (paper)

57.00 cm. x 72.00 cm. | 22.44 in. x 28.35 in. (frame)

Pastel, graphite and scratching
Framed work : 57 x 72 cm
Support: baryta cardboard laminated on wood panel.

Hans Hartung (1904-1989), born in Germany, belongs to the second generation of abstract artists. He was twenty-one years old when he attended a conference by Kandinsky (1866-1944) which confirmed him his interest for the abstraction art, he had discovered and experimented when he was a teenager. He fled his native country because of Nazism and arrived in Paris in 1934. He lives and works in miserable conditions. At the beginning of the Second World War, he joined the Foreign Legion of France, and was wounded in Belfort in 1944. He became a naturalized French citizen at the end of the Second World War.
For Hartung, abstraction is a natural outcome. He experimented with it at a very young age, in his school notebooks.
The embodiment of abstract expressionism, Hartung's paintings became less "rebellious" in the early 1950s. At the end of this decade, he practiced pastel in a very particular way, as shown by the exceptional drawing we offer, which dates from 1961.
Following his habit established in 1933, Hartung titles the work with a letter, the year of creation and a serial number. Thus, he completely evacuates the question of the narrative or the relationship to reality in art that a title induces.
On the other hand, in this way of titling, the question of time is not evacuated. Hartung thus wants to place his works in a continuum and keep the trace of an evolution.
Hartung was first of all a draughtsman before being a painter. Moreover, in a way, his gestures as a painter are perhaps more those of a draughtsman.
Hartung makes exist in a visible and palpable way the energy, the movement, what the hand, the soul or the spirit can co-produce together.
Hartung makes exist a process, a materialization of the creation in time, a pulsation. At the beginning of the 20th century, the futurists use figurative art to represent movement; Hans Hartung does not.
If we could say, Hartung’ artworks feature phenomena. A work of Hartung can be considered as a phenomenon, in the etymological sense of the term, that is to say "that which shows itself", to remain in the language of phenomenology as the philosopher Husserl (1859-1938) defined it.
One cannot help but imagine the artist's process. One understands that in the right part, the yellow is covered by the black and thus was laid before, one supposes a sense of creation from left to right. The execution is prodigious. From 1957 onwards, Hartung makes extensive use of oil pastels, whose texture allows him to express himself freely on the paper without tearing it. This is a remarkable characteristic of Hartung's drawings: surety of gesture, mastered power and a necessary part of improvisation in the execution of the work.
Hans Hartung's pastels were soon the subject of exhibitions, as in 1959 at the Kleemann Galleries in New York. The artist presented pastels with parallel lines of different thicknesses and intensities with spaces between them. In the work we propose, Hartung systematizes this process into a continuous unfolding of line bundles.
The other remarkable process, in addition to the virtuosity associated with power and speed, is the scratching, that is to say the removal of material. In his painted works, he operates by scratching in the still fresh pictorial material. In his drawings, he scratches the support itself, here a baryta cardboard, used by photographers and appreciated for its solidity and its perennial whiteness thanks to a mineral that it contains - the barium sulfate.
The result of his "scratches" is of remarkable graphic elegance.
This work by Hans Hartung brings together strokes that are more or less strong, present, or lighter, up to these scratched streaks, removals of matter that are as significant as the silences in music.

Very good condition
Handsigned by the artist in pencil
Certificate of authenticity

Ref : LCD4838