The youthful infatuation, inventive partnership, break-up and Burton-Taylor-esque reunion of Anna-Eva Bergman and Hans Hartung is among the untold love tales of the Twentieth-century avant-garde. Whereas on the peak of his profession Hartung was celebrated as a distinguished determine within the Artwork Informel motion, a largely European response to Summary Expressionism, Bergman’s work has been uncared for regardless of her vital contributions to an summary vocabulary of artwork impressed by nature. The artists are the topic of a brand new twin exhibition on the Kunsthalle Praha, Anna-Eva Bergman & Hans Hartung: And We’ll By no means Be Parted.
After learning at artwork colleges in Oslo and Vienna, the Norwegian Bergman enrolled on the Académie André Lhote in Paris. She met the German-born Hartung in 1929, and so they married in the identical 12 months. They lived from 1933 to 1934 in Menorca, the place Bergman was impressed by the dramatic coastal panorama of waves crashing onto the crags. Each artists had been fascinated by mathematical approaches akin to gridded programs to organise compositions and the golden ratio, which they believed provided a timeless and common aesthetic. Quickly, although, there was hassle in paradise. Bergman grew to become beset by in poor health well being, which required operations and convalescences in Berlin, Paris and the French Riviera. The couple divorced in 1938.
Hunted by the Gestapo
Whereas Hartung joined the French Overseas Legion within the Second World Conflict, throughout which he was pursued as a traitor by the Gestapo and in the end misplaced a leg in battle, Bergman returned to Norway. In the summertime of 1950, she travelled to the Lofoten Islands and Finnmark on the nation’s northern edge, and experimented with tempera to symbolize the rugged topography and transparency of the shoreline in its extraordinary perpetual mild.
Though Bergman and Hartung had each remarried, they reunited in 1952 and moved right into a studio again in Paris. There they furthered their experiments with arithmetic and abstraction, and fell in with the postwar milieu of Terry Haass, Germaine Richier and Pierre Soulages.
Explosive productiveness of the reunion years
“[Their] togetherness was distinctive, permitting each artists to develop utterly distinct types whereas sharing residing areas, travels and over-arching themes,” the curators Theo Carnegy-Tan and Pierre Wat write within the exhibition’s catalogue, and “even after they separated, between 1938 and 1952, the obvious isolation wherein the 2 artists labored served as an incubator for the explosive productiveness of their reunion years.”
In 1973, the couple moved to the outskirts of Antibes, remodelling their home and studio in a Modernist type. The property is now managed by the Hartung Bergman Basis, which maintains a public show of the works of each artists, and has supported the exhibition in Prague. And We’ll By no means Be Parted is billed as the primary main museum present to put the 2 artists in dialogue, that includes work from throughout their careers, in addition to sketches, archival materials and mutual presents.
• Anna-Eva Bergman & Hans Hartung: And We’ll By no means Be Parted, Kunsthalle Praha, Prague, 5 June-13 October
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