January 12 to March 17, 2018
980 Madison Avenue, Third Floor, between 76th and 77th streets
New York City, nahmadcontemporary.com

Two major gallery presentations of the artist Hans Hartung (1904-1989) –  the exhibition under review here and Hans Hartung: A Constant Storm, Works from 1922-1989 at Perrotin, 130 Orchard Street (through Feburary 18) – are currently resolving a curious paradox. Since the 1970s, the groundbreaking and highly inventive modernist has been cited as an understudied figure on this side of the Atlantic. This observed neglect, however, hasn’t been remedied by comprehensive considerations of his oeuvre in American exhibitions, nor, for that matter, in English. The tide is now changing, as the two New York shows and a concurrent display at Simon Lee Gallery in London portend the artist’s rediscovery. The exhibition at Nahmad Contemporary, in particular, affirms the exigency and rewards of reviving Hartung.

This tightly curated exhibition showcases the German-born, post-war French artist as a veritable master of medium: An almost mathematical sensibility for line and composition are shown to tame his highly inventive artistic processes and violent automatic gestures. A mythology of isolated periods of genius has emerged around Hartung’s work, as he is most widely regarded for either the “long grasses” of his early career or his reinvention by way of frenetic spray-gun paintings during his senescence. Covering four decades of prolific production in fourteen works, the exhibition establishes coherence between the early experiments in regulated line and the later, anarchic spray-gun renderings by revealing the artist’s guiding principles and theoretical preoccupations.

In particular, the exhibition divulges Hartung’s enduring exploration of line as a central compositional device. Tracing his manipulation of line from the earliest work in the show, the 1952 monochrome T-1952-3, to a pairing of ambient works from 1982, illuminates the artist’s use of line as both formal structure and emotional envoy. Where T-1952-3 records Hartung’s gestural slashing of the canvas, for which he has become classified as an “action painter,” his later works T1982-H29 and T1982-K29 transpose torrid scrawls of mental exertion amid atmospheric zones. Searing his signature linear scratches atop bands of placid gradations of color in the later works produces a complex tonal register that moves from unbridled action to staid retrospection within a single canvas.

Though the artist’s fascination with line remains a constant throughout his career, he continually innovated around the line, both in its conceptual ideation and in his technical execution. The examples from 1982 evidence Hartung’s response to the growing Parisian interrogation of calligraphy, calling to mind the Eastern influences of Hartung’s Art Informel confreres Zao Wou-Ki and Lee Ungno. Perhaps owing to his colleagues’ deconstruction of traditional Eastern ideograms into sites of abstraction, Hartung’s conceptualization of calligraphy allows line, in his handling, to multiply in signification—all at once line is a test of malleability, a marker of vital emotion, and a conduit for language. Through its explorations of line, the exhibition also studies the artist’s changing methods of applying paint on canvas. In T1982-H29 and T1982-K29, for example, Hartung achieved his network of dynamic lines by thrashing the canvas with a paint-covered tree branch.

While Hartung’s quasi-calligraphic lines communicate his participation in Parisian modernism, they also symbolize his American relevancies. His unique tree branch painterly process, for example, immediately recalls Pollock’s drip. Similarly, his atmospheric backgrounds signal Rothko. Importantly, Hartung and Rothko recognized their shared artistic sensibilities and maintained a convivial friendship. Following Rothko’s death in 1970, Hartung even suggested that Rothko’s iconic paintings were galvanized by a trip to Hartung’s studio in the late 1940s: “[He] saw a painting in progress, in which large horizontal monochrome strips crossed the canvas; the painting was at an intermediate stage and I had not yet added the graphic elements. Rothko was especially interested and moved.” Maybe Hartung’s reputation as a connoisseur of line has been responsible for the lack of take up in America. The Nahmad show reveals Hartung’s equal attention to ambient atmospheres—in works like T1966-H11, T1980-R36, and T1982-E8—in a way that should more securely locate his achievement within an American sensibility.

A hinge-point of this exhibition is the grouping of three captivating paintings from 1971 [see installation shot, above]. Taken individually, the works are as philosophically rigorous as they are spiritually evocative. Jewel-toned curvilinear masses orbit atop uniformly black backgrounds as rounded parallel black lines slice swaths of color with destabilizing precision. While some of these works touch upon a cosmological realm, Hartung also engages in what was a vibrant conversation at that time among contemporary painters about the modernist grid—the aesthetic ordering principle first promulgated by artists such as Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg. In this gesture, Hartung liberates the bound geometries of the grid, discards primary colors in favor of a daring palette, and casts them in a galaxy of their own design.

This highly meditative triad of works lends further insight into Hartung’s displacement of de Stijl’s rigid parameters. In T-1971-R19 and T-1971-R21, the artist brackets the vertical edge of the paintings with blocks of color, amplifying the assertion that these are paintings, rendered on canvas, contained by their own materiality. By defining the limits of the canvas, Hartung debunks the high modernist lore that grids radiate into infinity, extending beyond the work endlessly.

Hartung’s spray-gun paintings were a radical departure, instigated after a stroke limited the artist’s mobility in 1986. In the vein of Matisse’s cut-outs, Hartung’s adversity is often seen as the creative catalyst for his artistic reinvention in his last years. The robust presentation of his work at Nahmad Contemporary puts these seemingly divergent works back into conversation with his oeuvre as they have us seeing the frantically sprayed lines as continuations of his charged gestures with brush and branch. The selection of works in this show makes for a generously navigable understanding of the artist without limiting our sense of Hartung’s dynamic, indomitable explorations of concept and technique.

The post In a Galaxy of their Own Design: Line and Atmosphere in Hans Hartung appeared first on artcritical.

October 29 to December 30, 2010
547 West 25th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues,
New York City, (212) 242-7727

Hans Hartung’s long career as a European abstract artist has not been fully understood by the New York art world. Born in Leipzig in 1904, he grew up in a cultured atmosphere; music was a central theme in his family life. Early on he copied artists, including the Old Masters and moderns such as Lovis Corinth, Oskar Kokoschka, and Emil Nolde. After studying at the art academies of Dresden and Munich, he decided to leave Germany, making his way to Paris in 1926. For a long time he lacked money and recognition. Hartung became a member of the French Foreign Legion in late 1939; while fighting in North Africa in 1944, he lost a leg. A year later, he became a French citizen, and in 1947 he had his first solo exhibition in Paris. He would go on to become more and more famous—in 1960, he won the International Grand Prix for painting at the Venice Biennial—and kept working until his death in 1989 in Antibes, France. The current show focuses on work made during the last year of his life, a period of prodigious creativity that resulted in some 360 paintings.

This is the first Hartung show in New York since the Metropolitan Museum’s large, and poorly received, display of his recent work, curated by Henry Geldzahler, in 1975. The canvases at Cheim & Read emphasize Hartung’s trademark lyric gesture:with the help of spray paint, he created works whose lyricism is extreme, bordering on the decorative. For a New York audience, acclimated to Pollock’s style for more than fifty years now, Hartung’s late work may seem a bit derivative; like other European artists of an Art Informel or Tachiste orientation, Hartung’s art doesn’t quite have the experimental power the New York School artists are known for. Yet is it unwise to write off Hartung’s achievement, which spanned more than a half century and encompassed a broad range of abstract styles. Indeed, in light of a life’s accomplishments, the late paintings look like a culmination of fruitful work with abstract imagery. In this show, Hartung looks like a major enthusiast: vaporous backgrounds of yellow and red compete with spirals of black paint in T1989-L14 (1989), whose mixture of misty and linear effects demonstrate a technical mastery and a sense of poetic expression, which from today’s point of view may appear showy but whose embellishments originate from a dedicated hand.

It would be easy to damn Hartung with faint praise, but for this viewer, his case is more complicated than it would at first seem. The artist’s control of painterly effects remains visually remarkable; the paintings carry increasing interest as one explores their composition. For example in T1989-A4 (1989) a tall acrylic on canvas, loping linear lines in black and gold interact with each other, the black lines forming a galaxy with a central nucleus, while the gold is mostly vertical, with some complications on the bottom right of the painting. In the upper left, there is a haze of blue-black dots, above which a light blue field prevails. Over time, the work begins to take on more weight than that of a cultivated imitation; while the painting is refined, it is also assertive in its vocabulary. Like most of the paintings on view, T1989-A4 manages both elegance and dumb force in ways that distinguish Hartung and transcend the idea that he is merely copying something. T1988-K29 (1988) is a marvelous work, in which black dots and lines crisscross the lower half; the background is composed of a dark blue haze of small dots and blotches. Here, as elsewhere in the show, Hartung flirts with decoration but mostly avoids it by means of an exuberance that is raw and cultured at the same time.

The post The Raw and the Cooked: The late paintings of Hans Hartung appeared first on artcritical.

Joe Fyfe, a painter known for his stark, almost belligerently informal abstraction, is also a critic and curator (and a contributing editor at artcritical).  In “Le Tableau,” a geographically and historically wide-angled summer group exhibition at Chelsea’s Cheim & Read Gallery that he has organized, Fyfe pugnaciously shakes by its horns the francophobia of the American critical establishment. The show pairs contemporary practitioners from both sides of the pond known for their almost semiotic interrogations of a painting’s support with 1950s and ‘60s “tachistes,” as the French liked to call their abstract expressionists: Jean Fautrier, Hans Hartung, the Canadian Jean-Paul Riopelle, and that quietly lyrical genius of sumptuous tones, the Russian-born Serge Poliakoff. These guys were big names at the time. But while they continue to command a loyal collector base in France, where they are often found in the concluding room of regional fine art museums, they are completely marginal to the official history of post war art promoted in the United States. Such “old masters” rub shoulders with Paris-friendly yanks such as Joan Mitchell, who resided in the city of lights for much of her time, and Milton Resnick. The result of Fyfe’s revisionist experiment is, quite apart from its critical or historical validity, both a tactile and a visual orgy of raw textures, smeared impastos, and punctured supports. Until September 3, 547 West 25th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues, 212-242-7727.

A version of this article, accompanied by a work of Serge Poliakoff’s, appeared at the New York Sun, June 28, 2010

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