Hartung, Hans

French painter of German origin, Hans Hartung was born in Leipzig in 1904. At the beginning of the 1920’s, he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts of Dresden. Before the rise of Nazism, he left Germany in 1931. He settled permanently in Paris in 1934. There he met Kandinsky and Mondrian and became befriended with Miró, Calder and Henri Goetz, the inventor of the carborundum method of printmaking. 

Painter and prolific printmaker, he gets in 1960 the Grand International Prize of Painting of the Venice Biennale and in 1967 the Prix d’Honneur of Printmaking of the Ljubljana Biennale, Ljubljana, Yugoslavia. Considered as one of the most important representatives of “abstract art”, he is also recognized as a precursor to “action painting”. Very early on, large exhibitions are devoted to him: particularly a retrospective at the Musée National d’Art Moderne de Paris in 1968. 

Hans Hartung died in Antibes in 1989.