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Lot Essay
T 1949-24 is an important work of gestural calligraphy from the highpoint of Hartung's career. Hartung was by nature an abstract expressionist painter. As early as 1922 he had made his first foray into pictorial abstraction with a remarkable series of brightly coloured watercolours that he made while in complete ignorance of the first abstract painters such as Malevich, Mondrian or Kandinsky. It was however, not until after a long break from painting enforced by the many trials and tribulations he suffered during the Second World War that Hartung first began to paint in a deliberate and progressively abstract way. Returning to his father-in-law Julio Gonzalez's studio in Arcueil after the war Hartung began to make paintings in which the gestural act of painting became indivisible from the resultant work itself. Responding to the belief that a line is a force which borrows its energy from he who traces it, each mark and motion of Hartung's brush should, he believed, encapsulate and express the very nature of the force and action that went into making it. As an interaction between action and material and between man and canvas, painting in this way would not become just a record or expression of the artist's psychological experience in making it, it would in fact be that experience.
In the late forties, alongside artists like Soulages, Pollock and Wols, Hartung became one of the leading exponents of what was then known as Action Painting. Like much of the art of this era, a large part of Hartung's aesthetic can be seen to reflect an Eastern sensibility towards the act of creation. In particular, what was central to Hartung's art was the line as a graphic record of the painter's psyche. This predominantly graphic feature of his painting, which he was to pursue throughout most of the 1950s and '60s, is perhaps most pronounced in paintings of the late 1940s like T 1949-24. At this time Hartung was painting and experimenting with paintings of black lines on China paper - works that inevitably brought out a strong calligraphic nature to his line. In T 1949-24 this calligraphy is transformed into canvas by painting, over three sparse blocks of brown, yellow and blue, a dramatic and homogenised calligraphic cohesion of energetic force and expression. Held together into a disparate unity of form, the work pulsates with the gothic energy of Hartung's line and demonstrates his enviable command over his materials. It also clearly reflects Hartung's almost automatic approach to his painting, embracing the spontaneous and opportune mark in the same way that distinguishes oriental calligraphy.
In the late forties, alongside artists like Soulages, Pollock and Wols, Hartung became one of the leading exponents of what was then known as Action Painting. Like much of the art of this era, a large part of Hartung's aesthetic can be seen to reflect an Eastern sensibility towards the act of creation. In particular, what was central to Hartung's art was the line as a graphic record of the painter's psyche. This predominantly graphic feature of his painting, which he was to pursue throughout most of the 1950s and '60s, is perhaps most pronounced in paintings of the late 1940s like T 1949-24. At this time Hartung was painting and experimenting with paintings of black lines on China paper - works that inevitably brought out a strong calligraphic nature to his line. In T 1949-24 this calligraphy is transformed into canvas by painting, over three sparse blocks of brown, yellow and blue, a dramatic and homogenised calligraphic cohesion of energetic force and expression. Held together into a disparate unity of form, the work pulsates with the gothic energy of Hartung's line and demonstrates his enviable command over his materials. It also clearly reflects Hartung's almost automatic approach to his painting, embracing the spontaneous and opportune mark in the same way that distinguishes oriental calligraphy.