Lot 57 D

In the 1950s and 1960s, Hans Hartung was classed as one of the most important representatives of international Informel. Born in Leipzig in 1904, he trained at the art academy there and in Dresden, before moving to France in 1935 where he lived in Paris at the centre of the artistic avant-garde of that time. After the war, he quickly became a celebrated protagonist of the ‘École de Paris’ whose informal visual language he helped develop and whose success temporarily outshone the work of Picasso, the universal artist. Hartung’s decisive contribution were the lines which he applied to the canvas or paper with brushes or pens, but also with besoms, rakes and palm fronds. From 1960, Hartungs’s work became truly bold and avant-garde, when he was awarded a prize at the Venice Biennale and created the present pastel and chalk drawing ‘P 1960-203’. On a large format, he floats brown, black, blue and green-yellow bundles of lines over a light background. Whilst the colour scheme emits a fresh, calm effect, the strokes convey a dynamism and youthful vigour – especially the lines that are scratched back into the materiality, once again energising the composition.