Lot 41 D

Hans Hartung was a life-long artistic loner who went his own, unswerving way detached from contemporary art trends. His spontaneous, gestural painting suggests classifying him in the area of the automated working methods of Tachism. However, Hartung combined direct, improvised painterly expression with a conscious concept for an image, which strived for a tension-laden, yet harmoniously structured composition.
To achieve this, the artist used a wide variety of techniques and tools, some of which he borrowed from other genres. “In my youth […], I created a few etchings, which were then followed by others in 1953. This working technique of scratching on copper and zinc, is really made for me and even twenty or thirty years later, my inclination towards it is perceptible in my painting; especially during the years from 1961 until 1965 when I used various tools to scratch – mostly dark colours – into the freshly applied paint.” (Hans Hartung, cited in: exhib.cat. Hans Hartung. So beschwor ich den Blitz, Museum Ludwig Köln 2004, p.26).
The gestural scratch marks also characterise “T1962-31”. They create transparencies in the surface of the picture and contrast vividly with the black linear mesh overlying them.