ORDER

Hans Hartung was one of the twentieth century’s outstanding artists: a brilliant practitioner of abstract painting with an unrivalled sensitivity to how the viewer’s experience is shaped by space, colour, and light. He was also a highly perceptive commentator on a wide variety of artists and artistic styles. In this volume, the distinguished art historian Thomas Schlesser—currently the Director of the Hartung-Bergman Foundation—gathers together Hartung’s most illuminating remarks on his predecessors and contemporaries, as well as on the creative process more generally.

Hartung’s forcefully expressed views on artists as varied as Hals, Picasso, and Kandinsky are exceptionally insightful, while his comments on the most fundamental elements of painting—on the importance of starting with the right size of canvas and the joys of working with dark colours—vividly evoke Hartung’s deeply felt pleasure in the work of artistic creation. Going beyond his creative endeavours, this volume is furthermore a unique evocation of Hartung’s formidable personality, and of the courage and loyalty to principle that shaped his remarkable life. Hans Hartung in His Own Words is, in short, an indispensable companion to a major figure in the cultural life of the last century.