Hartung Bergman Foundation

We might be tempted to believe that works of art—particularly those of Hans Hartung or Anna-Eva Bergman—exist in isolation, as pure arrangements of lines, masses, and colors, independent of any context. The idea is appealing: it would make canvas or paper a self-sufficient and silent object. Yet this absolute is a fiction. Every creation involves an element of address. It presents itself to a gaze, and that gaze never arrives unbiased. Thus, voices rise up around the works. Critics, writers, and curators put words to the aesthetic experience. In the case of Bergman and Hartung, this verbal production was profuse and diverse. It is sometimes dense, harsh, humorous, deferential, and occasionally dithyrambic. Dominique Aubier thus evokes "the adornment of profound truths" in relation to Bergman's metallic surfaces; Pierre Daix writes that, in her work, "light speaks." Madeleine Rousseau sees in Hartung's gestural virulence a "struggle with reality," while Pierre Cabanne, for his later years, evokes an "admirable trembling of time" borrowed from Chateaubriand. These formulations, often erudite, sometimes caustic, each seek to capture tensions, rhythms, and flows. Above all, they contribute to the cultural and historical construction of images.