LINES OF FORCE

BEFORE World War II, abstract art was dominated by the geometrical and almost architectural paintings that grew out of cubism and culminated in Piet Mondrian's austere compositions in primary red, white and blue. But in the past decade has come a new experiment with intense, expressive forms that use flowing, linear rhythms as a kind of "handwriting" or "gesture-painting," linking Western art and the ancient Oriental art of calligraphy.

Leader of the calligraphists (a style that includes U.S. Painter Mark Tobey's famed "white writing" and the late Jackson Pollock's lassolike drip whirls) is German-born, French-naturalized Hans Hartung. Now considered a Frenchman by the French, who last November bought out his first one-man show in nine years at prices ranging from $4,000 to $6,000, and a German by the Germans, who are honoring his works with a ten-month-long museum tour, Hartung, at 52, is being hailed by critics as "one of the prophets of modern art" (in Paris) and ''one of the most influential painters of the postwar period" (in Germany). In the U.S., where Hartung is having his first one-man show at Manhattan's Kleemann Galleries, the Museum of Modern Art's Director of Collections Alfred Barr Jr. calls him "perhaps the best master of calligraphic abstraction." Hartung himself is more laconic. Asked by a Parisian art critic to describe how he painted, he replied: "I draw lines."

Away with Animals. Born the son of a well-to-do Leipzig physician, Hartung began drawing in infancy, as most children do. But, recalls Hartung, "while the other kids were drawing manikins and animals, I tried to draw thunderstorms." Later on he filled the margins of his schoolbooks with doodles that seemed best to express his feelings. Outwardly, Hartung followed the trend of his generation, haunted the museums in his teens admiring Rembrandt, Matthias Grueunewald and El Greco, began painting in the style of Viennese Expressionist Kokoschka.

The painting that proved to be his turning point was Franz Marc's Fate of the Animals, done just before World War I. Standing before it, Hartung found that "the more I looked, the more the animals annoyed me. I forced myself to overlook them, and back home I tried to express the same rhythm with color only, without using animals or any other objects."

Down & Out in Paris. Though Hartung, at his father's insistence, continued his academic art training, dabbling in mathematics on the side, he had by 1922 already stumbled on the secret of letting the line speak for itself. Set against monochrome backgrounds, it could float as joyously as a ribbon on a June breeze, take on the tension of coiled springs, jam up in anger, ascend in triumph or struggle behind the heavy, heavy black grillwork of despair. But for decades Hartung's new-found language spoke only to himself and a few fellow artists. Between 1922 and 1946 he sold only three paintings. Says he: "I don't know how I managed to survive."

Suspect in Nazi Germany for his abstract art, he slipped across the border to France, worked for a time in Paris with Pioneer Sculptor-Welder Julio Gonzalez (whose daughter was Hartung's second wife). His painting T 38-2* done at the time, shows the sculptor's influence in the central construction, also expresses Hartung's washed-out feeling and jittery state in its pale blues and nervous lines.

Treading the Precipice. A few days before war broke out in September 1939, Hartung enlisted in the French Foreign Legion. Demobilized after the fall of France, he escaped later to Spain, was thrown into a concentration camp. Freed through U.S. intervention, he re-enlisted in the Foreign Legion, lost his right leg during the big Belfort offensive in November 1944.

Since the war Hartung has pushed his painting beyond the nervous thin lines of his earlier compositions, is now painting sweeping, large-scale duotone arabesques, alternating them with carefully studied, dryly painted compositions such as T 50-21. Although treading the precipice faced by all expressionists--that any letdown in tension reduces a work to mere decoration --Hartung has no fears that his work will not be understood. Says he: "Abstract paintings are intensely emotional creations which ought to touch the innermost chords of the soul. Future generations will learn to read this new language."

*Hartung numbers his works in sequence: T for tableau (picture), followed by year and number.

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