Hans Hartung was one of the few German artists of his generation who, after only a few figurative attempts, were consistently committed to abstraction from the start on. A lecture by Wassily Kandinsky, which the Leipzig-born artist heard during his student days in 1925, would be a key experience. Hartung began to pursue a path of abstraction in the early 1930s, and his painting eventually made him one of the main protagonists of European Informalism. Our early abstract composition impresses with its progressive, flat-gestural imagery and the element of superimposition, both stylistic devices that would have decisive influence on Hartung's further painterly oeuvre.

The present composition appears to be placed on the canvas in a playful and light manner, with an almost dance-like gesture. The lines and shapes on a light background have a highly dynamic expression and at the same time a dreamy, otherworldly character. Hartung brought the fine, swirling lines and the confidently placed color areas from bright green-yellow to earthy brown into a fascinating harmony and balance. The staged weightlessness is reminiscent of the famous mobiles by Alexander Calder, whom Hartung met as part of the Paris avant-garde at the end of the 1930s. Hartung realized a fascinating lightness and transparency in our composition "T1974-32", it allows for a seemingly endless view of distant celestial spheres into which we sink our gaze in order to completely surrender to the dancing forms. In the present composition, Hartung also masterfully succeeded in transferring the dynamics of his drawings into painting.

Those familiar with Hartung's working methods in the 1940s, will be even more fascinated by the masterfully perfected illusion of spontaneity. Until 1960, Hartung's compositions were based on precisely prepared drawings that he in some cases transferred to large format using quadrature. Hartung was concerned with preserving the expression of his handwriting and the immediate creative energy of the drawing. In the work offered here, Hartung actually comes quite close to his artistic goal, as it celebrates the gestural energy of the line, a characteristic property of European Informalism in the following years. The art movement was based on free gesture as a direct expression of the subconscious, which finds expression on the canvas in the tradition of the surrealist "écriture automatique". "T1947-32" is an outstanding early example of Hartung's transformation of free graphic gesture into painting, making it a seminal work for his oeuvre and European Informalism.

In the 1970s, Hartung's oeuvre was honored in Germany with a grand retrospective at the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne, and in the USA with a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum, New York in 1975. Today Hartung's paintings are in many international museums like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Tate Gallery, London. [JS]