Hans Hartung (September 21, 1904 – December 7, 1989) was a French naturalized German painter.
Hartung was not a student of Vasilij Vasil’evič Kandinskij, as is often thought but there was a strong bond of mutual esteem. In 1935, to avoid Nazi persecution of the so-called degenerate art, he left Germany and moved to Paris, where he lived in great hardships. The war broke out, on 26 December 1939 he joined the Foreign Legion, but after a few months he was demobilized to Sidi Bel Abbes; reached France worked as an agricultural worker. In 1942 he took refuge in Spain, where he was arrested and imprisoned for seven months. After his liberation, he reached North Africa and on 8 December 1942 joined the Legion again. Assigned to the Road Regiment fought in Tunisia and landed in France on 1 October 1944. In November he was seriously wounded in the Belfort fighting in an attempt to drag an injured fellow soldier into his own lines. Evacuated, he was amputated of his right leg. He was reformed by the Legion on 19 May 1945. Naturalized French in 1946, he was decorated with the 1939–45 War Cross, the Military Medal and the Legion of Honor.
In 1945 he resumed his pictorial activity interrupted due to the conflict.
If in the first works he highlighted adherence to non-figurative art, characterized by abstract expressive elements, in the second postwar period he developed an informal research on painting based on the value of ‘sign’, on the mixture of spontaneity and control, graphic and pictorial cues.
In 1960 he received the Grand Prix of the Venice Biennale.
