The Invisible Chord: Hans Hartung and Music

Opens Tuesday, May 5 3rd Floor Bringing together nearly eighty paintings, documents, and working tools, the exhibition explores the central role of sound in the artist's plastic and existential universe. From Bach to Pink Floyd, including composers such as Lili Boulanger, a landscape of energies, gestures, and resonances runs throughout his entire body of work. A gifted dancer and pianist in his youth, Hans Hartung was obsessively devoted to music—a true melomaniac, bordering on pathology. He abhorred silence. Pierre Soulages recounted: "His radio is always on—when he comes to see me, he cannot resist playing his favorite records." He adds: "Even moments of rest, and especially of work, were almost unbearable for him without music." Hartung's paintings are thus suffused with a sonic climate of rhythms, harmonies, and vocal or instrumental outbursts. Though silent, his work secretes melodic flows within its very fibers, emanating from the composers he revered. Who were they? First and foremost, the great figures of the Baroque: Bach, Handel, Vivaldi. The Goldberg Variations, the Sarabande, and The Four Seasons filled his studio as he painted, whether with a brush, a lithographic roller, or industrial spray guns. He also listened attentively to modern composers such as Lili Boulanger, Pierre Boulez, and even Philip Glass. Hartung was never a theorist of the relationships between sound, color, and form. Unlike artists such as Kandinsky, Schönberg, and their followers, who pursued synesthetic or intellectual explorations, his relationship to music was far more direct: physical, intuitive, and pragmatic. In short: without music, no pictorial creation, and without creation, no reason to exist, since for the artist, "the joy of living is inseparable from the joy of painting." This exhibition in Venice—where Hartung achieved one of his greatest triumphs—presents works from the 1920s to the end of his life, each bearing the trace of his gesture and action. They reflect his physicality, personal history, and place within collective history: as a World War II amputee and a German resister to Nazism. They also testify to what he was musically: a tireless listener whose canvases crystallized fugues, symphonies, operas, and sonatas. The exhibition traces the origins of this passion through early works and exclusive archives. It explores analogies between abstract pictorial processes and musical composition or orchestration, identifying affinities with figures such as Brahms and Stockhausen. It also delves into more speculative approaches, evoking, for instance, the cosmo-psychedelic dimension of the 1960s and its echoes in the contemporary rock scene, as well as the recurring temptation of silence. Finally, the exhibition invites visitors to discover several of Hartung’s studio tools, archival documents, and films, immersing them in his sonic universe. A specially commissioned video, presented in Riva Botta, features short interviews with composers, performers, and choreographers reflecting on Hartung’s work. Hans Hartung (b. 1904, Leipzig, d. 1989, Antibes) is one of the most acclaimed European painters of the 20th century and achieved international recognition as a seminal figure of art informel, which arose in France during World War II. His career really began in 1922: aged just eighteen, even he doesn't know the theories of Kandinsky, he produces a series of abstract watercolors striking by their sheer expressiveness. This is the beginning of a career that lasted nearly seventy years and was punctuated by constant technical innovations. Beyond the apparent spontaneity of his distinctively bold and almost calligraphic gestural abstraction, rationalism equally informed his style, which arose out of an early interest in the relationship between aesthetics and mathematics. Presented as a champion of a gestural, lyrical, and emotional painting, he remains yet also passionate for mathematics, and his painting must be apprehended through its rationality: from the 30s to the late 50s, he first produces small-size works, spontaneously executed on paper; then he creates the painting by laying down a grid and scaling up the small-size paper onto a canvas, referring point by point. The 60s also mark a turning point. Hartung stops working by reproducing small formats, but enters a patient search for technological innovation, including the production of multiple tools. 1960 is also the date on which he won the grand prize for painting at the Venice Biennale, reaching the top of international recognition. Hartung will never stop creating, painting with still more ardor until his last days in his property of Antibes that he designed himself. The Grand International Prize for Painting, which he won at the 1960 Venice Biennale, marked a decisive turn in his practice. Hartung began improvising directly onto canvas and experimenting with new media, namely fast-drying acrylic and vinyl paints, as well as scraping and spraying techniques. The quest for balance between spontaneity and perfection remained at the core of Hartung's painterly aesthetics until the end of his life. Curated by Thomas Schlesser Presented by Fondazione Querini Stampalia and Hartung-Bergman Foundation in collaboration with Perrotin Thomas Schlesser is Director of the Hartung-Bergman Foundation and Professor at the École Polytechnique in Paris. A specialist in Gustave Courbet, to whom he has devoted numerous studies, he is also the author of several essays and biographies, among them Art Facing Censorship (Beaux-Arts Éditions, 2011, reissued 2019), The Universe Without Man – The Arts Against Anthropocentrism (Hazan, 2016), Making Us Dream – From the Dream of the Enlightenment to the Advertising Nightmare (Gallimard, 2019), and Anna-Eva Bergman – Luminous Lives (Gallimard, 2022). The Querini Stampalia is one of Italy's oldest and most prestigious cultural foundations. Founded in 1869, for over 150 years it has upheld the vision of its founder, Count Giovanni, an audacious and visionary pioneer who conceived it as a place for research and learning, encounter and exchange, personal growth and dissemination of knowledge. Located in the heart of Venice, the Fondazione serves as a dynamic intersection where past and present converge: from its precious art collections and extensive library to the spaces reimagined by masters of contemporary architecture, including Carlo Scarpa, Valeriano Pastor, Mario Botta, Michele De Lucchi. A courageous, welcoming, and intellectually vibrant institution, the Querini Stampalia consistently amplifies its exceptional heritage, cultivating public trust and ensuring each visit is a memorable experience. Its history originates from a radical and profoundly innovative choice. Founded in 1994, the Hartung-Bergman Foundation was established according to the wishes of artists Hans Hartung (1904–1989) and Anna-Eva Bergman (1909–1987), major figures of modern art, with the aim of preserving and transmitting their work. In the 1960s, the couple acquired a vast olive grove on the heights of Antibes, where they built their villa and studios. This place of life and creation, marked by modernist architecture and a Mediterranean landscape, has become the heart of the Foundation. Emmanuel Perrotin founded his first gallery in 1990 at the age of twenty-one. He has worked closely with his roster of artists, some for more than thirty years, to help fulfill their ambitious projects. Perrotin participates in more than twenty art fairs each year, including Art Basel (Basel, Miami, Hong Kong, Paris +); Frieze (London, New York, Los Angeles, Seoul); the Dallas Art Fair; Expo Chicago; West Bund Art & Design (Shanghai); TEFAF (New York) among others.