The first major retrospective of artist-couple Anna-Eva Bergman and Hans Hartung reveals a shared vision forged in nature, music, and the infinite. This long-overdue catalogue traces their parallel yet intertwined journeys—two radical innovators who shaped post-war abstraction while their lives intersected across decades.
Bergman (1909–1987), the Swedish-Norwegian modernist, distilled landscapes into shimmering, metaphysical forms. Her use of gold leaf—evoking Nordic light, ancient icons, and geological strata—gave her abstractions an almost sacred weight. Meanwhile, Hartung (1904–1989), the German-born pioneer of art informel, slashed through the canvas with his signature kinetic gestures, a visual echo of his lifelong obsession with velocity and chaos.
What emerges is a portrait of artistic symbiosis. They met in 1929, parted ways, then reunited in 1952, their later years spent working side by side in the south of France. The book meticulously reconstructs their dialogue through paintings, sketches, and intimate archival traces—Bergman’s photographs of Mediterranean rocks mirroring Hartung’s lightning-strike brushwork, their mutual fascination with cosmic vastness rendered in radically different tongues.
Beyond biography, this volume positions Bergman as more than Hartung’s counterpart. “Bergman’s radiant, meticulously crafted works – long eclipsed by Hartung’s reputation – at last emerge from the shadows. Even Hartung’s celebrated 1960 Venice Biennale victory appears differently here – not as an individual achievement, but as part of their ongoing artistic dialogue about abstraction’s transcendental power.”
A welcome addition to Modernist scholarship, this catalogue doesn’t just document two great artists; it unveils the fierce conversation between them. – PCR 2025
Anna-Eva Bergman & Hans Hartung And We’ll Never Be Parted
Edited by: Theo Carnegy-Tan, Pierre Wat
Texts by: Theo Carnegy-Tan, Pauline Mari, Catherine Millet, Camille Morineau, Thomas Schlesser, Pierre Wat
Graphic Design: Zuzana Lednická, Andrea Vacovská (Studio Najbrt)
English
June 2025, 280 Pages
Hardcover
190mm x 265mm
ISBN:978-3-7757-5907-6