Hans Hartung rediscovered in New York

Hans Hartung (1904-1989) was the greatest German painter of his generation. His international reputation has long been secure, but the current exhibition of his works at the Cheim & Read Gallery in Chelsea, all dating from the last full year of his life, is the first in America since a retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1975-76.

Why the big lay-off? Why no U.S. galleries to sell Hartung's work? Why no interest from other museums? Other German artists— Baselitz, Richter, Kiefer— have certainly received attention. But, for three and a half decades, Hartung could hardly even be found in group shows. It was as though he had hit a wall of silence— or an organized boycott.

Was it an unmentionable scandal? A Nazi past? A drastic fall-off in the work?

Far from any of these. Hartung fled the Nazis, joined the French Foreign Legion, and wound up a prisoner of war. After World War II, he emerged in Paris as the founder of a major art movement, tachism. He settled in Antibes, not far from Picasso. He had a long and happy marriage. And, as the current show makes clear, he was still at the height of his powers even at the end of his life— indeed, more productive than ever, creating some 360 works in his last 12 months.

The answer, it seems, lies in two words: Hilton Kramer.

When the critic was king

Kramer was New York's reigning art critic, at least in the daily press, during the 1970s. That was the era when the critic was king. A nod from the great and the powerful could make or break a career, or even a whole movement.

The critics had canonized Abstract Expressionism in the '50s, and Pop Art in the '60s. Nothing had replaced these movements— indeed, nothing has to the present day— but everyone was looking for the Next Big Thing.

Not only reputations were riding on what the critics thought, but serious money too. The art market had begun its relentless inflation, one hardly broken even by the crash of '08. (Did you see that Qing vase that went for $69.5 million at a suburban London auction house the other day?)

Nowadays, cash need hardly follow criticism: The market has developed a dynamic of its own, and excess liquidity, as they call obscene profit these days, is seeking its haven in fine art instead of junk mortgages. The '70s were another matter, though, and Hartung's Met show was coordinated with a gallery exhibition.

Commercial disaster

When, then, Kramer wondered in his New York Times review how a painter of such "surpassing mediocrity and dullness" as Hartung could ever take up the space of a major museum, it was not only bad news for the Met but a commercial disaster for Hartung. Not a single one of his paintings sold, and not a single dealer (or curator) wanted to hear from him again.

Kramer had done this before, when he attacked the now-legendary exhibit of Philip Guston's Klan paintings as the works of a would-be "stumble-bum." Guston's reputation didn't recover in his lifetime, but his Klansmen now hang in some of the world's great museums.

For Hartung, the recovery time has been much longer, at least on these shores. That makes the show of 12 of his late acrylics at Cheim & Read all the more of an event. Even in so modest a sampling, it's obvious at once that you're in the presence of a major painter.

At work in a wheelchair

A wartime injury had left Hartung permanently disabled, and in his last years he was largely confined to a wheelchair, working with various assistants. At the end, he devised a novel method of applying acrylics through a spray hooked up to an old garden can. This enabled him to work quickly, but without sacrificing any of the phenomenal calligraphic dexterity that distinguished his art.

It also returned him to a very old theme. As a child, Hartung had built himself a telescope out of cardboard tubing and an old camera lens. The sprayed works, with their backdrops of particolored dots against a pale, inflected ground, suggest stellar spaces; and the bunched forms that appear against them, with their long, flared extensions— looping tendrils of color, some solid and fernlike, others a discontinuous chain, like DNA sequencing— seem to indicate a primeval birthing process.

It is as if Hartung is trying, on these canvases, to depict a perpetual genesis that embraces both cosmic vastness and the inmost intricacies of organic form. They are fragments of an infinity that ray simultaneously inward and out.

As rewarding as the current exhibition may be, it only whets one's appetite for more of Hartung, and for a full retrospective that will put his entire career in context. This time, let us hope, Hilton Kramer won't attend.