27 - Karl Hartung

Karl Hartung Liegende Circa 1947/1948 Bronze. Height 20.8 cm, width 49.5 cm, depth 31 cm. Name stamp 'HARTUNG' and the special mark on the underside. Foundry mark "W.GEISLER BERLIN" on the inside of the right, abstracted arm. From a total edition of 6 casts and one artist's or estate cast. One cast each is held in the collections of the Museum Folkwang in Essen as well as the Kunstverein Wuppertal. Life-time cast. - With a patina shimmering from dark brown to olive green. In excellent condition. Krause 370 We would like to thank Anna Hartung, the Estate of Karl Hartung, for the additional information. Provenance Kulturkreis der deutschen Wirtschaft (acquired directly from the artist); on loan to the Suermondt-Ludwig Museum, Aachen Exhibitions Cf. i.a. Berlin 1948 (Galerie Gerd Rosen), Karl Hartung, with ill.; Zurich 1949 (Kunsthaus), Kunst in Deutschland 1930-1949, cat. no. 92; Berlin 1949 (Galerie Springer), Künstler der "Berliner Neuen Gruppe"; Berlin 1952 (Haus am Waldsee), Karl Hartung, cat. no. 69; Cologne 1961 (Wallraf-Richartz-Museum), Ars viva '61, cat. no. 34 (this cast); Rotterdam 1964 (Museum Boymans-van Beuningen), Duitse Kunst van heden, cat. no. 76; Berlin 1978 (Akademie der Künste), Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts, with ill.; Berlin 1988 (Galerie Pels-Leusden), Karl Hartung, cat. no. 26 with ill.; Nuremberg/Berlin/Schleswig/Marl/Bremen 1998 (Germanisches Nationalmuseum/Georg Kolbe Museum/Schleswig-Holsteinisches Landesmuseum Schloss Gottorf/Skulpturenmuseum Glaskasten Marl/Gerhard-Marcks-Haus), Karl Hartung. Werke und Dokumente Literature Cf. Juliane Roh, Industrie als Mäzen, in: Die Kunst und das schöne Heim, vol. 52, 1954, no. 4, p. 139 with ill. The “Liegende”, which was created around 1947/48, is a concentrated treatment of a theme that would occupy Karl Hartung for decades: the nude, particularly the female nude, a classic motif in the history of art. For Hartung, however, it is less an object of study than the point of departure in his search for a form which makes it possible to visualise the essential, universal aspect of humanity as an aspect of creation. The female body is recognisable but not defined. The form of the “Liegende” becomes open or closed depending on the angle from which it is viewed. One moment, the contours of a female body emerge and, a moment later, the figure seems to flow back into an abstract, organic form. Individual passages increase in volume and expand out towards the viewer while others recede. Hartung never permits the body to become entirely solid. It remains in a state of motion that develops out of the structure of the figure’s body: the torsion of the midsection, the tipping of the legs to the side, the raising of the upper body in the opposite direction. This motion is supported by three regularly distributed points of contact with the surface beneath the sculpture. Between them, the bronze detaches itself from the surface and rises up, opening interstices and activating the space underneath and between the forms. “Throughout his life, he continued to declare that nature was his model. His greatest wish was to form something of the same kind, to stand alongside nature as its equal. He was interested in an objectification of sculptural form, […] removed from any dependency on one’s own self. This withdrawal of one’s individual self for the sake of the artistic revelation of an objective, universal formal language is a central characteristic of his work,” writes Markus Krause (in: Karl Hartung. 1908–1967, Metamorphosen von Mensch und Natur. Monographie und Werkverzeichnis, Nuremberg 1998, p. 74). This aspiration becomes apparent in the reclining figure. The individual body dissolves in order to become an organic, anthropomorphic form. A classical motif becomes what Hartung himself referred to as “vegetative form”: a timeless form developed out of nature.