233 - Karl Hartung

Karl Hartung Untitled (Menschenmauer) 1956 Wax crayon drawing on firm wove paper. 179.7 x 283.5 cm. Signed and dated 'Hartung 56' in black lower right. Verso dated 'Januar Frebruar [sic!] 56' and annotated 'Künstlerbund'. - Slightly browned and with minor marginal defects. We would like to thank Anna Hartung, the Karl Hartung Estate, for the kind additional information. The drawing is registered in the archive of the Karl Hartung Estate. Provenance Kulturkreis der deutschen Wirtschaft (acquired directly rom the artist); loan to Von der Heydt-Museum Wuppertal Literature Cf. Birk Ohnesorge, Karl Hartung: Zeichnungen, Berlin 2008; Gudula Mayr, Der Bildhauer Karl Hartung als Zeichner, in: Arie Hartog (ed.), Im übertragenen Sinne - Bildhauer zeichnen, Dresden 2022, p. 158-171 In terms of its suggestive depiction of figures standing densely packed together, the drawing is reminiscent of works from Hartung’s sculptural oeuvre: small "Figurenwände" from 1953 and so-called "Figurenreliefs" from 1957 and 1958. Markus Krause writes of these reliefs that "the entire ‘pictorial surface’ is always […] conceived as a uniform, cohesive continuum of semi-three-dimensional forms, which are, however, sometimes so highly abstracted that at first glance they are difficult to identify as human figures" (Krause, Hartung, p. 160), a description that certainly applies to our drawing as well.