‘It was love at first sight, again': Prague exhibition celebrates work of pair at heart of Europe's avant garde

The Guardian

6 hours ago

They created some of the most riveting abstract art of the 20th century, fought Nazis with the gun and the pen, married, divorced and married again. Now the continent-spanning and nigh-forgotten love story of the Burton-Tayloresque couple at the heart of the European avant garde is finally being given its due at a major art institution.
And We'll Never Be Parted, exhibiting at Prague's Kunsthalle gallery, is the first show to reunite the Norwegian painter Anna-Eva Bergman and German-born Hans Hartung.
Consisting of 350 items across two floors, the exhibition features paintings, photographs, tools – and the extraordinary breakup letter that spelled the pair's separation but allowed them to remarry as creative equals 15 years later.
Born in Stockholm to a Swedish father and a Norwegian mother, Bergman trained as an artist in Oslo and Paris, where she and Hartung met and married in 1929 before moving to Dresden. In the early phase of her career she made a living as an illustrator, including of anti-Nazi cartoons.
Hartung, born in Leipzig in 1904, was quicker to hit his stride as a serious artist. His idiosyncratic scribbles, swirls and scratch marks helped him achieve international recognition as a key figure of art informel, a largely European counter-movement to American abstract expressionism. Where the action paintings of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning were often violent in their gestures, Hartung executed his ideas in a more controlled manner, preparing his marks with smaller sketches and a grid system.
Though single works by each featured in a 1932 group show in Oslo, it was Hartung who enjoyed most of the limelight. In their reviews, some critics referred to Bergman simply as Mrs Hartung.
On 14 April 1937, Bergman announced her separation from Hartung in a bluntly phrased letter sent from Sanremo, Italy. While insisting that 'the cause is not another man', it noted that 'from an erotic point of view, we are simply not a match'. Above all, what motivated her decision to leave their marriage, she wrote, was the need to develop as an artist in her own right.
'I shall thus try to make my way through the world on my own, and I shall succeed. I must be completely free and alone, and above all with a lot of time – no housework and other worries – to focus just on my own work while still having time to rest on the side.'
Bergman concludes her breakup note with: 'May your art always come first, just as before. It has been your strength and perhaps also (on a human level) your weakness.'
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After moving back to Norway, she studied ecclesiastical art and the use of gilding, making abstract paintings that drew inspiration from the bleak landscape around her, returning again and again to archetypal natural forms such as mountains, rocks and fjords.
'Without the separation, they wouldn't have developed as artists in the way they did,' said Theo Carnegy-Tan, one of the show's curators. 'They needed the time apart.'
Having seen communist and Jewish friends 'disappeared' under the Nazis, both artists experienced first-hand the rise of fascism. Bergman went into hiding in the Norwegian countryside to avoid being captured by occupying German forces, while Hartung was interrogated and roughed up by the Gestapo.
After war broke out, he refused to serve under the German flag and joined the French foreign legion, later losing a leg after sustaining severe injuries in the Battle of the Vosges in 1944. Confronted with mutilated bodies on the battlefield, and inspired by the Spanish painter Julio González, whose daughter he married after the breakup from Bergman, he returned briefly to more figurative painting.
Yet after writing each other a series of cautious letters, the pair met again for the first time after the end of the war, at a González retrospective in Paris in 1952. 'It was love at first sight, again,' said co-curator Pierre Wat.
In 1961, the remarried couple acquired a plot of land to house their villa-studio in Antibes, southern France, where they expanded their artistic practices. They died two years apart, Bergman in 1987 and Hartung in 1989.
While Hartung's standing as a key figure of abstract expressionism in Europe was advanced immediately after his death, Bergman's work has been rediscovered only over the past five years. Her first major retrospective was at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris in 2023 and her first solo show at Oslo's National Museum in 2024.
'Bergman stood outside the big artistic movements of her time, and it took some time for her reputation to be elevated,' said Carnegy-Tan. 'It wouldn't have been right for this reunion to take place until they are treated as equals.'