THE ART JOURNAL FOR CONTEMPORARY CULTURE, ART HISTORY, AND THOUGHT

What Remains When the Love Story Is Set Aside?

Anna-Eva Bergman and Hans Hartung at Kunsthalle Praha

DOSSIERS

Hans Struberger

10/13/20255 min read

Installation view of Anna-Eva Bergman & Hans Hartung: And We’ll Never Be Parted, Kunsthalle Praha, 2025. A visitor seated before works by Anna-Eva Bergman. Photograph: DOKUNST.

The story almost tells itself. Anna-Eva Bergman and Hans Hartung met in Paris in 1929, married, separated, survived war and exile on different paths, and found each other again fifteen years later. An exhibition could easily turn this material into a drama in which the paintings become testimony to a love affair. And We’ll Never Be Parted at Kunsthalle Praha is aware of the story’s appeal. Its title promises inseparability; letters, photographs and works the artists gave each other make that bond tangible. Yet the exhibition aims to be more than the story of an artist couple. On its final day, the question worth asking is one the title cannot answer: what can we understand about Bergman’s and Hartung’s art if we set their relationship aside for a moment?

For Bergman, the answer begins with an experience of space too readily called stillness. Her pared-down forms retain memories of horizons, stones, mountains and boats without simply depicting them. Metal leaf and paint alter the surface as the light and the viewer’s position change. A form that first appears fixed, almost emblematic, resists any final definition. In her Stones of Castile of 1970, Bergman joins the experience of a particular landscape to a method that releases the image from any one place. The form is condensed, but it is not timeless: travel, perception and the painter’s material choices continue to work within it. Nor does the rhythm of her paintings arise from repeated lines alone. It emerges between a surface that receives light and a viewer who must move to see it.

Hartung’s work demands another kind of attention. His lines can look as though they arrived on the surface in a single unstoppable instant. That appearance long sustained his reputation as a painter of the immediate gesture. With Hartung, however, the visible sweep tells us remarkably little about how a painting was made. For decades he transferred small drawings to larger formats using a grid; later he expanded his methods through scratching, spraying and an array of tested tools. Between the first mark and the finished painting may lie a drawing, an enlargement, a technical invention and another decision. None of this diminishes the work’s energy. It restores a precision concealed by the word “spontaneous”: Hartung also composed the appearance of suddenness.

Only then does comparison become worthwhile. Bergman’s light is no gentle answer to Hartung’s forceful line, just as his marks are no counterpart to her supposed calm. Both ask how an abstract form can make more perceptible than it names. But they pursue that question under different conditions. Bergman holds a form open through surface, scale and shifting light. Hartung investigates how a movement becomes a trace, and how that trace can still assert movement when it has been planned, transferred or produced with a tool. Their affinity lies less in the appearance of their work than in their refusal of a familiar assumption: that abstraction, by giving up recognisable objects, must also give up experience.

The fifteen years they spent apart are crucial to this understanding. Bergman did not develop her visual language in a waiting room between two marriages. Her renewed encounter with the landscape of northern Norway around 1950 helped shape her later abstraction. Hartung, meanwhile, had to continue working amid persecution, war and severe injury, and reorganise his practice after 1945. When they met again in 1952, they were artists whose work had been formed precisely by the years they had spent separately. To describe that time merely as a painful interruption in an essentially shared career would miss the exhibition’s most important finding: closeness becomes interesting here because it does not presume artistic sameness.

Together with the Fondation Hartung-Bergman, curators Theo Carnegy-Tan and Pierre Wat have assembled more than 300 works and documents. That breadth is a strength: it makes development and contradiction available for comparison. It also presents a curatorial temptation. A letter can draw attention away from a painting; a photograph can make the togetherness of two lives seem more convincing than the differences between two canvases. The works they gave each other especially invite us to seek proof of intimacy in the art. As records of mutual recognition, they are revealing. As explanations of the paintings, they would be too convenient. The fact that two artists saw and valued each other does not yet explain why one used metal leaf or the other enlarged a drawing.

The exhibition’s account of their equality also requires care. Its accompanying text speaks of a principle of equality between Bergman and Hartung. That may describe something important about their personal and artistic relationship. It must not be confused with the history of their public recognition. Hartung became a defining figure of European postwar abstraction during his lifetime; in 1960 he received the Grand Prize for Painting at the Venice Biennale. Bergman’s work was exhibited and studied, but for many years it did not receive comparable institutional attention. That two people took each other seriously as artists did not oblige the art world to do the same. A retrospective can expose that disparity. It cannot erase it simply by placing both names on the same wall.

This makes the decision to mount a joint exhibition both productive and delicate. It gives Bergman the scale, visibility and archival attention of a major art-historical presentation. Yet it places her once more beside the man whose fame has so often framed the reception of her work. The question is not whether her paintings can hold their own next to Hartung’s. They plainly can. The question is whether visitors learn to see them beyond that comparison as well. Bergman’s painting has its own geographical and intellectual points of reference, from Norwegian coastlines to Spanish landscapes. Its meaning need not begin where a resemblance to Hartung can be found.

And We’ll Never Be Parted is at its strongest when it treats common ground as something difficult: an enduring exchange between people who did not dissolve their work into each other’s. Its account becomes less convincing when every difference threatens to become evidence of a deeper unity. This is more than a quibble with the exhibition’s title. It concerns the way art history looks at couples—and how quickly it turns two independent practices into a shared destiny. The Prague retrospective provides the means to judge more carefully: major paintings, early experiments, studio tools and an exceptionally rich archive. Its achievement is to let us see Bergman and Hartung together. Critical attention begins with the recognition that we need not read them as a single body of work.

Exhibition: Anna-Eva Bergman & Hans Hartung: And We’ll Never Be Parted, Kunsthalle Praha, 5 June–13 October 2025. Curated by Theo Carnegy-Tan and Pierre Wat; co-produced with the Fondation Hartung-Bergman.