15/10/2026
Fifteen Years of Silence, Then a Villa by the Sea 🌊
Paris, 1929. Two students cross paths at the painter André Lhote's academy 🎨. He is a young German from Leipzig, a doctor's son who built his own telescopes and cameras as a boy and was obsessed with lightning ⚡. She is a 20-year-old Norwegian who grew up without a father and almost without a home, and learned early not to depend on anyone. They marry on September 28 of that same year 💍
They move to Minorca and have a house built there 🏡. You'd assume they were happy. Then, on April 14, 1937, Anna-Eva Bergman sends Hans Hartung a letter ending it. She wants her independence.
For fifteen years they lose touch. He flees N**i Germany, joins the Foreign Legion, crosses Spain in secret, gets locked up there, then goes back to the fighting. In 1944 he is wounded in the Vosges, and his right leg is amputated, twice. She goes back to occupied Norway, draws anti-N**i caricatures, and learns to lay metal leaf, which becomes her signature ✨
In 1952 she returns to Paris and finds him again. He falls head over heels for her all over again ❤️. They move in together in 1953 and marry for the second time in 1957 💍
For the next few decades they work side by side. He paints in big, explosive gestures. She goes the other way, stripped back and almost meditative: horizons, stones, stars 🌌. In 1961 they buy a plot of land in Antibes, and Hartung wears out several architects before he finds the right one. On December 19, 1973, the villa-studio is finally handed over 🏛️
She dies in July 1987. Her last canvas is a horizon. Hartung, devastated, lives only to paint, flinging paint at the canvas with an almost furious energy. He finishes his last work on November 16, 1989, exactly a week after the Berlin Wall fell. He dies on December 7, at 10:50 p.m.
Don't miss visiting the Fondation Hartung Bergman when you're in 🇫🇷
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