In Antibes, the master cubes of the Hartung-Bergman Foundation

From the street, you can only see the bamboo that borders the estate and, very high up, the tops of the trees. Past the gate of the Hartung-Bergman Foundation, which opened its doors in May, on the heights of Antibes, the villa with its stripped elegance is gradually revealed. White lines and oblique walls borrow from the purity of modernism as much as from the simplicity of vernacular architecture. It is here, far from the tumult of the Riviera, that the painters Anna-Eva Bergman and Hans Hartung spent their last fifteen years.

In his book Anna-Eva Bergman. Bright Lives, to be published in November by Gallimard, Thomas Schlesser, director of the foundation, reports that when Marcelle Driessen, the cook and living memory of the place, applied in 1973 to serve the masters of the place, she tensed up. ” What is that ? », she wonders, suspicious, at the sight of the geometric cubes. Of a style unlike the Provençal farmhouses in the neighborhood, they can only be inhabited by “spies” !

Read also Hans Hartung, lively painter

Very quickly, Marcelle understands that the artists with strong accents she is dealing with are among the most talented of their time. A figure of the post-war Paris school, the German Hans Hartung was then known for a falsely lyrical, falsely gestural painting, where nothing in reality is left to chance.

Less famous than her husband, the Norwegian Anna-Eva Bergman paints paintings imbued with silence and mystery, crossed with gold or silver leaf. An extraordinary couple “this crippled pirate and this reed-woman”, as Thomas Schlesser nicely describes them. A solid couple too, who waited, together, the time it took for success to peak, beyond their 45 years.

A maniacal sense of detail

Their romantic and artistic journey is not trivial. They married young, in 1929, divorced eight years later, without really ceasing to love each other. So much so that after a moving reunion they left their spouses and united again in 1957. To shelter this second chance that life offers them, and also to work in peace, they need a new place, far from of the Parisian tumult. The couple hesitated between Carboneras, in Spain, where all the artistic-literary intelligentsia of the time converged, and the south of France, where they stayed from their meeting in 1929.

In 1961, they fell in love with this 2-hectare plot overgrown with broom, wild grass and scrub, planted with two hundred olive trees and pines. All around, greenhouses and orchards. “The place is remote, wild, and at the same time five minutes from the hospital”, notes Thomas Schlesser. Hartung, who lost a leg in the Battle of Belfort in 1944, where he fought in the ranks of the Foreign Legion, needs regular care. Anna-Eva Bergman is in fragile health.

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