05/28/2013
Like his friend Pablo Picasso, Swiss-American painter John Konstantin Hansegger (1908-1989) was never content to limit his reach to the movement of the moment, continually adding new styles to his repertoire, several of them of his own invention.
In his native Switzerland he was a child prodigy, influenced by Ferdinand Hodler and Albert Anker and garnering acclaim for his realistic landscapes and portraits. By 1932 he had found his way to the avant-garde scene in Paris, encouraged by Picasso, Leger and Mondrian as he mastered cubism and surrealism. In 1936 he painted his famous portrait of Pablo Picasso from a live sitting--a rare honor, with a brilliant result. Then, challenged by Picasso to invent his own style, Hansegger created the unprecedented Abstract Parallels series, a style he would continue to refine for the rest of his life.
This style, in part gestural Action Painting and in part Color Field, anticipated the later development of Abstract Impressionism in America. Invited to join the Surindependants in 1937, Hansegger exhibited at their shows all over Europe, winning the Silver Medal of Paris in 1939 with one of his Abstract Parallels paintings. Soon the war forced him to abandon his burgeoning career in Paris and return to his native Switzerland where he was an important member of Paul Klee’s Allianz.
In 1942 he founded the historical gallery Des Eaux Vives, in Zurich, which providing a safe exhibition venue for fellow Allianz artists Kandinsky, Klee, Max Bill, Hans and Sophie Tucker Arp, Max Huber, Richard Lohse, Max Bill and many others during the dark days of World War II. Most of his Allianz work was in the Art Konkret style, sometimes blended with his Abstract Parallels motif.
After the war he exhibited in the rigorous avant-garde Galerie Nierendorf Gallery in New York, along with Klee and Kandinsky, before embarking on extensive travels to Israel, Ecuador (where he originated his “Family of Man” series), South Africa and Japan. After he was invited to hold a one-man show at the Princeton University Museum in 1953, where he painted Albert Einstein from life, he elected to stay in America. In time he settled in Columbia County, New York, where he continued to paint, show and innovate until his death in 1989, a few months after being honored with a major retrospective at the Kunst Museum in his home city of St. Gallen, Switzerland.
HANSEGGER STYLE GUIDE. Hansegger’s insistence on maintaining the artistic freedom to vary his styles as he saw fit admittedly made life difficult for gallerists who preferred a more ordered approach. In the end, it results in a far richer artistic legacy than would otherwise have been the case, and in actuality there is far more consistency to Hansegger’s work than meets the eye. He never abandoned a style after he moved on to a new one, but instead returned to each one again and again over the years, continuing each series as a steady stream of work throughout his career, often blending one style with another. Many of the motifs that first appeared in his cubist and surrealist work in the 1930’s also appeared in his Abstract Parallels, and later migrated to his Art Konkret and Ornamentalist work, making it relatively easy to identify a Hansegger throughout the decades. Here is a brief guide to a few of his more important styles.
ABSTRACT PARALLELISM This early, seminal form of Abstract Impressionism was created by Hansegger in Paris in 1937-8, and incorporates both color field and gestural elements. It is characterized by a multitude of color spots and erratic strokes embedded in vertical “strips” (similar to Barnett Newman’s later “zips”). The power of the spontaneous emotions triggered by the flashes of pure color is magnified by the repetition of the “strips,” approaching the rhythm of music. As Martica Sawin points out in her book “Hansegger” in 1962, blow-ups of the details of Hansegger’s Abstract Parallels begun in the 1930’s resemble nothing so much as the paintings of Clyfford Still, which were accomplished at a later date. Hansegger sometimes blended it with his other styles such as N**e Studies, Cubism or “Family of Man.” The utter originality of this approach was recognized early on in a 1939 review by Saint Aignan in La R***e Moderne of Paris, who proclaimed Hansegger as “The Neo-Independent…an Autodidact, not influenced by any master or any academy…he cannot be refused the merit of an undeniable personality.”
ART KONKRET Hansegger painted in this style over a 15-year span, beginning in Zurich around 1941. The Art Konkret style generally made no reference to the real world, and was not an abstraction of any object. The angles, lines and colors create their own reality, intrinsic to the painting. This was the style favored the “Allianz”—an important group of Swiss artists also associated with Paul Klee, Max Bill, Jean Arp and Kandinsky. The Allianz group advocated the koncrete art theories of Max Bill with more emphasis on color than did their Constructivist counterparts. Hansegger was a founding member with the Allianz and exhibited with them for many years. Many of the Allianz artists also were active in the Galerie des Eaux Vives, the gallery Hansegger founded in Zurich in 1942.
FAMILY OF MAN Man in nature is the subject of this late-Cubist style that Hansegger began in 1948. Also called “Rectilinear Figures,” Hansegger described the style as “Cezanne’s basic cubism made extreme.” To convey the message of simplicity he was after—men and women in harmony with their own natures and the world, Hansegger used only straight lines, earth colors and white and blacks. He continued working in this style over the next forty years, occasionally blending it with his Abstract Parallels.
COLOR VIBRATION The last important series created by Hansegger, around 1970, is an Abstract Expressionist concept that combines the Action Painting and Color Field styles. Standing at his easel Hansegger would will himself not to think, and working straight from his unconscious mind, paint innumerable strokes of a single primary color until an electric color mass was formed. Sometimes there was one such color mass per painting, sometimes a number. The dynamic canvases vibrating with energy were Hansegger’s very personal tribute to color.
ROOSTERS Throughout his life Hansegger entertained himself and his audience with colorful, dynamic paintings of roosters. The Hansegger Rooster—often running or rearing it’s head to crow—lives fully in its own nature, exuding masculinity, nobility, pride, courage and vitality. Executed in a number styles including cubism, the roosters have become a sort of Hansegger trademark.
PORTRAITS Hansegger was a gifted portrait artist, able to find and convey the essence of his sitters, who include many prominent people. In addition to Pablo Picasso, he was privileged to paint Albert Einstein, Dr. Albert Schweitzer, Sigmund Freud, photographer Lotte Jacobi and many others. He executed his portraits in a number of styles including the formal realist approach he used for Picasso and the soft impressionist style he discovered in Africa (see landscapes below).
LANDSCAPES Hansegger was a plein air landscape artist from his early days in St. Gallen, using a fairly detailed Post-Expressionist style. In his sojourn in South Africa from 1951-53, he began to dramatically loosen his style, rendering scenes in opposing strokes of reflected light and shadow to create sensory impressions rather than an objective reality. The flowing rhythms of his new landscape work came with him when he moved to the United States and are best captured in his Columbia County landscapes. In 1968 and continuing for about a decade, Hansegger enlivened some of his landscapes by painting them in a new style he called Ornamentism, integrating some of the abstracted forms and bright colors from his Abstract Parallels style into otherwise representational landscapes, to dramatic effect.
©2013, Bruce Palmer, Bruce Palmer Galleries
