The "Fondation Hartung Bergman" on the densely built-up hills behind Antibes is like an oasis.

You can immediately feel the magical aura of this place, a fragrant olive grove in which each of the more than two hundred year old trees has its own unique shape.

The trunks are gnarled, they root stubbornly in the overly dry earth.

Here and there they are towered over by mighty pines.

Bright white flat-roofed buildings loom through the trees, their clean lines drawing right angles and diagonals against the blue sky.

The Norwegian painter Anna-Eva Bergman, who was born in 1909, and the painter Hans Hartung, who was born in Leipzig in 1904, bought the site, which at the time belonged to an olive farm, in the early 1960s.

They wanted to construct a house with their studio space in this special place.

As different as their artistic work and as contradictory as their painterly gestures, their interest in architecture was in agreement.

They both met in Paris in 1929, married a few months later and, as young artists, moved to the island of Menorca, where they built a whitewashed cubic house in the garrigue.

After separating in 1937, they met again in the 1950s, remarried, and added an entire floor to their apartment on rue Gauguet in Paris for studio space.

Anna-Eva Bergman and Hans Hartung drew more than six hundred designs for the development of the site in Antibes.

During construction, they had the architect Mario Jossa, a student of Marcel Breuer, accompany them until they were able to move in in 1973.

After the death of the artists – Bergman died in 1987, Hartung two years later – the foundation found the most appropriate home imaginable in the property it had designed itself. In addition to a comprehensive collection of drawings and paintings, it keeps personal items, thousands of documents, 35,000 photographs and the detailed ones factory inventories.

Now, after two years of construction work, the facility has been opened to the public and offers space for thematic exhibitions.

Since 2014, the foundation has been managed by Thomas Schlesser, who has set himself the goal of reviving and public awareness and rediscovery of the two painters.

In the case of the well-known Hans Hartung, it is also about providing a new perspective on his extremely productive artistic work, which is constantly inventing new techniques.

Anna-Eva Bergman, on the other hand, had to be brought out of the blue first, her name is only gradually becoming better known.

The newly opened foundation has not been given the character of a museum – and that is a good thing.

One visits a personal place of residence in Antibes, where one gets close to the life and work of the two artists.

In the style of the existing buildings, a visitor reception designed by Cristiano Isnardi was added.

The flat, spacious residential building with its spartan, clear lines lies in a U-shape around a patio with a bright blue-tiled pool.

Further down the site, the studio houses of the two artists, each with several rooms, are nested between olive trees.

What is special about the complex are the walls, some of which are sloping upwards, breaking up the basic rectangular forms, but also diagonals, which are created by functionless, purely aesthetic pillars.