Entitled "Journey to the interior", the exhibition, which opens Friday until July 16 at the Museum of Modern Art, was inaugurated Wednesday evening by Queen Sonja of Norway in the presence of Brigitte Macron.

Composed of more than 200 works, including photographs, drawings and archival documents, it intends to "show all of his work from A to Z", enthuses curator Hélène Leroy, during the opening.

The ambition of the project does not stop there: through the abundance of documents and works, the viewer is immersed in the creative process of the artist and the path that led to the affirmation of his art, singular. A project that came to life four years after the one dedicated to Hans Hartung (1904-1989) in the same place.

© LUDOVIC MARIN / AFP

Born in Stockholm on May 29, 1909 to a Swedish father and a Norwegian mother, Anna-Eva Bergman (1909-1987) was recognized by her peers, before falling into oblivion. Trained at the Vienna School, she discovered modernism in Berlin. As well as her future husband: the German painter Hans Hartung, a key figure in abstraction.

The two artists married young, in 1929, then divorced eight years later, before meeting again in 1957, never to leave each other.

"Unclassifiable"

Although she exhibited all over Europe, her work remained in the shadow of her husband's.

Not completely abstract or figurative, the work of Anna-Eva Bergman is "singular", a little "unclassifiable", assures Ms. Leroy. The artist herself described her painting as "non-figurative".

His favorite theme? Nature, from the fjords of her native country that she will roam for years to the dry and arid landscapes of Andalusia or the Balearic Islands -- she lived in Menorca with Hans Hartung -- to the Mediterranean Sea that she admires in Antibes (where the couple's Foundation is located).

Not to mention the stones and pebbles. Each time, the spectator guesses the features of a valley, a mountain or a skin. An emotion, a tranquility, emerges. "There is something of the order of meditation," says the Commissioner.

As with this immense sun, which was lent by the Norwegian Parliament, or the painting "Mountain Ridge", the viewer has the impression of being immersed.

These paintings, painted after the war, are those of maturity. Those where the artist understands that she has finally found her voice, clean. Because, before painting these works crossed with gold or silver leaf, she was a journalist and illustrator for a time.

Several of her war cartoons denounced the rise of Nazism, the beginnings of which she saw in Berlin in the late 1920s. Another, dating from 1935 and entitled "El generalissimo", mocks the "Caudillo", Francisco Franco.

The artist was also interested for a time in figuratism, which she abandoned definitively after the war.

At the end of the 1970s, the couple moved to Antibes in a villa-workshop, open to the public for less than a year.

"Even before the existence of the Foundation, the couple's artist friends and admirers were referred to as +band in Hartung+. Today, I am very happy that there is a +gang in Bergman+", praised the director of the Hartung-Bergman Foundation, Thomas Schlesser.

© 2023 AFP