Hans Hartung was born in Leipzig and has lived much of his life on the edge of catastrophe, but with the unshakable belief in the transforming power of art. He drew incessantly as a child, and his fascination from the very beginning was with abstract forms. For many years Hartung was to experience all the solitude and hardships that an artist breaking new ground is traditionally believed to undergo. In Paris he countered lack of money and loneliness by copying at the Louvre and visiting the galleries. He married Anna-Eva Bergman, a Norwegian painter and they moved to the island of Minorca off Spain.

As World War II neared, German residents became suspect and they had to leave, even though they had very strong anti-Nazi convictions. He joined the Foreign Legion and survived most of the war without serious accident. Then, in 1944, while attempting to rescue a comrade behind enemy lines, he was shot in the leg, and eventually, the leg had to be amputated. Largely ignored before the war, abstract artists increasingly occupied center stage in Paris in the 1950s. Hartung began to exhibit.

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