Hans Hartung was one of the few artists who spent their entire life working in an Art Informel style. He began studying philosophy and art history in 1924 at the university of Leipzig, but soon changed to the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Leipzig and then Dresden. He continued his training in 1928 with the painter Max Doerner in Munich. This period is reflected in his oeuvre in spontaneous, sketchy line compositions in which Hartung was guided by the inspiration of chance and analyzed the tension between the areas of color and the lines. Hartung settled in Paris in 1932 where he met Kandinsky, Mondrian, Miró and Calder and exhibited works at the 'Salon des Surindépendants'. At the beginning of the war Hartung joined the Foreign Legion and returned to Paris in 1945 with severe injuries— his work during this period is characterized by suspended areas of color superimposed by calligraphic bunches of lines.

During the 1960s Hartung made monochrome areas of color in which he engraved rows of parallel grooves, thus introducing not only a calligraphic but also a three-dimensional element into his work. At that time, Hartung began to paint acrylic on big formats, alternately struck or scratched by fast touches. His freewheeling abstract paintings set influential precedents for many younger American painters of the sixties, making him an important forerunner of American Lyrical Abstraction of the 1960's and 1970's.

Hartung had important exhibitions in Paris, Brussels, Munich and Basle after 1949 and frequently showed works at the Documenta in Kassel between 1955 and 1964. He was honored with the 'Prix Guggenheim' in 1956 and awarded an honorary membership of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin. He was awarded the Great International Prize for Painting at the Biennale in Venice in 1960. Hartung published his memoirs called 'Autoportrait' in 1976. One year later he became a member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris and in 1981 was awarded the Oskar-Kokoschka-Prize of the Republic of Austria. He died in 1989 in Antibes as one of the most important painters of the European Informel.