Two Kinds of Light: At the Fondation Hartung Bergman in Antibes

La douceur fleurie des étoiles et du ciel et du reste descend en face du talus, comme un panier, contre notre face.

- Arthur Rimbaud, "Mystique," Illuminations

The flowery sweetness of stars and sky and the rest descends opposite the embankment, like a basket, against our face, and creates the flowering and blue abyss down there.

- John Ashbery's translation in English

You get there past a Carrefour. This is the magic, the mundane giving way to the sublime. You turn off an ordinary road above Antibes, climb a short hill, pass through a white wall, and then the olive grove opens. 

Two hectares of silver-leaved trees, the Mediterranean light falling through them in pieces, a white geometry of buildings. The heat and the sound of the cicadas rolls over you, under a cerulean sky. 

The Fondation Hartung Bergman, villa-atelier of Hans Hartung and Anna-Eva Bergman, was conceived largely by Hartung with Bergman and completed in 1973 after years of collaboration (and occasional combat) with a succession of architects. 

Hartung looked to the Mediterranean vernacular - the whitewashed house, the Roman domus organized around its courtyards - and obsessions with geometry and proportion, the golden ratio, windows set low to the eye level of a man in a wheelchair. The villa's pool sits where a Roman impluvium would have been, framing a view of the olive grove and the sky beyond. Every line, every angle, every view seems deliberately considered.

I visited with a friend who is an art historian by training, which is to say we overflowed with opinions as the forms and colors washed over us.

You enter through a staircase whose walls are covered with the two lives. It's the long arc of a story that began in Paris in 1929 when Hans Hartung and Anna-Eva Bergman met, married, parted, survived the century, and found their way back to each other in 1952. Their buildings hold them side by side in separate studios, the way long marriages hold two people: distinct and yet one.

Hartung's studio is a geology of paint - a riot of color compressed into strata, blue over red over black, the sulfateuse garden sprayers still sitting where he left them, paint-crusted and vivid. His wheelchair holds the center.

The walls make large late canvases: explosive, atmospheric, the spray of a man who lost his leg fighting for France in 1944 and who, increasingly confined by age and disability, turned the humble sulfateuse, an agricultural garden sprayer, into a painting tool capable of reaching across enormous canvases. 

He completed 360 canvases in 1989, the year he died.

There is a memorial room, with Hartung and Bergman's ashes, their final works, and some of their most prized possesions. Among medals, a small Picasso tile and a battered teddy bear, sits an illustrated copy of Rimbaud's Les Illuminations. It is open. The line visible reads: 

Un rayon blanc, tombant du haut du ciel, anéantit cette comédie.

A white ray, falling from the height of the sky, annihilates this comedy.

It is the most Hartung sentence in the world; the comedy of suffering, of history, of the wound. And also, it turns out, the most Bergman.

Anna-Eva Bergman's studio is next door and the light is different.

Bergman worked in metal leaf - gold, silver, tin, copper - pasted onto canvas and then scraped and worked until the surface moved with light like waves, like the underside of an olive leaf in a high summer wind. Her paintings are pyramids, moons, stars, horizons. Archetypal forms. They are enormous and very still. 

Standing before the silver pyramid, a single form rising from darkness, etched with fine lines, you feel the silence of altitude, the landscape from far above. I stepped from side to side, back and forth in front of it, feeling the calm certainty of a moonlit sky.

Then we stood in front of the gold painting - sheets of gold leaf applied and disrupted, black, red, blue and green breaking through at the edges like an ebbing tide - and agreed quietly, without needing to argue about it, that we liked her work more.

Perhaps it was the unapologetic feminine power in her work. Perhaps it was the familiarity of her lived experience - the patience of it, the determined accumulation, the light that others cannot diminish. Hartung's work is the wound you cannot leave behind. Bergman's is the wound from great time and space away, when it has become something like a star; eternal and infinite as she described her horizon motif.

Critics once reduced her to "Mrs. Hartung." Overlooked after she died, she is now recovered: a retrospective in Paris, a joint show in Prague, the slow correction of history written mostly by men. 

For us, Anna-Eva Bergman was the white ray falling from the sky, transcendant.

We walked back through the olive grove in the softening of the late summer afternoon, the trees casting the lightest embrace of a breeze. The light fell mottled through the branches like Bergman's patches of gold and silver, jeweled by olives dark green and small. I kept thinking of Rimbaud's eight lines - the suffering on the left, the battles, all the sounds of disaster tracing their arc;  and above it all, descending like a gift: la douceur fleurie des étoiles. The flowering sweetness of the stars. 

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Fondation Hartung-Bergman, 173 chemin du Valbosquet, Antibes. Open spring through autumn; check the Foundation's site for current season dates and hours before visiting. Allow two hours at least, if this magic speaks to you.