Hans Burkhardt was one of the great, early Abstract Expressionists, yet for much of his life he worked in relative obscurity on America's west coast, 3,000 miles from the torrid art world of New York where reputations are made and unmade. On the whole, he seems to have enjoyed his spiritual independence, since Burkhardt was an entirely self-reliant little man who expected no favours from anybody and believed that a man had to build his own house (which, literally, he did, near Los Angeles).
Burkhardt was born in Basle, Switzerland, in 1904 into morose and grinding poverty. His father left early for America, a few years-later his mother died of TB, and he and his small sisters were placed in an orphanage. In his teens he did odd jobs for a living, then at 18 managed to work his passage to America where he sought out his father in New York. The father, now married again and with a second family, got him a job in the furniture factory where he himself worked. Young Hans learned quickly and was soon a successful furniture decorator; he also attended night classes in drawing under Arshile Gorky, then almost unknown. Burkhardt became one of his two favourite pupils, the other being an 18-yearold Dutch immigrant named Willem de Kooning. These were the Depression years and Gorky was going through some hard times, so Burkhardt helped him out by buying his pictures and occasionally supplying him with groceries. He was taken to court by his wife, who sued him for more maintenance money, and ended by signing over all his property to their small daughter and quitting his job. With his half-brother George, he loaded tins of food into the boot of a second-hand Pontiac and drove away westwards across the US. In California, he worked during the war years in an aircraft factory and later painted sets in the MGM studios. Somehow, he also found time to paint on his own, though galleries were slow to show him.
Burkhardt was always a political radical, who was once arrested for picketing activities. His emotional sympathies were with the underdog and he was violently anti-war, even though he never saw it at first hand. On visits to Mexico he marvelled at the torrid light and was partly shocked, partly intrigued by the casual attitude to death and the way that human skulls were left lying around. These painting trips accentuated the macabre element in his style, though this seems to have been innate - he was a true descendant of Holbein, Urs Graf and Bocklin, all fellow-Swiss. The Vietnam War with its grisly casualty lists, military and civilian, provoked him into a memorable series of works in which the image of a cross is dominant.
Essentially Burkhardt is a painter of catastrophe, in a particularly 20th-century sense (though his splendid big pastels of female nudes show another side to him). Images of violence, war, conflagrations and mass suffering crowd his canvases, often in lurid, flame-like colour and raw, jagged shapes. Beginning with a kind of neo-Cubist style based on Picasso, he developed into one of the most extreme and uncompromising of all the Abstract Expressionists, though he worked on his own without contact with Pollock or even his old friend de Kooning.
Recognition was slow to come, but by the time of his death in 1989 his pictures were in a number of the world's leading museums. He left an entire collection of paintings and drawings to his birthplace, Basel, which he had begun to revisit late in life. His work has never been seen in Dublin, but the enterprising Galway Arts Festival has mounted two exhibitions of it, one of paintings and the other of pastels.