Hans Hofmann

(click to enlarge)
Hans Hofmann, photograph by Arnold Newman, 1960. (credit: © Arnold Newman)

(born March 21, 1880, Weissenberg, Ger. — died Feb. 17, 1966, New York, N.Y., U.S.) German-born U.S. painter and art teacher. From 1898 he studied art in Munich, and in 1904 he moved to Paris, where he was inspired by the work of Henri Matisse and Robert Delaunay. In 1915 he opened his first school of painting in Munich. He moved to the U.S. in 1930 and taught at New York's Art Students League. In 1933 he opened the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Art, where he would exert strong influence on young abstract painters of the 1930s and '40s, including Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock. His style evolved into total abstraction, and he pioneered the paint-dripping technique later associated with Pollock. He closed the school in 1958 to devote the rest of his life to his painting. He was one of the most influential art teachers of the 20th century and a significant figure in the development of Abstract Expressionism.

For more information on Hans Hofmann, visit Britannica.com.

(b Weissenberg, Bavaria, 21 March 1880; d New York, 17 Feb 1966). American painter, teacher and theorist of German birth. He moved with his family to Munich in 1886 and in 1896 left home to become assistant to the director of public works of the State of Bavaria; he distinguished himself with a number of inventions, including an electromagnetic comptometer, a radar device for ships, a sensitized light bulb and a portable freezer unit for military purposes. In spite of his parents' strong objection and their hopes for his career as a scientist, in 1898 he enrolled in the art school run by Moritz Heymann (b 1870) in Munich. Hofmann subsequently studied with a succession of teachers and was particularly influenced by Willi Schwarz (b 1889), who familiarized him with French Impressionism, a style that affected his earliest known paintings, such as Self-portrait (1902; New York, Emmerich Gal., see Goodman, 1986, p. 14).

See the Abbreviations for further details.

The German-American painter Hans Hofmann (1880-1966) approached abstract painting through cubism and Fauvism. His teaching and painting were singularly influential for the development of American painting after 1945.

Born in Weissenburg, Germany, Hans Hofmann studied music and science before enrolling in 1898 at Moritz Heymann's Munich art school. Hofmann's early work was influenced by Wilhelm Leibl's impressionism and by French neoimpressionism. His pencil studies at this time also suggest an unusual preoccupation with the relationship of figures to their ground planes.

From 1904 to 1914 Hofmann, sponsored by a Berlin art collector, studied in Paris. He met many cubist and Fauve artists and was drawn particularly to Robert Delaunay's abstractions. When World War I began, Hofmann's patronage ended, and he returned to Munich.

Teaching in Munich

Because of a lung ailment, Hofmann was not drafted. He opened an art school in Munich in 1915, and for the next 15 years he articulated a philosophy of art based on Fauvism and cubism; in particular, he sought to redefine Paul Cézanne's two-dimensional picture plane in terms of light. Hofmann's concern with his students' development often took precedence over his own work. By the 1920s his reputation as a teacher was assured, and his school began to attract students from America, including Al Jensen, Louise Nevelson, and Carl Holty.

The political climate of postwar Germany made it increasingly difficult for Hofmann to maintain his school, and in 1930 he accepted an invitation to teach a session at the University of California. He returned to California the following summer, and in the fall he moved to New York City, where he joined the faculty of the Art Students League. In 1932 he opened his own art school in New York, with summer sessions at Provincetown, Mass.

Early Works

Although Hofmann virtually abandoned painting until the late 1930s, a few examples from his Munich period survive. His work from 1915 to 1930 suggests his increasingly critical interpretation of cubism and Fauvism. In the mid-1920s a new interest in free-form motifs that seems to derive from Wassily Kandinsky appears. Although more relaxed, Hofmann's composition is never loose; the newly expressive forms are controlled by the planar integrity learned from Cézanne and synthetic cubism. Apples (1931) shows this approach.

Hofmann's essay, "Plastic Creation, " in the League (1932-1933) is his first important statement made in America concerning the function of two-dimensional picture space. In it he articulated an academic approach that had far greater impact than his few paintings of the early 1930s. However, for Hofmann, the possibilities of painting always encompassed divergent approaches; the geometric and the curvilinear, the thickly impasted and the thinned surface were all concurrently viable throughout his career, although there were periods when one set of problems seemed to take precedence over another, such as in his 1941-1943 landscape studies.

Works of the 1940s

Hofmann's work beginning in the 1940s received great critical acclaim. In 1944 he exhibited at the influential Art of This Century Gallery in New York. Interest grew for works such as Spring (1940) and Fantasia (1943), which, in their innovative dripped and curvilinear forms spreading across the picture surface, substantiate the claim that Hofmann was a founder of automatism in American painting. In 1948 Hofmann was given a retrospective exhibition in Andover, Mass. At this time the publication of his selected writings provided explanations of the paintings and inspired a generation of younger American artists.

Although Hofmann continued to teach until 1958, he found more and more time for his painting and discovered new motifs in the work of younger painters. Apparition (1947) recalls Jackson Pollock, with its anthropomorphic shapes emerging from the scrambled background. At the same time, Hofmann could rethink Henri Matisse, as in Liberation (1947), in which the paint is thinned down and delicately contained within the outlines, or in Magenta and Blue (1949-1950), in which both color and relationship of figure to ground plane paraphrase Matisse.

Works of the 1950s and 1960s

Hofmann's reputation was firmly established by the 1955 and 1957 retrospective exhibitions given at Bennington College and the Whitney Museum. So too did his interests diversify and expand; technical virtuosity characterized his last decade. In his late 70s he retired from teaching to devote full time to painting. His message of "push and pull" against the picture plane is convincingly worked out in The Gate (1959), in which not only are the geometric shapes set in parallel planes but the palette knife and the brushstroke work to the same end. Comparing this painting with The Conjurer (1959), with its billowing forms and intense color range, again suggests the diversity and genius of Hofmann's art. Agrigento (1961), in the monumental simplicity of the monochromatic hue and the wide sweeping brushstroke, suggests that in spite of Hofmann's complex artistic theories he was able to express a visual experience directly with a minimal amount of intellectualizing.

While Hofmann's success as a teacher can be judged by the success of his pupils, his own paintings and writings establish him as a major force in contemporary American painting. He died in New York.

Further Reading

Sam Hunter, Hans Hofmann (1963; 2d ed. 1964), is the most useful book for illustrations of Hofmann's work. Hunter includes many of the essays that originally appeared in Hofmann's own Search for the Real, and Other Essays, edited by Sara T. Weeks and Bartlett H. Hayes, Jr. (1948). A useful bibliography is in William Seitz, Hans Hofmann: With Selected Writings by the Artist (1963). For the most critical interpretation of Hofmann's work as painter and teacher, Harold Rosenberg's essays in The Anxious Object (1964; 2d ed. 1966) are indispensable. Equally perceptive is Clement Greenberg, Hofmann (1961). See also Frederick Wight, Hans Hofmann (1957).

Additional Sources

Goodman, Cynthia, Hans Hofmann, New York: Abbeville Press, 1986.

Quotes:

"The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak."

Hans Hofmann
'The Gate', 1959-1960, collection: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
Born	March 21, 1880(1880-03-21) Weißenburg, Bavaria, Germany
Died	February 17, 1966 (aged 85)
Nationality	German-American
Field	Painting
Movement	Abstract Expressionism
Influenced by	Henri Matisse, Robert Delaunay
Influenced	Lee Krasner, Clement Greenberg, Helen Frankenthaler, Larry Rivers

Hans Hofmann (March 21, 1880 – February 17, 1966) was a German-born American abstract expressionist painter. He was born in Weißenburg, Bavaria on March 21, 1880 the son of Theodor and Franziska Hofmann. In 1932 he immigrated to the United States, where he resided until the end of his life.

Contents 1 Biography 2 Paintings 3 Teaching and writing 4 Collections 5 Hofmann Estate 6 See also 7 References 8 Sources 9 External links

Biography

At age six he moved to Munich. It was here that his father took up a job with the government. Starting at a young age, he gravitated towards science and mathematics. At age sixteen, he started work with the Bavarian government as assistant to the director of Public Works. Through this, Hofmann was further able to develop his knowledge of mathematics. He even went on to develop and patent devices such as the electromagnetic comptometer, a radar device for ships at sea, a sensitized light bulb, and a portable freezer unit for military use. Even with such great abilities in science and mathematics, Hofmann started to take great interest in creative studies, starting educational art training after the death of his father.

Paintings

According to the Hofmann biography at the Tate Gallery website ^[1], Hofmann's work is distinguished by "a rigorous concern with pictorial structure, spatial illusion, and color relationships."

The Guggenheim Collection's information on Hofmann states that his "completely abstract works date from the 1940s" ^[2]. Hofmann believed that abstract art was a way to get at what was really important. He famously stated that "the ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak." ^[3]

Teaching and writing

Hofmann was renowned not only as an artist but as a teacher of art, both in his native Germany and later in the U.S. In Munich he founded an art school, where Louise Nevelson, Wolfgang Paalen, Worth Rider^[4] and Alfred Jensen, were among his students. He closed this school in 1932, the year he immigrated to the U.S.

In America, he initially taught a summer session at the University of California, Berkeley in 1930, after which he returned to Munich. In 1931 he taught another summer session at the University of California, Berkeley and a semester at the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles before again returning to Germany. ^{[5] [6]} After Hofmann relocated to New York City he began teaching in 1933 at the Art Students League of New York. Leaving the League in the mid 1930s Hofmann opened his own schools in New York and later in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Many famous or notable artists, especially some who could generally be classified as abstract expressionists, studied with Hofmann in New York and Provincetown. These distinguished alumni included: Lee Krasner, Israel Levitan, Helen Frankenthaler, Gerome Kamrowski, Joseph Plaskett, William Ronald, Joan Mitchell, Michael Goldberg, Ray Eames, Larry Rivers, Jane Frank, Nell Blaine, Robert de Niro, Sr., Jane Freilicher, Allan Kaprow, Red Grooms, Wolf Kahn, Marisol Escobar, Nicholas Krushenick, Burgoyne Diller, Mercedes Matter, James Gahagan, Erle Loran, Louisa Matthíasdóttir, Judith Godwin, Lynne Mapp Drexler, and Donald Jarvis.

In 1958, Hofmann closed his schools in order to devote himself exclusively to his own creative work. Hofmann is a painter and theorist of particular appeal to other artists. American painter Walter Darby Bannard ^[7] and British artist John Hoyland ^[8] both have been involved in curating retrospectives of Hofmann's work.

Also prominent as a writer on modern art, Hofmann authored an influential book (sometimes referred to and anthologized as an "essay"), Search for the Real, in which he discussed his push/pull spatial theories, his reverence for nature as a source for art, his conviction that art has spiritual value, and his philosophy of art in general. Hofmann is especially noteworthy as a theorist of the medium who argued that "each medium of expression has its own order of being," "color is a plastic means of creating intervals," and "any line placed on the canvas is already the fifth."

Collections

Hans Hofmann's works are in the permanent collections of many major museums in the United States and throughout the world, including the UC Berkeley Art Museum, New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum, the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Seattle Art Museum, the Dayton Art Institute, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Honolulu Academy of Arts, the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus (Munich), the Museu d'Art Contemporani, (Barcelona), and the Tate Gallery (London). In addition to these collections, he also designed a colorful mural located outside the entrance of the High School of Graphic Communication Arts located in the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood of the borough of Manhattan in New York City. ^[9]

Hofmann Estate

When Hans Hofmann died on February 17, 1966, his widow, Renate Hofmann managed his Estate.

After Renate's death in 1992, the New York Daily News published an article titled, "From Caviar to Cat Food," which detailed the "sad and tortuous story" of Hofmann's widow. The article contended that Renate's court appointed guardians "milk[ed] the Estate for more than a decade" and allowed the mentally unstable Renate to live "with her cats and liquor in a garbage-strewn oceanfront home."^[10]

Under threat of prosecution, the original executor of the Hofmann Estate, Robert Warshaw, was successful in having the neglectful guardians pay $8.7 million dollars to the Estate for "extraordinary conscious pain and suffering."^[11]

Under the will of Renate Hofmann, The Renate, Hans and Maria Hofmann Trust was formally created with Robert Warshaw at its head. The mission of the Trust is "to promote the study and understanding of Hans Hofmann's extraordinary life and works" and to accomplish these goals "through exhibitions, publications and educational activities and programs focusing on Hans Hofmann"^[12] as well as forthcoming catalogue raisonné of Hofmann's paintings.^[13]. The U.S. copyright representative for the Renate, Hans and Maria Hofmann Trust is the Artists Rights Society^[14].

See also

• Abstract expressionism
• Abstract art
• Modernism
• Western painting
• Art theory (aesthetics)
• Clarence Holbrook Carter (studied with Hofmann in the summer of 1927)
• James Gahagan

References

1. ^ Tate Collection | Hans Hofmann
2. ^ Guggenheim Collection - Artist - Hofmann - Biography
3. ^ Hans Hofmann: Quotes
4. ^ Karl Kasten on Worth Ryder retrieved online October 27, 2008
5. ^ Hofmann Chronology, retrieved October 27, 2008
6. ^ BAM/PFA - Art Collection
7. ^ Hofmann Estate bibliography, online October 27, 2008
8. ^ [Hans Hofmann: The Late Paintings (exh. cat., intro. J. Hoyland; London, Tate, 1988), John Hoyland Tate Biography, online October 27, 2008]
9. ^ You're in Hell's Kitchen: High School of Graphic Communication Arts
10. ^ Artnet "News" page. July 19, 2001
11. ^ Artnet "News" page. July 19, 2001
12. ^ The Renate, Hans and Maria Hofmann Trust website: About Us page
13. ^ The Renate, Hans and Maria Hofmann Trust website: catalogue raisonné page
14. ^ Most frequently requested artists list of the Artists Rights Society

Sources

• Chipp, Herschel B.. Theories of modern art; a source book by artists and critics (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1968)
• Greenberg, Clement. Hofmann (Paris, Editions Georges Fall, 1961).
• Hofmann, Hans; Sara T Weeks; Bartlett H Hayes; Addison Gallery of American Art; Search for the real, and other essays (Cambridge, Mass., M.I.T. Press, 1967) OCLC 1125858
• Tapié, Michel. Hans Hofmann : peintures 1962 : 23 avril-18 mai 1963. (Paris: Galerie Anderson-Mayer, 1963.) [exhibition catalogue and commentary] OCLC: 62515192
• Marika Herskovic, American Abstract Expressionism of the 1950s An Illustrated Survey, (New York School Press, 2003.) ISBN 0-9677994-1-4. pp. 166-169
• Marika Herskovic, New York School Abstract Expressionists Artists Choice by Artists, (New York School Press, 2000.) ISBN 0-9677994-0-6. p.16; p.37; pp. 182-185
• ART USA NOW Ed. by Lee Nordness;Vol.1, (The Viking Press, Inc., 1963. pp. 18-21

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Hans Hofmann

• Hanshofmann.net
• COLOR IMAGE of a 1959 Hofmann work at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
• The Estate of Hans Hofmann
• Hans Hofmann Biography: Guggenheim Collection (New York)
• Hans Hofmann Biography: Tate Collection (Tate Gallery, London)
• Hans Hofmann Biography: PBS.org
• Information on Hans Hofmann: Askart.com
• PBS interactive pages on Hans Hofmann's "push/pull" theory
• Hans Hofmann papers at the Smithsonian Archives of American Art

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)