HANS HOFMANN’s fundamental laws of painting
The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive in California, where the artist deposited a trove of his paintings, organized a retrospective last year, and a catalogue raisonné was published in 2014. One of Hofmann’s most lasting contributions to the understanding of art was his push/pull theory of spatial relations. He believed that contrasts of colors, forms, and textures created a push and pull in the mind of the viewer that must be balanced. When World War I broke out in 1914, Hofmann and his wife were forced to leave Paris and return to Munich. The government disqualified him from military service due to a respiratory condition, and he opened an art school in 1915. Hofmann’s reputation as an art instructor reached overseas, and in 1930, a former student invited him to teach the 1930 summer art session at the University of California at Berkeley.
In conjunction with the show, a collection of the artist’s essays is published as Search for the Real, and Other Essays. In the fall, the artist purchases a house at 76 Commercial Street, which was previously owned by seascape painter Frederick Waugh. The home will become the permanent Provincetown residence for Hofmann and Miz, and the school will run out of the large studio Waugh had built in the back.
Hofmann paints Spring, a small, abstract “drip” painting of oil on panel. This and several other works from the early 1940s such as Untitled, The Wind, Fantasia, and Agitation indicate Hofmann’s early stylistic experimentation with a technique that Pollock would make famous by the end of the decade. Although Hans Hofmann never joined the American Abstract Artists, he encouraged its membership and sent a letter of support when the organization was formally established. Yet, through his students, who represented not only a significant number of the membership, but an important counterbalance to the geometric formalists, Hofmann’s influence within the group was remarkable.
Hofmann’s influential writing on modern art have been collected in the book Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948), which includes his discussions of 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. At sixteen, as an assistant to the director of public works in Bavaria, his engineering skills became apparent. He invented a radar device for ships, a sensitized light bulb, and a portable freezer unit for use by military forces.(3) With a thousand marks as a gift from his proud father, Hofmann enrolled in art school. Soon he had encountered Impressionism, and discovered the Secession Gallery in Munich. He attended evening classes at the Colarossi Academy and at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière.
Grand Egyptian Museum, With 12 Galleries Now Open…
“Push and pull” is the play between color, shape, and placement on a surface to create competing forces that produce depth within a flat surface. Fritz Bultman offers his studio to Hofmann and his students for the summer session of the Provincetown school. It would be heartening to see a few more Hofmanns come out of storage now and then, but protean and uneven careers, like his, are difficult to package—to their credit. You have to argue about them, examine them from various angles, and see what they can do now. A color create slight leading light of his day, Hofmann was safely ensconced in the history books before his death in 1966, a month shy of his 86th birthday. The Museum of Modern Art in New York organized a survey in 1963, and that same year sent a show about him and his myriad students on a grand tour of Europe and South America.
- Hofmann became close friends with Jules Pascin and Robert Delaunay, whose theories on color seeded Hofmann’s own ideas about color and form.
- Surrealist-influenced artists around Guggenheim’s gallery also encouraged Hofmann’s style to move in that direction and his work gradually became more abstract and infused with mythic and primitive imagery, resulting in pictures such as “The Wind” (c.1944).
- Heavily influenced by the philosophy and art theory of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (who also dabbled in optics), Hofmann explored such issues as color, depth, rhythm, perception, and form.
- After relocating to the United States, he reopened the school in both New York City and Provincetown, Massachusetts until he retired from teaching in 1958 to paint full-time.
- Hofmann believed that abstract art was a way to get at the important reality.
Much of the work Hofmann exhibited in that show was conservative in comparison to some of the advanced painting then being created by other artists in Guggenheim’s stable; Self-Portrait with Brushes (1942) is typical of his style at this time. Inspired by his surroundings of his home in Provincetown, it was also stylistically eclectic. But it was a success, leading to further significant shows both in Europe and America. Hofmann’s contact with other, more Surrealist-influenced artists around Guggenheim’s gallery also encouraged his own art to move in that direction; his work gradually became more abstract and infused with mythic and primitive imagery, resulting in pictures such as The Wind (c.1944). At one time historians even speculated on whether Hofmann’s experiments with drip painting were the inspiration for Pollock’s own more famous use of the method, but most now believe that Hofmann’s attempts postdated those. In the early 1950s, Hofmann’s pictures became richer in feel, with surfaces built up in layers of thick impasto and rectangular forms floating on areas of saturated color.
Late Period
He went on to develop and patent such devices as the electromagnetic comptometer, a radar device for ships at sea, a sensitized light bulb, and a portable freezer unit for military use. Hofmann believed that abstract art was a way to get at the important reality. He famously stated that «the ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak». Hofmann would continue to work as a teacher until 1958, yet his circumstances in the mid-1930s enabled him to find more time for his own painting. He had not had a solo exhibition since his first in Berlin in 1910, but in 1944 he finally had a second, at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century Gallery in New York.
Pippa Garner, Inventive Artist Who Satirized Consumerism…
.jpeg)
Hofmann became close friends with Jules Pascin and Robert Delaunay, whose theories on color seeded Hofmann’s own ideas about color and form. At this time, Hofmann was painting Cubist still lifes, landscapes, and figurative pieces, and his work was included in group exhibitions at the New Secession Gallery in 1908 and 1909. He believed that modern artists should evoke pictorial space not in the traditional manner by modeling form with the use of atmospheric perspective, but by using contrasts of color, shape, and surface. Only in this way could an artist stay true to the two-dimensional way the canvas shows a work to the spectator. These tensions between form and color were crucial to a painting’s success, Hofmann believed, and referred to them as the «push and pull» within a picture. Hofmann believed that modern artists should evoke pictorial space not in the traditional manner by modeling form with the use of atmospheric perspective, but by using contrasts of color, shape, and surface.
Hans Hofmann (1880–1966) is one of the most important figures of postwar American art. Celebrated for his exuberant, color-filled canvases, and renowned as an influential teacher for generations of artists—first in his native Germany, then in New York and Provincetown—Hofmann played a pivotal role in the development of Abstract Expressionism. Despite his renown as a teacher, it wasn’t until 1944, at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century Gallery, that Hofmann had his first solo exhibition in the United States.
