Hans Hofmann (March 21, 1880 – February 17, 1966) was a German-born American painter, renowned as both an artist and teacher. His career spanned two generations and two continents, and is considered to have both preceded and influenced Abstract Expressionism. Born and educated near Munich, he was active in the early twentieth-century European avant-garde and brought a deep understanding and synthesis of Symbolism, Neo-impressionism, Fauvism, and Cubism when he emigrated to the United States in 1932. Hofmann's painting is characterized by its rigorous concern with pictorial structure and unity, spatial illusionism, and use of bold color for expressive means. The influential critic Clement Greenberg considered Hofmann's first New York solo show at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century in 1944 (along with Jackson Pollock’s in late 1943) as a breakthrough in painterly versus geometric abstraction that heralded abstract expressionism. In the decade that followed, Hofmann's recognition grew through numerous exhibitions, notably at the Kootz Gallery, culminating in major retrospectives at the Whitney Museum of American Art (1957) and Museum of Modern Art (1963), which traveled to venues throughout the United States, South America, and Europe. His works are in the permanent collections of major museums around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tate Modern, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, National Gallery of Art, and Art Institute of Chicago. Helen Frankenthaler, Nell Blaine, Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, Louise Nevelson, and Larry Rivers, among many others—as well as on the theories of Greenberg, in his emphasis on the medium, picture plane, and unity of the work. Hofmann died of a heart attack at 85 in New York City on February 17, 1966.

Biography

Hans Hofmann was born in Weißenburg, Bavaria on March 21, 1880 to Theodor Friedrich Hofmann (1855–1903) and Franziska Manger Hofmann (1849–1921). In 1886, his family moved to Munich, where his father took a job with the government. From a young age, Hofmann gravitated towards science and mathematics. At age sixteen, he followed his father into public service, working for the Bavarian government as assistant to the director of Public Works. He increased his knowledge of mathematics there, eventually developing and patenting devices including an electromagnetic comptometer, a radar device for ships at sea, a sensitized light bulb, and a portable freezer unit for military use. During this time, Hofmann also became interested in creative studies, beginning art lessons between 1898 and 1899 with German artist Moritz Heymann. He also immersed himself in Paris's avant-garde art scene, working with Matisse and becoming friends with Picasso, Georges Braque, and Robert and Sonia Delaunay.

Hofmann's work in the 1940s was championed by several key figures who initiated a new era of growing influence for art dealers and galleries, including Peggy Guggenheim, Betty Parsons, and Samuel M. Kootz. His first New York solo show at Guggenheim's Art of This Century gallery in 1944 was positively reviewed in the New York Times, ARTnews and Arts Digest.

thumb|right|"Open Letter to [[Roland L. Redmond, President of the Metropolitan Museum of Art." Hofmann was among a group who would become known as The Irascibles, 18 painters and 10 sculptors who in May 1950 sent an open letter to the Met, rejecting the museum's "monster national exhibition" to be held in December. Francis Henry Taylor, the Met's Director, they said, had "publicly declared his contempt for modern painting," and Robert Beverly Hale, the Associate Curator of American Art, has "accepted a jury notoriously hostile to advanced art."]]

In his later period, Hofmann often worked less gesturally, creating works such as The Gate (1959–60), Pompeii (1959) or To Miz - Pax Vobiscum (a 1964 memorial after her death), that were loosely devoted to architectonic volumes and sometimes referred to as his "slab paintings." In these works, he used rectangles of sensual color that reinforced the shape of his consistent easel-painting format and sometimes suggested a modular logic, yet escaped definitive readings through areas of modulated paint and irregular shapes.

In 1957, the Whitney Museum put up a large retrospective on Hofmann, which traveled to seven additional museums in the United States over the next year. In his review of the retrospective, critic Harold Rosenberg wrote, "No American artist could mount a show of greater coherent variety than Hans Hofmann." In 1963, The Museum of Modern Art gave a full-scale retrospective, organized by William Seitz, with a catalogue that included excerpts from Hofmann's writings.

A 2017 exhibition at the Portland Museum of Art titled "Hans Hofmann: Works on Paper" was the first complete overview of his little known works on paper including ink, crayon, watercolor, gouache, and other media. The exhibition surveyed his life-long engagement with drawing, watercolor, and painting on paper. This exhibition was organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville, a cultural institute at the University of North Florida and supported by The Renate, Hans and Maria Hofmann Trust.

Teaching

Hofmann was renowned not only as an artist but also as a teacher of art, both in his native Germany and later in the U.S. His value as a teacher lay in the consistency and uncompromising rigor of his artistic standards and his ability to teach the fundamental principles of postwar abstraction to a diverse body of students. and Bistra Vinarova. Art historian Herschel Chipp asserted that the school was likely the first school of modern art in existence. After relocating to New York City, he began teaching at the Art Students League of New York in 1933. By 1934, Hofmann opened his own schools in New York and in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Many notable artists studied with him, including Lee Krasner, Helen Frankenthaler, Ray Eames, Larry Rivers, Allan Kaprow, Red Grooms, Nell Blaine, Irene Rice Pereira, Gerome Kamrowski, Ward Jackson, Fritz Bultman, Israel Levitan, Robert De Niro, Sr., Jane Freilicher, Wolf Kahn, Marisol Escobar, Burgoyne Diller, Alexandra Luke, James Gahagan, Richard Stankiewicz, Lillian Orlowsky, Louisa Matthíasdóttir, Linda Lindeberg, and Nína Tryggvadóttir. Beulah Stevenson, a long-time curator at the Brooklyn Museum, was also among his pupils. In 1958, Hofmann closed his schools in order to devote himself exclusively to his own creative work. In 1963, The Museum of Modern Art curated the traveling exhibit "Hans Hofmann and His Students," which included 58 works representing 51 artists.

Despite being credited with teaching a number of the most gifted women artists of the period—at a time when they were still somewhat rare—Hofmann has sometimes been described as exhibiting a "straightforward male chauvinist posture." Lee Krasner, who remained a devotee, likened some of his critiques to the back-handed praise earlier women artists often experienced (for example, "so good, you'd never know it was done by a woman!").

Writing

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. In formal terms, he is especially noteworthy as a theorist of the medium who argued that "each medium of expression has its own order of being," that "color is a plastic means of creating intervals," and his awareness of a painting's frame, represented by his quote, "any line placed on the canvas is already the fifth." Hofmann believed in remaining faithful to the flatness of the canvas support, and that to suggest depth and movement in a painting an artist must create what he called "push and pull" in the image—contrasts of color, form, and texture.

Hofmann held a strong conviction about the spiritual and social value of art. In 1932, he wrote: "Providing leadership by teachers and support of developing artists is a national duty, an insurance of spiritual solidarity, What we do for art, we do for ourselves and for our children and the future."

Collections and art market

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, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Whitney Museum, Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Art Institute of Chicago, Seattle Art Museum, Baltimore Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Cleveland Museum of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Provincetown Art Association and Museum, Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus (Munich), Museu d'Art Contemporani, (Barcelona), Tate Gallery, Art Museum of West Virginia University, and the Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto). Hofmann also designed a public work, a colorful mural located outside the entrance of the High School of Graphic Communication Arts located in the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan.

<!-- Deleted image removed: thumb|The Hofmann Mural in front of the High School of Graphic Communication Arts -->

In 2015, at a Christie's New York auction, Hofmann's Auxerre (1960), inspired by the expansive stained glass windows of the Cathédrale Saint Etienne in France, achieved a world auction record for the artist at $6,325,000.

Hofmann Estate

When 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." Under threat of prosecution, the original executor of the Hofmann Estate, Robert Warshaw, was successful in having the neglectful guardians pay $8.7 million to the Estate for "extraordinary conscious pain and suffering." as well as a catalogue raisonné of Hofmann's paintings. The U.S. copyright representative for the Renate, Hans and Maria Hofmann Trust is the Artists Rights Society.

See also

  • Abstract art
  • Abstract Imagists
  • Art theory (aesthetics)
  • Color field
  • Modernism
  • The Irascibles
  • Western painting

References

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, Massachusetts, 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
  • Cynthia Goodman, Hans Hofmann : in conjunction with the exhibition "Hans Hofmann"; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, June 20, 1990 – September 16, 1990; Center for the Fine Arts, Miami, November 1990 – January 1991; The Chrysler Museum, Norfolk, Virginia, February 1991 – April 1991 (München : Prestel, 1990.)
  • Marika Herskovic, American Abstract Expressionism of the 1950s An Illustrated Survey, (New York School Press, 2003.) . pp.&nbsp;166–169
  • —, New York School Abstract Expressionists Artists Choice by Artists, (New York School Press, 2000.) . p.&nbsp;16; p.&nbsp;37; pp.&nbsp;182–185
  • ART USA NOW Ed. by Lee Nordness;Vol.1, (The Viking Press, Inc., 1963. pp.&nbsp;18–21
  • 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
  • A Finding Aid to the Hans Hofmann papers, circa 1904-2011, bulk 1945-2000 in the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution
  • Hoffmann works from the collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.