Hans Hofmann

The career of the German-American painter and educator Hans Hofmann (1880–1966) describes the arc of artistic modernism from pre–World War I Munich and Paris to mid twentieth-century Greenwich Village. His career also traces the transatlantic engagement of modern painting with the materials of its own making, a relationship that is perhaps still not completely understood. In these interrelated narratives, Hofmann is a central protagonist, providing a vital link between nineteenth- and twentieth-century art practice and between European and American modernism. The remarkable vitality of his later work affords insight not only into the style but also the literal substance of this formative period of artistic and material innovation. This richly illustrated book, the fourth in the Getty Conservation Institute’s Artist’s Materials series, presents a thorough examination of Hofmann’s late-career materials. Initial chapters present an informative overview of Hofmann’s life and work in Europe and America and discuss his crucial role in the development of Abstract Expressionism. Subsequent chapters present a detailed analysis of Hofmann’s materials and techniques and explore the relationship of the artist’s mature palette to shifts in the style and aging characteristics of his paintings. The book concludes with lessons for the conservation of modernist paintings generally, and particularly those that incorporate both traditional and modern paint media. This book will be of value to conservators, art historians, conservation scientists, and general readers with an interest in modern art.

Hans Hofmann: The Nature of Abstraction offers a fresh and revealing assessment of the artist’s prolific and innovative painterly career. The comprehensive exhibition and accompanying catalogue will feature approximately seventy paintings and works on paper by Hofmann from 1930 through the end of his life in 1966, including works from public and private collections across North America and Europe. Curator Lucinda Barnes builds on new scholarship published over the past ten years and the 2014 catalogue raisonné to present Hofmann as a unique synthesis of student, artist, teacher, and mentor who transcended generations and continents. His singular artistic achievement drew on artistic influences and innovations that spanned two world wars and transatlantic avant-gardes. Over the last fifty years Hofmann has come to be understood primarily from the vantage of his late color-plane abstractions. Hans Hofmann: The Nature of Abstraction expands our understanding and reinvigorates our appreciation of Hofmann through an inclusive presentation of his artistic arc, showing the vibrant interconnectedness and continuity in his work of European and American influences from the early twentieth century through the advent of abstract expressionism. Exhibition dates: Berkeley Museum of Art Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA): February 27–July 21, 2019 The Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA: September 21, 2019–January 6, 2020

Edited by Michael Rush. Text by Catherine Morris, Irving Sandler.

Hans Hofmann (1880-1966) is one of the most important figures of postwar American art, for both his own abstract paintings and his influence as the legendary teacher of generations of artists in Germany, New York, and Provincetown. His presence in New York, a link to Wassily Kandinsky, the Cubists, and Fauves, catalyzed the movement ultimately known as Abstract Expressionism, whose influence still pervades the aesthetic categories and practices of art today. This volume features essays on Hofmann's life and work by Helmut Friedel and Tina Dickey; excerpts from Hofmann's own statements; full documentation of his career (including chronology, selected bibliography, and comprehensive list of solo and group exhibitions); and thirty-two large colorplates of works from 1942 to 1965 by this supreme colorist, his finest paintings from European and American collections. They richly represent his unique painting style, which conveys a deeply personal experience of color that has lost none of its power to fascinate the viewer.

Color Creates Light: Studies with Hans Hofmann brings together the man, the schools, the painting, the ideas, and the teaching. Jed Perl of The New Republic calls this book "enormously important... nothing less than the missing chapter in the history of the period," for Hofmann's decade of painting in Paris prior to World War I, combined with his observations of the masters of all cultures, enabled him to explain Cubism to the avant-garde and catalyzed the later Abstract Expressionism. In the ateliers of German emigrant Hans Hofmann (1880-1966) in Munich, New York and Provincetown, talented students later to become some of the most significant artists and educators of the time rubbed shoulders with critics, collectors, and curators, who in turn transmitted and transmuted Hofmann⿿s ideas across Europe, America, Canada, and beyond. From how Hofmann taught to what he taught, artists talk shop about the inner workings of the visual language, required reading for those engaged in creative composition, whether visual, verbal, musical, architectural, cinematic, or choreographic.

The writings of the "dean of the New York School of Abstract-Expressionist Painting." "The creative process lies not in imitating, but in paralleling nature; translating the impulse received from nature into the medium of expression, thus vitalizing this medium. The picture should be alive, the statue should be alive and every work of art should be alive." Thus Hans Hofmann wrote nearly half a century ago. He left the Old World, Germany, for the New, at the age of 50. In 1948, when the retrospective exhibition was held at the Addison Gallery of American Art, Hofmann was 68; he had been in the United States for 18 years, a citizen for seven years. Yet he was scarcely recognized in Europe or America as an artist of significance and had never had a full-scale retrospective exhibition of his work. Beginning with a group exhibition in Germany in 1909, he had been given 12 one-man shows and had been included in four group exhibitions before the exhibit at Andover. Subsequently, he was to have 33 one-man shows and to be in over 60 group exhibitions, including the 1960 Venice Biennale, in which he was one of the four artists chosen to represent America. The catalogue of the 1948 retrospective at the Addison Gallery incorporated Hofmann's writings, all originally written in German, some pieces translated fluently, others awkwardly paraphrasing the original. He had written them over a period of 40 years for periodicals journals, or his own teaching purposes; occasionally they overlapped; there was no sequence of development. In the original volume of Search for the Real, published in 1948, it was felt desirable to edit his writing as little as possible, nevertheless to present the essays in the most lucid English true to his meaning, printed only with his approval. "The Search for the Real in the Visual Arts," "Sculpture," and "Painting and Culture" were all printed in full. The section "Excerpts from the Teaching of Hans Hofmann" was composed of selections from his essays "On the Aims of Art" and "Plastic Creation." The last brief section, "Terms," was gleaned from the other essays, lectures, diagrams, notes, and cryptic memoranda written to himself, headed by one of Hoffman's diagrams. It was a further distillation of his own definitions in the nature of a vocabulary. In the last 18 years of his life, recognition was his, nationally and internationally, in proportion to the originality and depth of his thinking, his versatility and comprehensiveness, his productivity and vigor. His was a prophetic visual expression of action in a three-dimensional world on a vibrating two-dimensional surface. He was a dynamic teacher; the wide range of his influence is to be seen in the list of artists comprising an exhibition "Hans Hofmann and His Students," circulated in America and abroad during the three years before his death in 1966. Among the 32 painters and sculptors in this exhibition were students as varied in their developed personal idioms as Helen Frankenthaler, Larry Rivers, Louise Nevelson, Richard Stankiewicz, and Alan Kaprow. Running simultaneously and also shown in South America and Europe as well as in the United States, a one-man show of 40 major works initiated by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, is a testimony to the words of the "dean of the New York School of Abstract-Expressionist Painting."