Hans Hofmann was a German-born American artist, representing the Abstract Expressionism. An avid experimenter, he elaborated the method dubbed ‘the push and pull’ which considered the color as the important tool for translating emotions.
The artist was also known for his teaching activity. He was among the most important mentors of the post-war period who transmitted his knowledge to many artists in Germany and then in the United States.
Background
Hans Hofmann born as Johann Georg Albert Hofmann came to the world on March 21, 1880, in Weissenburg, Bavaria, Germany. He was the second child in a family of Theodor Friedrich and Franziska Manger Hofmann.
Hans had an elder brother Karl and one younger brother Theodor, and two younger sisters named Rosa and Maria.
When Hofmann was a six-year-old child, his father received an administrative position in the government in Munich. The family relocated to the city where the boy spent his childhood.
At an early age, Hans revealed the abilities for mathematics, music, science, literature, and art. His parents expected him to choose the scientific area but Hofmann himself quickly realized that he was more passionate with art.
Education
Hans Hofmann began his artistic training in 1898 after his father’s death. Hans enrolled at Moritz Heymann's art school in Munich as a part-time student. During one-year at the institution, the young man learned about Impressionism and Pointillism styles.
In 1900, Hofmann took some art lessons at Heinrich Wolff and Ernst Neumann’s school for graphic arts. From the same year to about 1902, he attended the studio of the artist from Bulgaria, Nikolai Michaeiloff.
Thereafter, Hofmann was taught by such artists as Anton Ažbe and Willy Schwarz. Besides, in 1902 he did an educational trip to Baia Mare in Hungary.
Then, Hans Hofmann got acquainted with Philipp Freudenberg who owned the leading department store in the city by the time. Besides, Philipp was an art collector. Hofmann’s painting impressed him so much that Freudenberg supported him with money to pursue his education in Paris.
While at the capital of France, Hans Hofmann continued to develop his artistic skills at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and at the Académie Colarossi. The young artist met a lot of his colleagues in the city, in particular, fauvists and cubists, and explored the art of Henri Matisse and Robert Delaunay. Their colorful abstract paintings had a great impression on Hofmann.
Hans Hofmann left Paris at the outbreak of the First World War and returned to Munich. He had no more possibility to revisit the capital of France to bring back his canvases. So, they all were lost.
Hofmann received three honorary degrees, Doctor of Humane Letters from the Dartmouth College in 1962, Doctor of Fine Arts from the University of California, Berkeley and Pratt Institute in New York City in 1964-1965 relatively.
Career
Hans Hofmann started his career at the age of sixteen. He followed his father’s steps and obtained a post of an assistant of a director in a public service firm called Public Works. While there, he had a chance to pull up his knowledge of mathematics. Hofmann elaborated and patented such mechanisms as the electromagnetic comptometer, a sensitized light bulb and a portable refrigerator for the army. However, the artistic career was more attractive to him.
From 1904, the young artist painted and demonstrated his artworks in Paris. The canvases of this period show his admiration by Paul Cézanne and the style of cubism.
In 1909, Hofmann sent few of his canvases to the Berlin Secession. The following year, he had his solo exhibition at the Paul Cassirer Gallery in Berlin. Four years later, he completely came back to Germany.
At the outbreak of the First World War, Hofmann was discharged from the military service because of the respiratory illness. In 1915, the artist opened his School of Fine Art. Combining methods such as regular life drawing sessions, discussions of art theory and critical reviews of canvases that wasn’t typical for traditional Art Academies, he quickly gained a reputation of a progressive art teacher. He was sought out by the students not only from Germany but from other countries as well. So, in addition to teaching at the school, Hofmann gave art lessons in Austria, Croatia, France and Italy during the summer sessions.
In 1930, he accepted an invitation from his former disciple Worth Ryder who worked by the time at the University of California at Berkeley in the United States to participate at its summer session. The stint lasted from 19 May through 28 June. A year later, Hans Hofmann came to Berkeley for the second time. The University and the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco held his first exhibitions in the country.
The next year, running from the difficult political situation in Germany, the painter relocated completely to the United States. He continued to combine his work at the studio with teaching. So, after arriving in the country, he joined the teachers’ staff of the Art Students League of New York City where he led a six-week evening drawing class.
By 1934, Hofmann opened his Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts in the Big Apple and soon established the summer art school in Provincetown, Massachusetts. He continued to paint and by the beginning of the 1940s, his canvases, more abstract in style, received good reviews from the public, art critics and influential art dealers.
A couple of group exhibitions in 1941 and 1943 at the Isaac Delgado Museum in New Orleans (currently the New Orleans Museum of Art) and at the Art Students League relatively was followed by the important one-man shows at the Art of This Century Gallery of Peggy Guggenheim and at the Arts Club of Chicago the following year.
In 1947, the artist began to collaborate with Samuel M. Kootz whose galleries would organize annual exhibitions of his works during the subsequent decades. Another well-known art dealer, Betty Parsons, hosted a solo show of the artist in her gallery as well.
The following year, Hofmann gathered all his reflections on art, including his push and pull theories, in the book called Search for the Real and Other Essays. A year after the publication of the book, the artist had a solo exhibition in Paris held at the Maeght Gallery.
After some solo shows during the 1950s, in particular, at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Bennington College in Vermont and the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1957, Hans Hofmann stopped to teach and concentrated only on painting at the end of the decade. In 1960, he represented the United States at the Venice Biennale along with Philip Guston, Franz Kline and Theodore Roszak.
In 1963, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City hosted a large retrospective of Hofmann’s art. The show was accompanied by the catalog featuring fragments from the artist’s essays.
Hans Hofmann worked actively till the end of his life. So, a year before his death, he completed forty-five paintings ten of which were united in ‘Renate Series’ probably inspired by his second wife Renate.
The last solo show of the artist was organized in the Kootz Gallery on February 1, 1966.
Hans Hofmann believed in the fundamental role of nature in art. He also was strongly convicted about the spiritual and social meaning of art.
Quotations:
"Art is something absolute, something positive, which gives power just as food gives power. While creative science is a mental food, art is the satisfaction of the soul."
"To sense the invisible and to be able to create it – that is art."
"Being inexhaustible, life and nature are a constant stimulus for a creative mind."
"Color is a plastic means of creating intervals – color harmonics produced by special relationships, or tensions. We differentiate now between formal tensions and color tensions, just as we differentiate in music between counterpoint and harmony."
"The impressionistic method leads into a complete splitting and dissolution of all areas involved in the composition, and color is used to create an overall effect of light. The color is, through such a shading down from the highest light in the deepest shadows, sacrified an degraded to a (black-and-white) function. This leads to the destructions of the color as color."
"It makes no difference whether a work is naturalistic or abstract; every visual expression follows the same fundamental laws."
"The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak."
"A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops."
"As a teacher I approach my students purely with the human desire to free them from all scholarly inhibitions, and I tell them, 'Painters must speak through paint – not through words.'"
"I do not want to avoid immersing myself in trouble – to be a mess – to struggle out of it. I want to invent, to discover, to imagine, to speculate, to improvise – to seize the hazardous in order to be inspired. I want to experience the manifestation of the absolute – the manifestation of the unexpected in an extreme and unique relation. I know that only by following my creative instincts in an act of creative destruction will I be able to find it."
"Basically I hate categorical labels. As a young artist I already was very clear about this – that 'objectification' is not the final aim of art. For there are greater things than the object. The greatest thing is the human mind."
Membership
American Academy of Arts and Letters
,
United States
1964
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
"The importance of Hofmann, it seems to me, drives not only from the teaching of freedom, of spontaneity, of automatism, but the two great things he taught were the respect for the two dimensionality of the canvas, and the idea of color as form." Samuel M. Kootz, art dealer and author
"He had a real joy of life. That was as important as anything I learned about painting." Irvin Kershner, movie director
"A passionate teacher, he got his students to work! I studied with Hans for three weeks in Provincetown, summer 1950. Having had a thorough lesson in Cubism well before I knew him, perhaps I was never one of his many student disciples but a great admirer.
To this day I think he remains extremely overlooked as an artist and an influence." Helen Frankenthaler, artist
"Walking into his home was like walking into one of his paintings; the floor was kelly green, the furniture painted in yellows, reds, pink, white etc. Fresh fruit and flowers, perhaps a wicker rocker. Always a joy." Helen Frankenthaler, artist
"Hofmann's abstraction is hard won: it comes from depicting the world around him. Over the years his paintings cover a vast territory: they are uneven in quality, various in style; he paints his own history of the most relevant 20th Century art, a kind of Hofmannesque Fauvism, Cubism, Abstract Expressionism." Anthony Caro, sculptor
Interests
Artists
Henri Matisse, Robert Delaunay, Paul Cézanne, Wassily Kandinsky, Vincent van Gogh
Connections
Hans Hofmann was married twice.
He met his first wife, Maria Wolfegg, in Munich at the beginning of the 1900s. They married only on June 5, 1924. Hofmann tenderly called his spouse ‘Miz’.
In a couple of years after Maria’s death in 1963 in consequence of a surgery, Hofmann formed a family with a woman younger than him. She was named Renate Schmitz. Renate was featured by the artist on many of his later works.
Hans Hofmann: Artist/Teacher, Teacher/Artist
Narrated by Robert De Niro, this TV movie is both an explanation of modern art and the story of a man who influenced thousands, some of whom are today's leading artists
Hans Hofmann: Circa 1950
The catalogue with essays by curators Michael Rush and Catherine Morris, and renowned critic Irving Sandler features the nine studies for murals that Hofmann produced for Josep Sert's Chimbote Project
Hans Hofmann: Creation in Form and Color
This lushly illustrated book offers a close look at Hofmann’s significant role in abstract expressionism and American modernism during the 20th century as well as his fundamental influence as a teacher on the development of modern art in America