Who Is Hans Hofmann, and Why Is He Underrated?

Hofmann is also regarded as one of the most influential art teachers of the 20th century. He established an art school in Munich in 1915 that built on the ideas and work of Cézanne, the Cubists and Kandinsky; some art historians suggest it was the first modern school of art anywhere. After relocating to the United States, he reopened the school in colorcreateslight.com both New York City and Provincetown, Massachusetts until he retired from teaching in 1958 to paint full-time. Some of Hofmann’s other key tenets include his push/pull spatial theories, his insistence that abstract art has its origin in nature, and his belief in the spiritual value of art. 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.

Biography of Hans Hofmann

The painting ”Self-Portrait with Brushes”(1942) is typical of his style at this time. Its fame soon spread internationally and his first visit to the United States, in 1930, was occasioned by an invitation from a former student, Worth Ryder, to teach a summer session at UC Berkeley. He visited again, and then on his third visit, with political tensions rising in Europe, Hofmann decided to stay and began teaching in New York at the Art Students League. He opened the “Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts” in 1933, and two years later opened a summer school in Provincetown, MA.

Fast Facts: Hans Hofmann

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.

In The Vanquished (1959), a garish “slab” is covered with a menacing, craggily black blob, blocking much of our view. As an instructor and mentor, Hans Hofmann was at the center of some of the most significant movements in modern art from the turn of the 20th century to the 1960s. His avid interest in the colorful work of Henri Matisse took the young Hofmann away from a focus on cubism that ultimately led to his work with “slabs” of color in his mature abstract expressionist work of the 1950s and 1960s. Art critics celebrated it as a step forward in the exploration of the abstract expressionist style. His work during the 1940s ranged from playful self-portraits executed with bold strokes to colorful geometric shapes that echoed the work of European masters Hans Arp and Joan Miro.

• Art history has had difficulty reckoning with artists who wear more than one hat.
• Only in this way could an artist stay true to the fundamental fact of the canvas, its two-dimensionality.
• Hofmann gives the newly completed painting Of Unequal but Equivalent Balance to the Musée de Grenoble in France.
• Robert Coates, skeptical of the “spatter-and-daub” style of painting, uses the term “abstract expressionism” in his review of Hofmann’s work.
• He taught Lee Krasner, Helen Frankenthaler, and Larry Rivers, and he formed a close relationship with Jackson Pollock.

Monochromatic rectangles in numerous shades float atop gestural compositions, interrupting and occluding those supposedly freewheeling improvisations. They imagine the future color mastery of someone like Stanley Whitney and conjure worlds beyond the frame, suggesting paintings within paintings. Think of René Daniëls’s pictures of exhibitions and David Diao’s depictions of bodies of work.

Based on such theories, Hofmann avoided any suggestion that a modernist artist or critic must distinguish between abstraction and representation, or between gestural, expressionistic styles and geometric forms. Many years later, in 1944 he had a second one, at the “Art of This Century Gallery” of Peggy Guggenheim in New York. From his early landscapes of the 1930s, to his paintings of the late 1950s, and his abstract works at the end of his career upon his death in 1966, Hofmann continued to create boldly experimental color combinations and formal contrasts that transcended genre and style.

Through Freudenberg’s patronage over the next decade, Hans Hofmann was able to move to Paris with Miz. While in France, Hofmann immersed himself deeply in the avant-garde painting scene. As his reputation grew, Hofmann’s painting “Akt (Nude)” appeared in the 1908 Berlin Secession show. Between 1900 and 1904, while living in Munich, he met his future wife, Maria “Miz” Wolfegg.