Hans Hofman 1880 —1966
Biography
HANS HOFMANN (1880-1966)
"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." - Hans Hofmann
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.
As a teacher he brought to America direct knowledge of the work of a celebrated group of European modernists (prior to World War I he had lived and studied in Paris) and developed his own philosophy of art, which he expressed in essays which are among the most engaging discussions of painting in the twentieth century, including "The Color Problem in Pure Painting-Its Creative Origin."
Hofmann believed fervently that a modern artist must remain faithful to the flatness of the canvas support. To suggest depth and movement in the picture - to create what he called "push and pull" in the image - artists should create contrasts of color, form, and texture.
Although renowned for his ideas, Hofmann once said that "painters must speak through paint, not through words." And his own foremost medium of expression was color: "The whole world, as we experience it visually," he said, "comes to us through the mystic realm of color."
Hofmann taught art for over four decades; his impressive list of students includes Helen Frankenthaler, Red Grooms, Alfred Jensen, Wolf Kahn, Lee Krasner, Louise Nevelson and Frank Stella. As an artist Hofmann tirelessly explored pictorial structure, spatial tensions and color relationships. In his earliest portraits done just years into the twentieth century, his interior scenes of the 1940s and his signature canvases of the late 1950s and the early 1960s, Hofmann brought to his paintings what art historian Karen Wilkin has described as a "range from loose accumulations of brushy strokes...to crisply tailored arrangements of rectangles...but that somehow seems less significant than their uniform intensity, their common pounding energy and their consistent physicality."
Hofmann was born Johann Georg Hofmann in Weissenberg, in the Bavarian state of Germany in 1880 and raised and educated in Munich. After initial studies in science and mathematics, he began studying art in 1898. With the support of Berlin art patron Phillip Freudenberg, Hofmann was able to move to Paris in 1904, taking classes at both the Académie de la Grande Chaumière (with fellow student Henri Matisse) and the Académie Colarossi. In Paris Hofmann observed and absorbed the innovations of the most adventurous artists of the day including Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Robert and Sonia Delaunay, Fernand Léger and Henri Matisse, many of whom he met and became friendly with. Hofmann would remain in Paris until 1914 when the advent of World War I required him to return to Germany. In 1915, unable to enroll in the military due to a respiratory ailment, Hofmann opened an innovative school for art in Munich, where he transmitted what he had learned from the avant-garde in Paris. The school's reputation spread internationally, especially after the war, attracting students from Europe and the United States, thus beginning what was to be almost a lifetime of teaching for Hofmann.
At the invitation of Worth Ryder, one of his former students, Hofmann went to the University of California, Berkeley, to teach in the summer of 1930. He returned to Berkeley the following year, a momentous one which also saw his first American solo exhibition at the Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. Because of the deteriorating circumstances in pre-war Germany, Hofmann made the decision to remain in the United States permanently (his wife, Maria, would join him in 1939). In 1932 he settled in New York where he again taught art, first at The Art Students League, then, a year later, at his own school (adding in 1935 summer sessions in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where he also lived). For eager young Americans, most of whom had traveled little-constrained in the 1930s by the Depression and in the 1940s by World War II and its aftermath-contact with Hofmann served as an invaluable alternative for direct contact with the European sources of Modernism. By 1960 noted art historian Clement Greenberg called Hofmann "in all probability the most important art teacher of our time." His school would remain a vital presence in the New York art world until 1958 when the seventy-eight year old Hofmann decided to devote himself full-time to painting.
Although Hofmann did not come to the United States until he was over fifty, he is embraced as an American painter and regarded as a key member of the Abstract Expressionists. For all his connections to that movement, and to abstraction itself, his work was nonetheless and by his own admission firmly rooted in the visible world. He combined Cubist structure and intense Fauvist color into a highly personal visual language with which he endlessly explored pictorial structures and chromatic relationships. Hofmann created volume in his compositions not by rendering or modeling but through contrasts of color, shape and surface. Beginning in the mid-1940s with a one-person exhibition at Peggy Guggenheim's The Art of This Century Gallery in New York, Hofmann's paintings were the subject of exhibitions at major institutions such as the Addison Gallery of American Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and The Museum of Modern Art. Hofmann was also one of four artists representing the United States at the Venice Biennale in 1960.
Hofmann was close to 70 years old when, in a dazzling burst of energy he painted most of the large, highly recognizable canvases of the late 1950s and 1960s that assured his reputation. With their stacked, overlapping and floating rectangles and clear, saturated hues, these extraordinary paintings continued up until the end of his remarkable long career what Hofmann had first explored as an artist over six decades earlier.
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View synoptic biography below.
Provincetown Landscape |
25 x 30 inches |
Highlights of an illustrious career
1880 Hans Hofmann is born in Weissenburg in Bavaria, Germany, on March 21. His father Theodor Hofmann, a government official, and his mother Franciska, the daughter of a prominent brewer and wine producer, have three sons and two daughters. Hans was the second son.
1886 The family moves to Munich. Hofmann attends public schools and develops special interests in mathematics, science, and music. He plays the violin, piano and organ and begins to draw.
1896 With his father's help, finds a position as assistant to the director of public works of the state of Bavaria. Patents several scientific inventions.
1898 Studies painting with Willi Schwarz, who introduces him to Impressionism, at Moritz Heymann's art school in Munich.
1900 Meets Maria "Miz" Wolfegg, his future wife.
1903 Through Willi Schwarz, he meets Phillip Freudenberg, the nephew of a Berlin collector, who becomes his patron from 1904 to 1914 and enables him to live in Paris (though he often summers in Germany).
1904 Frequents the Café du Dome, a haunt of artists and writers, with Jules Pascin, a friend from Mortiz Heymann's school. Miz joins him in Paris. Attends evening sketch classes at the école de la Grand Chaumière and the Académie Colarossi. Meets Picasso, Braque and Matisse.
1908 Exhibits with the Neue Sezession in Berlin, and again in 1909.
1910 First one-person exhibition held at Paul Cassirer Gallery, Berlin. Meets and befriends Robert Delaunay.
1914 Hofmann and Miz leave Paris for Corsica to recuperate from what proves to be tuberculosis. Called to Germany by the illness of his sister, they are forced by the outbreak of World War I to remain in the country. Financial assistance from Phillip Freudenberg ends.
1915 Ineligible for the army because of the aftereffects of his lung condition, and with Freudenberg's assistance terminated by the war, Hofmann decides to earn a living by teaching. Opens the Schule für Bildenes Kunst in Munich.
1918 After the war his school becomes known abroad and attracts foreign students. Between 1922 and
1929 holds summer sessions in Bavaria, Yugoslavia, Italy and France. Makes frequent trips to Paris. Has little time to paint but draws continually.
1930 At the invitation of former student Worth Ryder, teaches a summer session at the University of California, Berkeley, where Ryder is an associate professor in the Department of Art. Returns to Munich for the winter.
1931 In the spring, teaches at the Chouinard School of Art, Los Angeles, and again at Berkeley in the summer. Exhibits drawings at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco-his first one-person exhibition in the United States.
1932 Returns to Chouinard School of Art in the summer. Advised by Miz not to return to Munich because of growing political hostility towards intellectuals, Hofmann settles in New York. Former student Vaclav Vytlacil helps arrange a teaching position at The Art Students League of New York.
1933 Spends the summer as a guest instructor at the Thurn School of Art in Gloucester, Massachusetts. In the fall opens a school in New York at 444 Madison Avenue. Begins to paint again.
1934 Upon the expiration of his visa, travels to Bermuda where he stays for several months before returning to the United States with a permanent visa. Teaches again at the Thurn School of Art. Opens the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts at 137 East 57th Street in New York.
1935 Opens a summer school in Provincetown, Massachusetts.
1936 Hofmann moves his school to 52 West Ninth Street in New York.
1938 The Hofmann School moves again to 52 West Eighth Street, its permanent home in New York until
1958. Hofmann's lecture series at the school in the winter of 1938-39 is attended by such figures as Arshile Gorky and Clement Greenberg.
1941 Becomes an American citizen. Delivers an address at the annual meeting of American Abstract Artists at the Riverside Museum. Solo exhibition at the Isaac Delgado Museum of Art, New Orleans.
1942 Lee Krasner, formerly a Hofmann student, introduces him to Jackson Pollock.
1944 First exhibition in New York at Peggy Guggenheim's The Art of This Century Gallery. Hans Hofmann, Paintings 1941-1944 opens at The Arts Club of Chicago and travels to the Milwaukee Art Institute. Hofmann's paintings are included in Forty American Moderns at 67 Gallery and Abstract and Surrealist Art in America at the Mortimer Brandt Gallery (arranged by Sidney Janis in conjunction with publication of Janis' book of the same title) in New York. Meets critic Clement Greenberg. Close friendship with author and critic Harold Rosenberg begins.
1945 Included in Contemporary American Painting at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Included in all subsequent Whitney painting annuals.
1947 Exhibits at Betty Parsons Gallery in New York, the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts and in Pittsburgh. Begins to exhibit with the Kootz Gallery, New York, which would hold a one-person show of Hofmann's work each year (except 1948 and 1956) until the artist's death.
1948 Retrospective exhibition of his work at the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, Massachusetts, in conjunction with publication of his book, The Search for the Real and Other Essays.
1949 Travels to Paris to attend the opening of his exhibition at the Galerie Maeght and visits the studios of Picasso, Braque, Brancusi and Miró. Helps Fritz Bultman and Weldon Kees organize Forum 49, a summer series of lectures, panels and exhibitions at Gallery 200 in Provincetown.
1950 Participates in a three-day symposium at Studio 35 with William Baziotes, James Brooks, Willem de Kooning, Herbert Ferber, Theodoros Stamos, David Smith and Bradley Walker Tomlin. Joins the "Irascibles," a group of Abstract Expressionist artists in an open letter protesting the exclusion of the avant-garde from an upcoming exhibition of American art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
1954 Solo exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art.
1955 Clement Greenberg organizes a small retrospective of Hofmann's paintings at Bennington College in Vermont.
1957 Retrospective exhibition held at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, traveling to Des Moines, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Minneapolis, Utica and Baltimore.
1958 Ceases teaching to devote himself full-time to painting. Moves his studios into his former New York and Provincetown schools. Completes a mosaic mural for the exterior of the New York School of Printing at 439 West 49th Street.
1960 Represents the United States with Philip Guston, Franz Kline and Theodore Roszac at the XXX Venice Biennale.
1962 Retrospective exhibition opens at the Frankische Galerie am Marientor, Nuremburg and travels to Cologne, Berlin and Munich. Exhibition Oils on Paper 1961-1962 opens in Munich. Awarded Honorary Membership in the Akademie der Bildenden Kunste in Nuremberg and an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree by Dartmouth College.
1963 Miz Hofmann dies. Retrospective exhibition Hans Hofmann and His Students organized by William Seitz opens at The Museum of Modern Art and travels throughout the United States, South America and Europe. Signs an agreement to donate forty-five paintings to the University of California, Berkeley, and to fund the construction of a gallery in his honor at the University's new museum, then in the planning stage
1964 Receives an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from the University of California, Berkeley and the Solomon Guggenheim International Award. Becomes a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, New York. Renate Schmitz inspires The Renate Series
1966 Hans Hofmann dies on February 17 in New York.
Hans Hofmann and his students: MoMA exhibition 1963-1965
Hans Hofmann
Robert Beauchamp
Nell Blaine
Cameron Booth
Fritz Bultman
Nicolas Carone
Giorgio Cavallon
Perle Fine
Jean Follett
Miles Forst
Mary Frank
Helen Frankenthaler
William Freed
Jane Freilicher
Paul Georges
Michael Goldberg
Robert Goodnough
John Grillo
John Haley
Paul Harris
Julius Hatofsky
Dorothy Heller
Carl Holty
Alfred Jensen
Wolf Kahn
Allan Kaprow
Karl Kasten
Albert Kotin
Lee Krasner
Linda Lindeberg
Michael Loew
Erle Loran
Mercedes Matter
George McNeil
Jan Müller
Louise Nevelson
Robert De Niro, Sr.
George Earl Ortman
Stephen Pace
Felix Pasilis
Robert Richenburg
Larry Rivers
Ludwig Sander
David Loeffler Smith
Richard Stankiewicz
Joe Stefanelli
Myron Stout
Albert Swinden
Anne Tabachnick
Vaclav Vytlacil
Glenn Wessels
Wilfred Zogbaum
Museum Collections:
Ackland Art Museum, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, MA
Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo
Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto
Art Institute of Chicago
Art Museum of South Texas, Texas A&M University, Corpus Christi
Aspen Art Museum
Auckland Art Gallery
Baltimore Museum of Art
Berkeley Art Museum, University of California
The Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas at Austin
Brooklyn Museum of Art
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh
Cincinnati Art Museum
Cleveland Museum of Art
Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk
Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, NH
Davis Museum and Cultural Center, Wellesley College
Dallas Museum of Art
DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Lincoln, MA
Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington
Elvehjem Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Germanische Nationalmuseum, Nürnberg
Greenville County Museum of Art, Greenville, SC
Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca
High Museum of Art, Atlanta
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover
Honolulu Academy of Arts
Hunter Museum of American Art, Chattanooga
Indianapolis Museum of Art
Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Kunsthaus Hamburg
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami, Coral Gables
Mead Art Museum, Amherst College
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Milwaukee Art Museum
Mint Museum of Art, Charlotte
Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth
The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute, Utica, NY
Muscarelle Museum of Art, College of William and Mary, Williamsburg
Musée de Grenoble
Museum Ludwig, Cologne
Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
The Newark Museum
Palm Springs Art Museum
Philadelphia Museum of Art
Philip Musée de Grenoble
Museum Ludwig, Cologne
Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
The Newark Museum
Palm Springs Art Museumand Muriel Berman Museum of Art, Ursinus College, ollegeville, PA
Portland Art Museum, OR
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art
Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, University of Nebraska, Lincoln
Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas, Lawrence
Speed Art Museum, Louisville
Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich
Tate Gallery, London
Tel Aviv Museum of Art
Toledo Museum of Art
Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita State University
University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor
Utah Museum of Fine Arts, University of Utah, Salt Lake City
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
Washington University Gallery of Art, St. Louis
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown
Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven
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