HANS HOFFMAN

hans hofmann

18 JUNE — 25 JULY 2021

hans hofmann W O R K S O N PA P E R

TAYLOE PIGGOTT GALLERY 62 SOUTH GLENWOOD STREET JACKSON HOLE WYOMING TEL 307 733 0555 TAYLOEPIGGOTTGALLERY.COM

“ F E E L I N G I N T O ” F O R M : T H E E M P AT H I C M I N D

by Tina Dickey

When I star t to paint—I want to forget al l I know about painting. I take for granted that my knowledge has become second nature.

In the approach toward my work, I fol low not one, but several seemingly opposed principles. I make sure, however, not to make the mistake of mixing two or al l of them in one and the same creative operation. What I would hate most is to repeat myself over and over again—to develop a false style. I do not want to avoid immersi ng myself in trouble—to be in 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 fol lowing my creative instincts—in an act of creative destruction—wil l I be able to find it. As a painter, I deny any rule, any method and any theor y. I trust and fol low only the inner eye in the faculty of empathy. The painterly instincts are stronger than the wil l . The outcome fascinates me—it permits no reasoning. Or may it be that a kind of super-concentration makes one forget the immense mental effor t as it makes one forget the immense physical effor t? I don’t know. The Philistine wil l see in it a similarity to the ar t of the Schizophrene.

—Hans Hofmann, “When I Star t to Paint…,” Typescript, April 1, 1950, Hans Hofmann Papers, Archives of American Ar t

Total ly naked and covered in paint, Hans Hofmann was leaning on the rail of the sec-ond stor y boardwalk in the Days Lumber yard Studios in Provincetown, Massachusetts, staring through his studio door with a furrowed brow. His student and neighbor James Gahagan emerged from his own studio in search of a breeze. “What’s the problem?” Gahagan asked. “Step into my studio,” said Hofmann. “You’l l see what’s wrong. I have just slaughtered a painting.”

Some fifty years later, lecturing at the New York Studio School, Gahagan recal led his insight of that moment: “Up to that point, I’d always demanded maybe a bit too much control over my painting, over the process itself. Here was the man I considered a mas-ter—who freely admitted that he could blow the whole thing apar t, lose it. I thought once you became a painter and you knew what the hel l you were doing, you just made beautiful paintings, one right after the other.”

In 1915, Hofmann star ted an ar t school in Munich, Germany, to provide rehabilitation assistance for shel l-shocked soldiers. Hofmann recognized that the creative process offered a means to regenerate and transform a damaged psyche. He also had the larger hope that the health of the human psyche would be reflected in the political health of the culture, the nation, and the world—as one sacred and i nseparable organism.

Despite the radi cal changes in his work from decade to decade, and even from painting to painting, Hofmann’s understanding of the creative process did not change. I n the statement “When I Star t to Paint…,” he rebel led against the imposition or cultivation of a uniform (and marketable) style. He fought to achieve the highest states of visual awareness—and gave himself the freedom to fail. Such a creative process—aiming not to please and winding up not where

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one expects or plans or even wants to be—results in the bir th of an interrelated whole. The Philistine wil l see in it a similarity to the ar t of the Schizophrene.

To one hostile to the ar ts, this can appear to be madness.

Through empathy—Einfühlung or “feeling into”—the inner eye senses the emerging relationships on canvas. Then, by simplifying, even destroying, to clarify those relationships, the inner eye strengthens the connections. As Hofmann embraced fear and frustration—and wound up using what he cal led the scheiss, scraping what’s left on the palette together into its own color— his outlined architectonic forms of the 1940s become untethered forces of color from 1952 on. Large masses activate space; through counterbalance and thrust, they turn in space. As the eye engages different relationships, a movement can shift in multiple directions. Movement within stil lness is power.

Power is tension. And power and tension are life.

Each work in this exhibition is a profound resolution of the unpredictable development of Hofmann’s vision. “There is in reality no such thing as modern ar t,” wrote Hofmann in 1952 for his Kootz Gal ler y exhibition, “Ar t is carried on up and down in immense cycles through centuries and civilizations.” Yet no ar tist creates in a visual vacuum. At age 65 at the end of World War II, Hofmann drew upon memor y as urgently as he drew upon his surroundings. He stil l painted from stil l lifes and the occasional model, yet he also responded to the visual language of his peers and his students. A work might echo an experience of light and movement in the landscape, or the singing blades of an electric fan.

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The years after the war were a fer tile period of semi-abstraction, a movement that re-mains without a name. The cubists had long ago returned to figurative work to anchor their structural exploits in an emotional reality. The avantgarde ar tists of New York, including Hofmann, had been experimenting with automatism and biomorphic forms: free associations and unintended meanings that might result in a new visual language.

Hofmann’s own experience of the histor y of European ar t and what he had learned of visual traditions worldwide informed his emphasis on color as the primar y force in paint-ing, an emphasis that set him apar t from his New York contemporaries. His creative emergence was thus more complex than theirs: He was transforming the dictates of a multifaceted histor y into contemporar y relevance.

“I develop two styles in painting, a decorative one and a highly symphonic one,” Hofmann summarized in 1952. “Besides these, I work as I please.”

Two works of 1946 give a hint of his dance between the poles of structure and emotion, between precision of form and poetr y of color, between geometric simplicity and symphonic facture: The Virgin and The Conjurer (Smal l Version).

What seems strange now is that these veins of work and his experiments with biomorphic form, garnered the label “Abstract Expressionism” in a New Yorker review of his exhibition at the Mor timer Brandt Gal ler y, on 57th Street in New York, in the early spring of 1946.1 And in 1961, Clement Greenberg would write, “Summer Glor y of 1944 and Conjurer of 1946 declare the impastoed, non-linear manner which, in my view, was his most consistently successful one

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in the ten years after 1948. Here color determines form from the inside as it were…”2 In his youth, Hofmann would have become familiar with a famous painting by Hieronymus Bosch. The original was in a museum in the suburbs of Paris, and block-print copies of the painting were popular. Bosch’s Conjurer, a rounded figure in red, stands on the right, facing his audience with his vessels of deception, luring his prey with a game of cups and bal ls. In one version, a frog emerges from his mouth to distract the former owner of the now stolen purse that is in the Conjurer’s hand. Hofmann’s Conjurer’s Vessels of 1945 is a similar composition, as is his abstract Conjurer of 1959.

Hans Hofmann’s 1940s experiments with amoebic form and thrown paint find gravity in the interlocking volumes and sexual imager y of The Virgin, which formed par t of an evolution that had begun in 1945. The painting’s potent form and decisive line sug-gest the work of Hofmann’s peers Arshile Gorky and Pablo Picasso. During that time, Hofmann had been coaching his friend (soon to be his dealer) Samuel Kootz on how to cour t Picasso, and by the end of 1946, Kootz brought the first new Picassos to New York since the beginning of the war.

Through the next few years, Hofmann’s inner struggle to mine the magic of older tradi-tions continued to influence his circles of painters and students.

In 1949, Hofmann had re-cently returned from his first exhibition in Paris at Galerie Maeght and from his reunions with Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Constantin Brancusi, Joan Miró, and others. He was also par t of a vibrant ar tistic

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community in Provincetown. An influx of talented ar tists, writers, and poets in Provincetown in the summers of 1949 and 1950 led to Forum 49, a summerlong series of exhibits and programs, which helped inspire the 1950 exhibition Post-Abstract Painting 1950, France and America at the Provincetown Ar t Association.

Hofmann’s inclusive view of ar t histor y, combined with his insistence on working from nature, resulted in a more definitive turn toward figuration among a number of his for-mer students, among them Rober t De Niro Sr., whose private studio was then the only studio to share the loft floor with Hofmann’s. The Canadian painter Joseph Plaskett recal led, “I’ve always thought that Hofmann’s teaching turned me from an abstract painter to a figurative one.” He attributed the change to his deepened understanding of visual dynamics.3 What the students perceived to be their rebel lion did not faze Hofmann. It was evidence of the grand shifts in visual exploration throughout time. Ir ving Sand ler was impressed by the degree of Hofmann’s own figuration in 1950, in works such as Fruit Bowl,4 or Le Coq, and the easily identifiable pineapple in Magenta and Blue. This figuration was balanced by his severely geometric mural studies of 1950 for a civic center in Chimbote, Peru (a col laboration with the Catalan architect Josep Lluís Ser t that was arranged by Kootz). Vestiges of these studies appear in the 1951 work Perpetuita. The title is Italian for per-petuity: end less, everliving, everlasting—not an unusual preoccupation for a 71-year-old. A big-bel lied nude in sandals bends in a close space, perhaps dressing himself in infinity, about to rol l in a blanket of sky, pul ling back the cur tain to another realm—revealing white bones in the night. A master includes

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ever y thing in a master work—sex, fear, love, pain, joy, being and nothingness, bir th and death, day and night—for existence itself is a transformative nexus of simultaneous transitions.

END NOTES 1. Robert Coates, “The Art Galleries, at Home and Abroad” New Yorker, March 30, 1946, p. 83. The term originated in 1919 in Der Sturm, see Helen Harrison, “Arthur G. Dove and the Origins of Abstract Expressionism,” American Art 12, no. 1 (Spring 1998): 75–76.

2. Clement Greenberg, Hans Hofmann (Paris: Editions Georges Fall, 1961), reprinted in Cynthia Goodman, Hans Hofmann, (Munich: Prestel Verlag, 1990), p. 126.

3. Joseph Francis Plaskett, taped interview with the author, Paris, March 31, 1999.

4. Irving Sandler, “Hans Hofmann, I Hate to Repeat Myself,” in Hans Hofmann: Circa 1950, exhibition catalog (Waltham, MA: Rose Art Museum, 2010), p. 94.

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Untitled, 1945 Gouache and ink on paper 31 x 22 1/2 inches

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Untitled, 1945 (c.)

Crayon on paper 22 1/2 x 28 1/2 inches

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Untitled, 1945 Crayon and ink on paper 24 x 18 inches

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Harlequin, 1944 Ink and crayon on paper 24 x 19 inches

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Untitled, 1944 Ink and color crayon on paper 24 x 19 inches

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Untitled, 1944 Ink and crayon on paper 24 x 19 inches

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Untitled, 1944 Ink and crayon on paper 24 x 19 inches

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Untitled, 1944 Ink and crayon on paper 24 x 19 inches

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Pink and Blue, 1944 Watercolor on paperboard mounted on panel 22 x 25 3/4 inches

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HANS HOFMANN was just one man, but his paintbrush arguably sparked a generation of American painters. In 1944, while he was creating these pulsing abstractions, the world was in uproar. In a tiny haven of lower Manhattan, a group of ar tists were making waves, abandoning representative painting for something entirely raw and new. Hans Hofmann was at the fore, giving free lectures in his broken English, forming what would become known as the Abstract Expressionist movement. With ar tists and intel lectuals fleeing Europe in droves, Hofmann’s school solidified New York as the center of the ar t universe in the years surrounding the Second World War. He may not be as wel l-known as, say, Jackson Pol lock, but many who knew them might argue Jackson Pol lock would not exist without the teachings of Hans Hofmann.

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