Everything about Hans Hofmann totally explained
Hans Hofmann (
March 21 1880 –
February 17 1966) was a German-born American
abstract expressionist painter. He was born in
Weißenburg,
Bavaria on
March 21 1880 the son of Theodor and Franziska Hofmann. In
1932 he immigrated to the
United States, where he resided until the end of his life.
Paintings
According to the Hofmann biography at the
Tate Gallery website, Hofmann's work is distinguished by "a rigorous concern with pictorial structure, spatial illusion, and colour relationships."
The
Guggenheim Collection's information on Hofmann states that his "completely abstract works date from the 1940s" . Hofmann believed that abstract art was a way to get at what was really important. He famously stated that
"the ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak."
Teaching and writing
Hofmann was renowned not only as an artist but as a teacher of art, both in his native
Germany and later in the U.S. In
Munich he founded an art school, where
Louise Nevelson,
Wolfgang Paalen,
Worth Rider and
Alfred Jensen, were among his students. He closed this school in
1932, the year he immigrated to the U.S. In
America, he initially taught at the
University of California, Berkeley in
1930 and in 1933 at the
Art Students League of New York. Leaving the League in the mid 1930s Hofmann opened his own schools in
New York and later in
Provincetown,
Massachusetts. Many famous or notable artists, especially some who could generally be classified as
abstract expressionists, studied with Hofmann in New York and Provincetown. These distinguished alumni included:
Lee Krasner,
Helen Frankenthaler,
Gerome Kamrowski,
William Ronald,
Joan Mitchell,
Michael Goldberg,
Larry Rivers,
Jane Frank,
Nell Blaine,
Robert de Niro, Sr.,
Jane Freilicher,
Allan Kaprow,
Red Grooms,
Wolf Kahn,
Marisol Escobar,
Nicholas Krushenick,
Burgoyne Diller,
Mercedes Matter,
James Gahagan,
Louisa Matthíasdóttir,
Judith Godwin, and
Donald Jarvis. In
1958, Hofmann closed his schools in order to devote himself exclusively to his own creative work.
Also prominent as a writer on modern art, Hofmann authored an influential book (sometimes referred to and anthologized as an "essay"),
Search for the Real, in which he discussed his push/pull spatial theories, his reverence for nature as a source for art, and his philosophy of art in general. Hofmann was an enormously important interpreter of
modernism and its relevance to advanced painting.
Collections
Hans Hofmann's works are in the permanent collections of many major museums in the United States and throughout the world, including
New York's
Metropolitan Museum of Art, the
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the
Whitney Museum, the
Museum of Modern Art (New York), the
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Boston's
Museum of Fine Arts, the
Art Institute of Chicago, the
Seattle Art Museum, the
Baltimore Museum of Art, the
Cleveland Museum of Art, the
Philadelphia Museum of Art, the
Honolulu Academy of Arts, the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus (
Munich), the Museu d'Art Contemporani, (
Barcelona), and the
Tate Gallery (
London). In addition to these collections, he also designed a colorful
mural located outside the entrance of the
High School of Graphic Communication Arts located in the
Hells Kitchen neighborhood of the
borough of
Manhattan in New York City.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Hans Hofmann'.
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