hans hofmann

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 emigrated to the United States, where he resided until the end of his life.

According to the Hofmann biography at the Tate Gallery website [see below], Hofmann's work is distinguished by "a rigorous concern with pictorial structure, spatial illusion, and colour relationships."

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 and Mercedes Matter were among his students. He closed this school in 1932, the year he emigrated to the U.S. In America, he initially taught at the University of California, Berkeley 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 American artists, especially some who could generally be classified as abstract expressionists, studied with Hofmann. These distinguished alumni include Burgoyne Diller, Lee Krasner, Helen Frankenthaler, Donald Jarvis, Joan Mitchell, Jane Frank, and Larry Rivers. In 1958, Hofmann closed his schools in order to devote himself exclusively to his own creative work. Hofmann authored an influential book, 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.

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 Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus (Munich), the Museu d'Art Contemporani, (Barcelona), and the Tate Gallery (London).

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." [1]