The Art of Hans Hofmann
“A rigorous concern with pictorial structure, spatial illusion and color relationships.”
Truro, Barnstable County, Massachusetts: as you turn left off the main road, onto the black tarmac leading to the entrance and the thoroughfare, there’s a white pumpkin-shaped sign with two white four by four legs. On the sign, black letters spell out the name Snow Cemetery.
White trapezoid markers sit to either side of the entrance. In fact, they are the entrance. There’s no archway, no overhead marquee. Just two stone guardians, standing resolute and stern.
A simple portal, which probably appealed to the ghost I am here to visit. He once said, “The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.” Appropriately, there is no nonsense in this city of the dead.
A white mist hangs in the air, but the deeper I try to look into it, the more it grays in color. The air is cold. So the combination of mist and cold go straight to my bones, which are surrounded by plenty of insulating flesh. If the chill pierces my unseen bones, imagine what it does to skeletons in a metal or wooden coffin buried in moist earth. I shiver at the thought.
Lots of bare trees: firs, birches, maples. Next to their nakedness, the evergreens look absurdly overdressed, yet smug in an elitist kind of way. Kentucky bluegrass grows between the graves. Although there’s nothing blue green about it now; more of a moldy yellow color, I should say. Frozen crisp, it crunches as I walk on it. I’m looking for a white marker, Teutonic in its thickness.
One hundred yards to the right, I find it. It has a happy look to it, even though it is somewhat isolated from its neighbors. Perhaps it’s a trick of the sunlight filtering through the gray mist, but there’s an effervescent quality in the air, an odor of frolic. The man buried here carried an innate happiness around with him, like an extra toe or a too-big nose. It was simply there inside him when he was born.
His name was Hans Hofmann. One of those German artists, an abstract expressionist. The Germans, it seems to me, have a genius for just about everything: painting, writing, war. Kind of like the French have a weakness for just about everything: women, wine, love, snobbishness.
Born in Weissenberg, Bavaria, he was modestly renowned in the Munich art world for not only his jovial and potent personality, but also for his paintings, and as an instructor of the mechanics, technique and theory of art. While living in Munich, he founded an art school. Among his more famous students were Louise Nevelson and Mercedes Matter.
Loud, brash, kind, opinionated, liberal, and infectiously enthusiastic, Hofmann inspired his students to angelic ideals. He espoused “a rigorous concern with pictorial structure, spatial illusion and color relationships.”
Hofmann, attuned to German political realities, closed his art school in 1932, and relocated to the United States at the age of fifty-two, where he landed in San Francisco. California which, in the 1930s, was paradise, No smog, no traffic jams, and perfect weather. Hofmann’s spirit, unshackled from the gravity of fascism, soared. He taught art at the University of California, Berkeley, California. Soon enough, though, he felt the call of the New York art world — the axis mundi, the ‘center of the world.’
Leaving California, he accepted a position teaching art at the Art Students League of New York. His own painting never suffered, but rather was stimulated by his teaching.
Then Hofmann opened his own art school in New York, and later in Provincetown, Massachusetts. His students make up the who’s who of abstract expressionism: Donald Jarvis, James Gahagan, Burgoyne Diller, Marisol Escobar, Nick Kurshenick, Lee Krasner, Helen Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell, Wolf Kahn, Red Grooms, Allan Kaprow, Larry Rivers, Jane Frank, Nell Blaine, Jane Freilicher, and Robert de Niro, Sr.
Hofmann wrote a book, an essay (a try) on modern art. In it, he expounded on his push-pull theory of space (I have no idea what he’s talking about), the natural senses as inspiration for his theories, and his general theory of art, which was quite disciplined in its approach to color, form, texture, and sweep. It’s all good stuff and worth taking the time to read, but I doubt any of it was formally applied to his personal paintings. It was there, floating in his mind and emotions, but the actual act of painting had to be, must be, just letting go and permitting emotion to lead.
Hofmann was and is generally regarded as an interpreter of modernism, which does not mean much of anything, really. For modernism is an irrelevant and redundant term, a concept susceptible to challenge. In the end, the term means whatever anyone wants it to mean.
But Hofmann could paint. And that’s the crux of the matter. Theories make nice books. Only talent produces art. And Hofmann was a genius at slapping oil paint on a canvas.
Most of his paintings are large. Their colors are bright and heavy with texture. Texture is a knack for finesse many artists don’t have. Texture adds depth, which, in turn, adds vivacity. Hofmann favored loose geometric shapes, particularly the square and its cousins, the rectangle and plane. Words cannot really describe it. But when the colors and texture and shapes were molded by Hofmann’s brush, the effect is wonderful: great gobs of yellow, green and red, suspended against slashing foundations of hellish blacks and peep whites and humming blues.
To me, it is interesting that Hofmann’s abstract paintings carry concrete names. In other words, his paintings, while abstract in form, represented something in the real world, at least in his mind. It’s as if, through the titles of the paintings, he was asking, “Can you see it, too?”
Hoffmann’s elemental happiness darts out from his canvasses. He made no effort to hide his sheer delight at being alive. For that reason, his paintings cause me to smile somewhere deep inside, even when they are dark paintings of dark sum and substance. They still proffer a hope, an expectation that something wonderful is about to happen.
Like Orlando the Marmalade Cat, living life for Hans Hofmann wasn’t difficult. On the contrary, it was a feast of pleasure with a taste of adventure mixed in for spice. Any man who can leave his home, his fame and his nation at the age of fifty-two is certainly bold, embracing possibility rather than avoiding it.
Generous with his time and talent, Hofmann, like Orlando, knew that small bothers usually led to big bonuses, if he could maintain being “interested in the same thing at the same moment.” So, like Orlando, who adopted the poodle Bill as a pet, Hofmann opened his art schools, adopting students as his pets. The big bonus was the magic of life and art, an alchemy that found expression in his paintings.
And like Orlando, Hofmann was never a tightwad when it came to money or compassion, or to his friends. Stand in front of one of his paintings and you will know that it is better to give than to receive.
