Kurzbeschreibung
Hans Hofmann (1880-1966) is one of the most important figures of postwar American art, for both his own abstract paintings and his influence as the legendary teacher of generations of artists in Germany, New York, and Provincetown. His presence in New York, a link to Wassily Kandinsky, the Cubists, and Fauves, catalyzed the movement ultimately known as Abstract Expressionism, whose influence still pervades the aesthetic categories and practices of art today. This volume features essays on Hofmann's life and work by Helmut Friedel and Tina Dickey; excerpts from Hofmann's own statements; full documentation of his career (including chronology, selected bibliography, and comprehensive list of solo and group exhibitions); and thirty-two large colorplates of works from 1942 to 1965 by this supreme colorist, his finest paintings from European and American collections. They richly represent his unique painting style, which conveys a deeply personal experience of color that has lost none of its power to fascinate the viewer.
Der Autor über sein Buch
Hans Hofmann, by Helmut Friedel and Tina Dickey.
"Never stick things together, or where you think they should go on paper. Put them where they should go in space. Tear them apart."
Hans Hofmann, legendary teacher.
Afire with the vision of the Fauve and Cubist painters of Paris with whom he’d lived and worked for a decade, Hofmann opened the first school of modern art in Munich in 1915. By the 1920’s, a pilgrimage to Munich rivaled the importance of a pilgrimage to Paris for any young American artist. Lured by former students to teach in summer sessions at the University of California, the master from Munich decided to remain in America in 1932. His schools in New York and Provincetown influenced generations of painters and teachers across the United States and Canada.
"Nature's purpose in relation to the visual arts is to provide stimulus not imitation. From its ceaseless urge to create springs all Life all movement and rhythm time and light, color and mood in short, all reality in Form and Thought."
Hans Hofmann, incendiary painter.
It was Hofmann who could explain Cubism to the small American avant-garde in the 1930's. Hofmann, whose early innovations and reassuring presence paved the way for the Abstract Expressionist movement to mature through its Surrealist stages to full flower, and who surpassed them all in the creation of a multidimensional color light. Fusing the structural awareness of Cubism and the wild color of the Fauves, he telescoped the achievements of the great traditions of art into a new language expressing and altering the realities of this century.
This book celebrates the return of Hans Hofmann's work to Germany in a 1997 exhibition at the Städtischen Galerie im Lenbachhaus in Munich and the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt. Superb reproductions of late works, the most comprehensive exhibition list to date, a selected bibliography and chronology, statements by the artist, and essays by Helmut Friedel, Director of the Städtischen Galerie im Lenbachhaus, and Tina Dickey, Editor of the Hans Hofmann Catalogue Raisonné, introduce Hofmann's life and work
