Hans Hofmann valuation
Taught half of New York how to paint, then out-painted most of them after he turned seventy.
Hans Hofmann was born at Weissenburg in Bavaria in 1880 and spent the years before 1914 in Paris among Matisse, Picasso and Delaunay, which is the whole basis of what he later taught.
What a work by Hans Hofmann is worth
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Bio
Hans Hofmann was born at Weissenburg in Bavaria in 1880 and spent the years before 1914 in Paris among Matisse, Picasso and Delaunay, which is the whole basis of what he later taught. He ran a school in Munich, emigrated in 1932, and opened schools in New York and Provincetown that shaped a generation — Lee Krasner, Helen Frankenthaler and many others passed through — while the writing on push and pull became the standard vocabulary for talking about pictorial space. He closed the schools in 1958 to paint full time, at seventy-eight, and the slab paintings of rectangles set against gestural colour that followed are the works he is now valued for. He died in 1966.
Paintings are unique, and the date is the central fact: the German and early American work, the drip and gesture paintings of the 1940s, and the late rectangle pictures are quite distinct. The paint is thick, often applied with a knife and in several campaigns, so surface irregularity is original and cracking is common and not necessarily a fault. Works on paper are numerous. Signature and date are usually lower right and often repeated on the reverse. The catalogue raisonne is the reference for attribution.
At a glance
- Born
- 21 March 1880, Weißenburg in Bayern
- Died
- 17 February 1966, New York City
- Movement
- Abstract Expressionism
More on Wikipedia.
Art of This Century, the Whitney and Venice
Hofmann first taught in America at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1930, and reopened his school in New York in 1934, teaching in Provincetown in the summers. His first New York solo show was at Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century in 1944, and he was later shown by Betty Parsons and Samuel Kootz. His essays were collected as Search for the Real in 1948.
The Whitney gave him a retrospective in 1957, and in 1960 he was one of the artists chosen to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale. The late slab paintings include Pompeii of 1959 and To Miz, Pax Vobiscum of 1964, in memory of his wife. Tate showed the late paintings in London in 1988, in an exhibition chosen by John Hoyland.
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