Hans Hofmann
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. 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.
If you own a work by Hans Hofmann
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
Write to info@whitebankfineart.co.uk, or start below.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.