Hans Hofmann

A pioneering artist, influential teacher and a crucial catalyst for Abstract Expressionism in New York, Hans Hofmann (1880–1966) is one of the most important abstract painters of the twentieth century. Following stints in Munich, Paris (where he befriended Picasso, Braque, Gris and Robert Delaunay), Hofmann established himself in the United States in 1932, setting up art schools in New York and Provincetown, where, over the next 40 years, his pedagogy was to significantly influence three generations of postwar American artists, among them Helen Frankenthaler, Red Grooms, Alfred Jensen, Lee Krasner, Louise Nevelson and Frank Stella. Hofmann’s painting, with its loose accumulations of brushstrokes and energetic tensions of rectangles, also proved a galvanizing precedent for Pollock, de Kooning, Motherwell and Newman. This publication surveys Hofmann’s life and work in all of its rich dimensionality, from his painting to his theoretical writings.

Celebrated for his exuberant, color-packed canvases, and legendarily influential as a teacher to several generations of artists—first in his native Germany, then in New York and Provincetown—Hans Hofmann (1880–1966) looms large indeed over postwar American painting. Circa 1950 accompanies The Rose Art Museum's examination of the nine studies for murals that Hofmann produced for the Chimbote Project, architect Josep Sert's 1950 Peruvian urban planning project. These works show Hofmann hitting an apex in his art: his canvasses spill over with gloriously messy energy, and palpable physicality, as they riff on strong, anchoring, circular, angular and cruciform forms. This full-color catalogue embellishes images from the project with essays by curators Michael Rush and Catherine Morris, and renowned critic Irving Sandler.