ARTIST OVERVIEW

Hans Hofmann’s (1880–1966) artistic and theoretical genius had a pervasive influence on postwar American art and artists. While Hofmann's teaching extended his startling theories to the brightest young artists of his time, his extensive and varied oeuvre, especially the abstract "slab" paintings from late in his career, revolutionized color theory and form.

Often referred to as the “father” of abstract expressionism, Hofmann brought the theory and practice of European modernism to America, providing a direct connection between the avant-gardes on both continents. Hofmann's early works—expressionist portraits and still lifes from the 1930s and early 1940s—are greatly informed by fauvism, surrealism, and cubism, movements that Hofmann experience first-hand as a student in Paris from 1904–1914.

Due to the deteriorating conditions in interwar Europe, Hofmann emigrated from Germany in 1930 and began teaching, first at the University of California, Berkeley, and later at his own academy located in New York and Provincetown, Massachusetts. From 1931 to 1958, Hofmann taught and influenced a generation of American abstract artists—Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky, Helen Frankenthaler, Elaine de Kooning, Robert De Niro, Sr., Paul Resika, Larry Rivers, Frank Stella, and scores of others.

Hofmann's writings on color and form were widely read and influential, none more so, perhaps, than his “push-pull” theory, which proved that color and form could create spatial depth and movement within a picture plane in much the same manner as traditional, linear perspective. His extremely vital abstractions from the fifties evince much of what he espoused and are prized by curators and critics today.

Hofmann produced some of his most path-breaking work in the years after his retirement from teaching and up until his death in 1966. In these late "slab" paintings, Hofmann's “push-pull” theory of color and form reached its apotheosis. Hofmann represented the United States at the 1960 XXX Venice Biennale along with Philip Guston and Franz Kline. In 1963, he bequeathed 45 paintings to the University of Berkeley, California, which led to the creation of the Berkeley Art Museum. That donation is now the largest collection of Hofmanns held by any museum in the world.

One year after Hofmann's first wife Miz died, he met and married Renate Schmitz in 1964, a relationship that inspired his legendary Renate Series. Hofmann died two years later on February 17, in New York City, at the age of 86.