MAY 02 - JUNE 29, 2002
Evolution/Revolution
Still Life with Fruit & Coffee Pot
HOF-026-OM
"The artist's technical problem is how to transform the material with which he works back into the sphere of the spirit." —Hans Hofmann
Hackett-Freedman Gallery proudly presented an outstanding collection of rarely seen works by abstract exprressionism master Hans Hofmann, May 2–June 29, 2002.
"The current exhibition is unique in presenting many groundbreaking works painted by Homann in the late 1930s and 1940s," states Curator Alla Efimova in the catalogue essay. It is "the period of his transition from Europe to America—from absorbing the theories of modernism to translating them into his own painterly idiom."
In these works, Hofmann maintains the primacy of representational forms even as he becomes increasingly bold in his exploration of the "push and pull" of pure form and color within the picture plane.
In the introductory catalogue essay, art historian and founding director of the Berkeley Art Museum, Peter Selz, states: "For Hofmann, color was the absolute and the dominant aspect of painting. The effect of a painting, he said, was largely dependent on what he called 'tensional relationships'—the opposition of intense hues."
As artist and teacher, Hofmann brought revolutionary changes to American art: even the irascible critic Clement Greenberg described Hofmann as "the most important art teacher of our time."
Hofmann’s dedication as a teacher is at the taproot of modern art in America. Most major artists of the second-generation New York School, including Frank Stella, Robert De Niro, Sr., Helen Frankenthaler, Paul Resika, and Lee Krasner attended his classes and followed his precepts; they, in turn influenced scores of other artists.
Hofmann's ties to the San Francisco Bay Area are deep; UC Berkeley offered him his first teaching position in the United States as he fled Nazism in Germany (in 1930 and 1931).
In gratitude, Hofmann later left a substantial collection of his work to the University Art Museum.
"If I had not been rescued by America, I would have lost my chance as a painter," Hofmann stated.
Hofmann's work is represented in many major collections, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
