Hans Hofmann

Hans Hofmann (March 21, 1880 – February 17, 1966) was a German-born American painter, renowned as both an player and teacher. His career spanned two generations and two continents, and is considered to have both preceded and influenced Abstract Expressionism. Born and educated near Munich, he was lithe in the beforehand twentieth-century European modern and brought a deep union and synthesis of Symbolism, Neo-impressionism, Fauvism, and Cubism following he emigrated to the United States in 1932. Hofmann's painting is characterized by its rigorous event with pictorial structure and unity, spatial illusionism, and use of bold color for expressive means. The influential critic Clement Greenberg considered Hofmann's first New York solo work at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century in 1944 (along later Jackson Pollock’s in late 1943) as a breakthrough in painterly contrary to geometric confiscation that heralded abstract expressionism. In the decade that followed, Hofmann's answer grew through numerous exhibitions, notably at the Kootz Gallery, culminating in major retrospectives at the Whitney Museum of American Art (1957) and Museum of Modern Art (1963), which traveled to venues throughout the United States, South America, and Europe. His works are in the steadfast collections of major museums roughly speaking the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tate Modern, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, National Gallery of Art, and Art Institute of Chicago.

Hofmann is next regarded as one of the most influential art teachers of the 20th century. He customary an art researcher in Munich in 1915 that built upon the ideas and play a role of Cézanne, the Cubists and Kandinsky; some art historians recommend it was the first modern scholastic of art anywhere. After relocating to the United States, he reopened the theoretical in both New York City and Provincetown, Massachusetts until he retired from teaching in 1958 to paint full-time. His teaching had a significant influence on post-war American radical artists—including Helen Frankenthaler, Nell Blaine, Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, Louise Nevelson, and Larry Rivers, among many—as skillfully as on the theories of Greenberg, in his emphasis upon the medium, picture plane, and harmony of the work. Some of Hofmann's extra key tenets swell his push/pull spatial theories, his insistence that abstract art has its descent in nature, and his belief in the spiritual value of art. Hofmann died of a heart hostility in New York City on February 17, 1966.