Provenance

The artist
Estate of the artist (1966)
Ameringer-Howard Gallery, New York
Private collection

Description

One of the most influential figures of postwar American art, Hans Hofmann (1880-1966) was renowned for his abstract paintings that fused modernist tenets with the principles of the prevailing Abstract Expressionism of the time. He taught and mentored a number of notable postwar artists such as Helen Frankenthaler, Lee Krasner, Ray Eames, and Larry Rivers (as Wolf Kahn once said, “All the advanced spirits among the young went to Hofmann”). After closing his influential schools in 1958, Hofmann focused all his energy into his own works after forty-three consecutive years of teaching. The creative energy he experienced during this artistic rebirth constituted the apogee of his career, reached in the last decade before his death in 1966.
“Untitled,” created three years before his death, is an energetic, jewel-toned burst of a painting dating from this critical period. The work achieves a remarkable variation of textures and brushstrokes within a small space, as well rhythmic tension between countering forces, which the artist described as “push-pull.” (1) As Hofmann explained, “Push-and-pull is not so simple as people think it is. It is actually the secret of three dimensionality, of a flat surface . . . creating space, deep, deep space without destroying the surface, without drilling a hole in the surface. . . It is all wrong with Italian perspective—it has only one direction in the depth, but nothing comes back. But in my pictures it goes back and comes.” (2)
Born in Germany in 1880, Hofmann immigrated to America in the 1930s and became a citizen of the United States. By the time he came to New York he had direct experience with avant-garde Parisian artists such as Picasso, Braque, and Matisse, contemporaneous movements such as Fauvism and Cubism, and the ideas of Kandinsky. Because of his wide knowledge of European modernism, he became a beacon for aspiring young artists in America. He was among the first to incorporate the ideas of modernism into a system of teaching; his methods deeply influenced several generations of painters.
Hofmann’s work is held in numerous public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art; Whitney Museum of American Art; Smithsonian American Art Museum; Guggenheim Museum; National Gallery of Art; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; among many others. Hofmann participated in many solo and group exhibitions, including the 1960 Venice Biennale. In the 1950s and 1960s, several retrospectives of his work showed at institutions such as the Art Alliance of Philadelphia, the Whitney Museum of American Art (which traveled to Des Moines, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Utica, and Baltimore), the Fränkischen Galerie in Nuremberg (which traveled to Cologne and Berlin), and the Museum of Modern Art. The MoMA show was sent to venues across America as well as in South America and Europe.
1. Hans Hofmann, “The Search for the Real in the Visual Arts,” 41, reprinted in Sam Hunter, Hans Hofmann (New York: Abrams, 1963).
2. Irma B. Jaff, “A Conversation with Hans Hofmann,” Artforum, January 1971. The interview was conducted one month before his death in 1966.