Hans Hofmann

Born – Weissenburg, Germany 1880

Died – New York City, USA 1966

 

Hans Hofmann was an influential artist and teacher. He studied in Paris, where he met Delaunay, Matisse, Braque and Picasso. In 1915 he opened an art school in Munich. He emigrated to the USA in 1931, where he opened another art school in New York. Attended by many of the next generation of American painters, the school exercised a profound influence on the subsequent development of abstract painting. Hofmann was a major influence on Jackson Pollock. His own work was initially representational, showing Expressionist and Fauve influences. His vigorous abstract style emerged in the 1940s. Nulli Secundus is a painting from the last years of his life, when he began to paint with renewed zest. The title means “second to none”. Hofmann always based his later work on nature; although the paintings themselves are often resolutely abstract. Built up from a series of underlying rectangles, the painting offers a curious and ambiguous sense of space. Hofmann himself believed form and colour to be inexorably linked, declaring “form only exists through colour, and colour only exists through form.”

 

Masterpieces:

  • The Prey
  • Exuberance

Text: The A-Z of Art, Nicola Hodge and Libby Anson.