Hans Hofmann

Known as the most influential art teacher of the twentieth century, Hans Hofmann was the only artist of the New York School to take direct part in the European artistic revolution of the century's first two decades. Through his work and his teaching, Hofmann linked the legacy of European modernism to American Abstract Expressionism.  

Hofmann was raised in Munich, where in 1898 he began to study at various art schools. While living in Paris from 1904 to 1914, he attended the Académie Colarossi and the Académie de la Grande Chaumière where he met Georges Braque ,Pablo Picasso, and other Cubists and was a friend of Robert Delaunay.  Hofmann opened his first art school in Munich after the outbreak of World War I.  The artist taught at the University of California at Berkeley during the summer of 1930 and returned to teach in California in 1931.  Hofmann later left a substantial collection of his work to the University Art Museum, stating that, "If I had not been rescued by America, I would have lost my chance as a painter." In 1932 he settled in the United States. His first school in New York opened in 1933 and was succeeded in 1934 by the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts; in 1935, he established a summer school in Provincetown, Massachusetts.  Hofmann continued teaching until his retirement in 1958.

It is difficult to overestimate the impact Hans Hofmann had on the development of modern art in America. Hofmann represented a direct link to Paris, where he lived for a decade at the turn of the century and befriended Picasso, Matisse, and Braque. An entire generation of American artists passed through Hofmann’s schools in New York and Provincetown, MA, including Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Helen Frankenthaler, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Arshile Gorky, Joan Mitchell, Judith Rothschild, Robert De Niro, Sr., and Paul Resika as well as the critics Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg.  These artists continued to influence scores of other younger artists and for this reason, Hans Hofmann is considered by most to be the "Father of Abstract Expressionism."

Hofmann’s genius resided in his ability to digest the spatial implications of cubism and translate them into a theory of abstract painting that he called “push-pull.” A dynamic canvas, for Hofmann, was one in which spatial cues perpetuated a constant shift between the picture plane, color, and composition. 

Nocturn (1962) is an outstanding example of Hofmann’s push-pull theory in action; the relationship of the central compositional mass to the red and green shapes against the field of blue create a space that is in constant flux, filled with a vibrating tension that is intensified by the painting’s inventive and intense palette.