The German teacher and painter of modern art Hans hofmann He was born in Weissenburg, Bavaria on March 21, 1880. As a child, he moved with his family to Munich, where at the age of 18 he attended art school, despite demonstrating early ability in science and mathematics. . Thereafter, the generosity of Philip Freudenberg, an art collector and philanthropist from Berlin, enabled Hofmann to study fine arts in Paris from 1904 to 1914.
In Paris, he trained at the Academia Colarossi and the Academia de la Grande Chaumiere. During this period he met many of the members of the Ecole de Paris, including the inventors of Cubism: Pablo Picasso, whom he met in his studio at Bateau Lavoir on the slopes of Monmartre, and his collaborator Georges Braque. In addition, he met the colorist Henri Matisse, the leader of Fauvism, as well as numerous other figures from the artistic community of the Parisian avant-garde. However, the artist who had the most profound effect on Hofmann It was Robert Delaunay, whose structural Cubism was giving way to Orphism, a style in which fragmented Cubist forms were painted in vibrant and expressive colors. This primacy of color over line had a lasting impact on the young German. In 1909, he exhibited some of his early work with the Neue Sezession in Berlin, meeting members of Die Brucke and Der Blaue Reiter, such as Emil Nolde (1867-1956) and others involved in German Expressionism. Back in paris Hofmann He received his first solo exhibition at the Galerie Paul Cassirer in 1910, where he mainly showed works in the Cubist style.
Returning to Munich before the outbreak of the First World War, Hofmann He tried to join but was deemed unfit for military service due to a lung condition. Instead, in 1915 he opened an art school, which over time acquired an international reputation for the quality of its teaching. Hofmann He taught successfully for about 17 years, and also published a series of written works on color in painting, compositional theories, and pictorial structure. In 1932, after visits in 1930 and 1931, when he taught at the University of California at Berkeley and exhibited works at the Palace of the California Legion of Honor, San Francisco, he closed the Munich art school and emigrated to the United States. United. At this stage, in regards to his own art, he was interested in Expressionism, especially landscape painting and still lifes.
Upon settling in New York, Hofmann taught for two years at the Art Students League. In 1934, he established the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts in Manhattan, which became one of the best art schools in the country, and in 1935 established a summer school in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Through these and other educational institutions, Hofmann it exerted a great influence on the development of American art during the next quarter century. His students included artists of the caliber of Louise Nevelson (1899-1988), Lee Krasner (1908-84), Helen Frankenthaler (b.1928), Allan Kaprow (1927-2006), Burgoyne Diller (1906-65), Joan Mitchell (1925-92) and many others. Hofmann He was also revered, both as an artist and a teacher, by the famous art critic Clement Greenberg (1909-94). His own art also flourished.
After initially focusing on drawing, he turned his focus back to oil painting, producing cubist-style compositions with vivid colors and pronounced surface texture. In 1941, he became a citizen of the United States.
During World War II, with many of the best French artists taking refuge from the German occupation of France, New York became the new world center for art. He was assisted by certain key people like Peggy Guggenheim, who opened a new gallery-museum, called Art of This Century, organizing exhibitions that highlighted abstract art movements such as Cubism, Surrealism, and Kinetic art. In addition, he organized a continuous series of social events, which brought together European migrant painters such as Arshile Gorky and Hans hofmann with artists such as Jackson Pollock and other young members of the New York School of Abstract Expressionism, several of whom were former students of Hofmann. In 1944, the Guggenheim Gallery hosted his first solo show in America.
In the meantime, Hofmann he was also developing his own style. It was in the early 1940s that he began producing totally non-objective art, all the while sharing ideas with young members of the New York School of Abstract Expressionism. Like he said, he was trying to “eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary can speakIn his case, this meant using vigorous brush strokes and saturated colors, along with geometric and irregular shapes. His 1940 work, Spring (Private Collection, Connecticut) was one of the first canvases to feature the drip paint method, later called “action painting”, which was closely identified with Pollock.
Hofmann He also wrote a seminal book, or essay, called Search for the real, in which he described his philosophy that art has spiritual value.
The teaching of Hofmann, allied to his writings and pioneering work in different painting techniques, helped stimulate the emergence of America’s first great art movement: Abstract Expressionism, particularly the gestural painting style exemplified by the monumental canvases of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning (1904-97), Franz Kline (1910-62) and Robert Motherwell (1915-91).