Although his mature work bears similarities to the emotional gesturing of the Abstract Expressionists, Hans Hofmann pursued a cerebral approach to painting that grew out of his long exposure to European modernism. Born the son of a public official in Bavaria, Hofmann grew up in Munich, where he commenced formal art study in the late 1890s. In 1904 his work attracted the attention of a wealthy collector, whose patronage enabled Hofmann to travel to Paris for further training. There he remained for ten years, absorbing the principles of Fauvism, Cubism, and other movements. When the outbreak of World War I brought Hofmann back to Munich, the artist opened his own school, commencing a decades-long teaching career that affected thousands of students, including many who became important artists in their own right.

Hofmann spent much of the 1920s teaching and working in Europe, and in 1930 he traveled to the United States to teach a summer session at the University of California, Berkeley. Over the next several years he taught on the West Coast, New York City, and in Gloucester, Massachusetts. With the rise to power of the Nazi party in Germany, Hofmann settled permanently in the United States, becoming an American citizen in 1941. By that time he had been teaching at his own school in New York for a number of years. His painting paralleled developments in Abstract Expressionism, and during the 1940s and 1950s, he was frequently included in exhibitions of their work. In 1957 Hofmann was the subject of a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art. After giving up teaching during the following year, he focused with new intensity on his painting, producing some of the finest work of his career. The artist was still active when he died in 1966.

The Currier's Landscape was painted during a transitional period in Hofmann's oeuvre as the artist moved from a semi-abstract mode inspired by Surrealism toward a more gestural style. Exemplifying Hofmann's love of rich color, Landscape incorporates broadly brushed passages of green, blue, yellow and red. Suggestive of forest tracts, sunsets, and blue skies, the composition retains its basis in the seen world, despite its exuberantly abstract handling.

For Hofmann, nature was an important starting point because it was, in his words, "a constant stimulus for a creative mind."(1) Once a painting began, however, color became the primary element. Color established balance, mass, depth, even its own light, and the challenge to the artist was to create color harmonies whose total effects were greater than the sum of their parts. In Landscape, Hofmann plays cool blues and greens against warm reds and yellows, working with the tendency of cool colors to recede and warm colors to advance so as to render a sense of three-dimensional volume and space. Like the paintings of Mark Rothko (q.v.), Hofmann's work reaches out toward the viewer even as it draws him or her into its fictive depths. While Hofmann is always careful to bring these divergent effects into a state of equilibrium, paintings such as Landscape are dynamic as well: dashing brushstrokes and fluidly intertwining colors convey a strong sense of energy that lends vitality to the composition and credence to Hofmann's assertion that "pictorial life is a created reality" with a peculiar power of its own.(2)

Landscape remained in Hofmann's possession until his death in 1966. Some years later it was acquired by collectors Samuel and May Gruber. Landscape was presented to the Currier Museum of Art by May Gruber in 1997.

VSD

NOTES

1. Hans Hofmann quoted in Frederick S. Wight, Hans Hofmann (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1957), p. 56.

2. Ibid.

REFERENCES

Helmut Friedel and Tina Dickey. Hans Hofmann. New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1998.

Ronald A. Kuchta, ed. Provincetown Painters. Ex. cat. Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY, 1977.

Frederick S. Wight. Hans Hofmann. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1957.