Hans Hofmann

Hans Hofmann (1880-1966) was one of the most important painters and teachers of the twentieth century, whose extraordinary influence on the development of American Abstract Expressionism is virtually incalculable. Born in Weissenburg, Germany, he moved to Munich as a young man to pursue his artistic training, and in 1904 he traveled to Paris, where he would spend the following decade at the heart of the European avant-garde. During his Paris years, Hofmann formed friendships with Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Robert Delaunay, and Henri Matisse, and he directly absorbed the great modernist innovations of Cubism and Fauvism at their moment of invention.

In 1915, Hofmann returned to Munich and opened the Hans Hofmann School for Modern Art, which quickly established him as one of the most respected art teachers in Europe. With the rise of Nazism in Germany, he emigrated to the United States in 1932, eventually settling in New York, where in 1934 he founded the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts with a summer campus in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Over the following three decades, virtually every important American artist of the postwar generation passed through Hofmann's classrooms. His students included Lee Krasner, Helen Frankenthaler, Larry Rivers, Louise Nevelson, Joan Mitchell, Wolf Kahn, and hundreds of others whose careers were shaped by his rigorous instruction.

Hofmann's celebrated "push-pull" theory, which insisted that the dynamic interaction of colors could produce genuine spatial depth on a flat surface, became foundational to postwar American painting. His own mature paintings, particularly the celebrated series of colored "slab" compositions produced in the last decade of his life, combine rectangular blocks of saturated color with more freely brushed gestural passages, translating a lifetime of thinking about painting into some of the most vibrant abstract canvases of the twentieth century. His works are held in every major museum, and his influence on American art continues to be felt in the practice of contemporary painters.

He once famously explained:

"It is not the form that dictates color, but the color that brings out the form."