The Writings of Hans Hofmann
Painter and Abstract Art Theorist between Germany and the United States
Part One
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| Fig. 1) An advertisement for the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts in Munich, published in 1915. Source: https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/hans-hofmann-papers-5966/subseries-2-1/box-4-folder-1 |
Studying 20th-century art literature in Germany also means
rediscovering, in all its variations (including linguistic ones), the
complexity of the country's history. The writings of Hans Hofmann (1880-1966)
confirm the rule. Most probably, the majority of today’s scholars would not
even consider his texts as part of German art literature. Indeed, Hofmann is
now traditionally considered as the noble father of American abstract
expressionism after World War II.
If the geographic environment in which Hofmann had a decisive impact
was the American one, it must nevertheless be said that almost all of his texts
were conceived and written in German and then translated into English for
educational purposes and for publication. Thanks to the Smithsonian Institute's
Archives of American Art, all of the artist's manuscripts and typescripts, in
German and English, have
been fully digitized and made available to the public since 2016. The
heirs' foundation also offers a complete list of
titles on its web page (including manuscripts and typescripts).
Most of the writings are largely unfinished and never published
texts. What is striking when consulting this vast material is the repeatedly
vain attempt (1915, 1931, 1948, 1952 and 1963) to write a treatise/handbook on
painting. He first tried in Germany (but also reflecting the artistic training
received during his ten-year stay in Paris) and then in the United States
(acting as a cultural link between Europe and the USA). Of course, it seems
legitimate to ask why, despite the persistence of the attempts and many
inquiries with publishing houses, Hofmann's efforts have never been successful,
not even posthumously. We will therefore try to formulate some hypotheses on
the basis of the reading of the numerous drafts of the treaty. Indeed, it seems
that no scholar has set himself so far the goal of studying the relationship
between the many drafts of the treatise, and of understanding their
relationship with Hofmann's shorter texts. The latter have been instead broadly
circulated in the form of articles, short essays and lessons. They also formed the
basis for a compendium of Hofmann’s 'philosophy of art' published in 1963 by
the New York critic and curator William Chapin Seitz (1914-1974), who
contributed to making the artist's aesthetic ideas known to the general public.
A real critical collection of the writings is not yet available, although
essays [1] and texts [2] have been published in the internet.
Rediscovering the contents of Hofmann's writings is an important
step in understanding how German aesthetic culture influenced the way of
thinking of American artists in the last century. If the treatise never saw the
light, the German artist's teaching was very effective and contributed
decisively to the affirmation of the idea that painting must be considered and
taught as an intellectual activity and an integral part of culture, and not as a spontaneous activity dedicated to pure pleasure.
Hofmann's teaching spread in a world (that of American contemporary
art) where aesthetic reflection was still recent. Already his Munich school of fine arts, inaugurated
in 1915 and shut down by the Nazis in 1934, was frequented between the two wars
by American personalities such as Worth Ryder (American painter, artist and
curator, 1884-1960), Vaclav Vytlacil (American painter, 1892-1984), Glenn
Wessels (South African painter and professor, naturalized American, 1895-1982)
and Carl Holty (German painter then naturalized American, 1900-1973). They were
all artists of the same generation as Hofmann. As explained by Irving Sandler
[3], this first generation of students was trained on the teaching materials
Hofmann prepared for Das Malerbuch: Form
und Farbe in der Gestaltung (The Painter's Book: Form and Color in
Creation), a theoretical text available as a typewritten since 1931 in an
English translation with the title Creation
in Form and Color. A textbook for Instruction in Art by Glenn Wessels (one
of the just mentioned students). This first generation of 'Munich' students,
once back in the United States, took up positions in the American university
system, propagating Hofmann's teaching, to the point that half of the American
abstract artists of the 1930s could be attributed, according to Sandler,
directly or indirectly, to his teaching. Hofmann's courses, therefore, had the
function which in most countries was entrusted to state academies.
The school which Hofmann opened in New York (1933) and its
Provincetown summer branch (1935) also had an important impact on numerous
subsequent generations, to the point that the aforementioned Seitz collected,
for his exhibition on Hofmann in 1963 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the testimonies of fifty of his
students who had become recognized artists in the meantime [4]. One of the most
famous, Erle Loran (1905 - 1999), painter and art historian, spoke of Hofmann
as "the best painter and composition
teacher since the Renaissance" [5]. Many other students - think of Lee
Krasner (1908-1984), Larry Rivers (1923-2002), Allan Kaprow (1927-2006) and
Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011) - eventually became superstars of American art
in the second half of the 20th century. Some of the theoretical aspects of
Hofmann's teaching fuelled the American avant-gardes many years after the
artist's schools closed in 1958. He was responsible for the idea that, on the
one hand, the artist's mind has a 'super-sensorial' function and, on the other
hand, art creation is a conscious and controlled moment, and therefore not
simply an expression of an unchecked moment of intoxication.
Hofmann also generated the theory of "Push and Pull" which in the fifties and sixties influenced the
American aesthetic discussion. The University of Berkeley, where Hofmann was
already active in the thirties, described it like follows: the concept of “push and pull is most often associated with
his signature works of the 1950s and 1960s, in which bold color planes emerge
from and recede into energetic surfaces of intersecting and overlapping shapes.
The ideas and impulses behind this enduring term, however, took shape decades
earlier, in his teachings, writings, and in his own paintings. In the late
1930s, in a series of widely attended lectures in Greenwich Village, Hofmann
demonstrated how to «push a plane in the surface or to pull it from the surface» to create pictorial space. «We must create pictorial space,» he declared to audiences of avid young artists and critics,
including Arshile Gorky, Clement Greenberg, and Harold Rosenberg. Hofmann would
later refine his definition of push and pull as «expanding and contracting
forces»”
[6].
Generally speaking, the art courses at Hofmann's New York school are
often described as an introduction to Cubism, Expressionism and Surrealism:
well, based on what I have read in the American archives, this might be a very
restrictive vision. Hofmann wanted to teach, more generally, how 'to learn to
see'. Even more than for abstract expressionism in the first post-war
generation, Hofmann's theories on the vision and reproduction of reality might
be crucial to understand Optic Art
and the various forms of conceptualism of the second half of the twentieth
century.
A short digression: the
German-language art literature of the last century and its relationship with
other cultural areas
Considering many posts I previously dedicated on this blog to the
writings of German artists of the 20th century, we have already discovered
numerous situations of intertwining between languages and cultures. From this
point of view, German art literature was an expression of multiculturalism,
albeit exercised in completely opposite directions. We
have seen the case of the autobiography of Georg Grosz (1893-1959), exile
from Germany since 1933 to escape Nazism and an American citizen since 1938,
whose memoirs were written in German, but translated into English, appearing
for the first time in the United States in 1946; herewith he wanted to explain
to the American public what had happened ten years before in the art world
because of the Nazis. We have also considered the cases of Hans
Hartung (1904-1989) and Arno
Breker (1900-1991), other artists born in Germany, but very close to
France, whose writings were released - in both cases - first in French and then
in German. However, the parallel between the two German artists could not be
more asymmetrical. Hartung became a French citizen in 1946 after fighting (and
losing a leg) in the Foreign Legion against the German army. Breker, on the
other hand, was banned in Germany for his Nazi past, having been not only very
close to Hitler but a privileged instrument of pro-Nazi propaganda in Vichy’s
France, thanks to his acquaintance with the country; after the Nazi defeat he
found again refuge in France, where he had many friends in revanchist circles.
Perhaps both would have preferred to write their texts in French directly, but
they had no way of doing so: Hartung entrusted a French journalist with the
editing of his memoirs based on reel recordings of long interviews (translated
into German only later, after ten years from the appearance in French), while
Breker compiled the memoirs in German, had them translated into French (they
appeared in 1970), and then published them two years later in German.
All these are evidence of a double reality of which Hofmann is also
confirmation and testimony: on the one hand the German artistic culture was
strongly interrelated with that of other areas, on the other hand the seizure
of power by Nazism and the Second World War created a terrible shock on
people's lives, upsetting their destinies and forcing them - for reasons that
are sometimes opposite and certainly ethically very different - to leave
Germany.
Hofmann is one of the most evident cases of this multicultural
reality. Of all the artists already mentioned, he was the oldest (he was born
in 1880). He was also perhaps the artist with the most varied artistic
training. He became a painter at the age of eighteen, in the Munich of the
Secession who was discovering its own impressionist vein. After a few years,
the German Impressionists - think of Lovis
Corinth (1858-1925) and Max Slevogt (1868-1932) - moved to Berlin, and
Munich lose its role as the pictorial capital of imperial Germany. Hofmann, in
turn, moved to Paris for a decade, from 1904 to 1914 and became part of that
vast and varied area around the Café du
Dôme in Montparnasse, which is often referred to as the École de Paris. In France he met
Matisse, was a great friend of Delaunay, but was above all tied to the Cubists
(some of his works were shown in an art exhibition organized by Paul
Cassirer in Berlin in 1910, where he was actually exposed as an expression
of Parisian cubism).
After being stranded in Germany during a vacation in the summer of
1914 due to the sudden outbreak of the First World War, Hofmann was drafted
into the army, but fortunately for him he was immediately found unable. In 1915
he opened an art school in Munich, the already mentioned "Hans Hofmann Schule für Bildende Kunst",
which was created in collaboration with local authorities with the aim of
treating soldiers affected by post-war traumatic shocks with painting.
Interestingly, while teaching veterans from the front, he was actually
propagating the aesthetics and style of the French 'enemy'. The school was
oriented, in fact, to the Parisian artistic principles (with him the students
were studying Cubism, Fauvism, Orphism) and much less to those German
expressionists who, at the beginning of the war, had become points of reference
in order to support an idea of national modern art superior to that of France.
In 1915 Hofmann also began working on Form
und Farbe in der Gestaltung: Ein Lehrbuch für den Kunstunterricht (i.e.
Form and color in composition: a textbook for the art lesson), the first of his
artistic treatise projects that would never be published.
While never joining the Munich Expressionists, the artist was
nevertheless a close friend of Gabriele Münter (1877-1962), Kandinsky's
companion, who secretly entrusted him with all the German canvases of the
Russian painter, when the Russian painter was forced to emigrate to Switzerland
because having the nationality of an enemy military power. We therefore owe it
to Hofmann's generosity and open-mindedness if the works of Kandinsky's German
period have come down to us intact. On the contrary, at the beginning of the
Great War, all his Cubist pictorial pieces that had remained in Paris were
destroyed: in the French capital the world of art was expunged of any 'enemy'
presence and the workshops of German painters were devastated.
In November 1918 Hofmann took sides for a short period in favour of
the socialist cause: between 1918 and 1919, during the brief experience of the
Bavarian Soviet Republic. In fact, he was appointed president of the Academy of
Fine Arts in Munich. It was a parenthesis: for the rest of his life Hofmann
proved to be essentially an apolitical artist and teacher. After the
revolutionary parenthesis, teaching in the Munich school absorbed Hofmann in
such a way as to make him completely forget even the practice of painting
between 1920 and 1935. To support the teaching activity he began to write
handouts, which were circulating among the students in typewritten form.
However, his goal was to complete Form
und Farbe by making it a real manual for teaching abstract painting.
The attempt to write a
treatise for American students
The Weimar Republic was in a situation of great economic and social
fragility. Hofmann realized very early on that the Munich school would have no economic
basis if the only audience remained German and European. Fortunately, there was
no shortage of opportunities: Americans, in fact, and especially young American
artists who had fought as soldiers in Europe and got to know contemporary art
in our continent, were developing a new interest for European art. Not all
these enthusiastic young people had a chance to settle as students in Paris,
already overcrowded with American painters and in any case very expensive for
those who did not come from wealthy families. Hofmann then began to try to
attract the attention of overseas students, whom he not only hosted in Munich,
but also accompanied in summer through Europe to holiday resorts (in the
Bavarian Alps between 1919 and 1923, in Dubrovnik in 1924, in Capri between
1925 and 1927, in Saint Tropez in 1928 and 1929). The same American students
soon made a career in the university world and created a network of contacts
for him in the United States: at the request of Professor Worth Ryder
(1884-1960), also his former student, Hofmann gave very successful lessons in
Berkeley in the summer of 1930 and 1931 and became one of the inspirers of the
new way of thinking about modern art in California. In 1931 a new complete
German manuscript version of Form und
Farbe was submitted to the Piper publisher in Berlin, which however
rejected it. Glenn Wessels (1895-1982), South African painter and art critic
who studied at Hofmann in Munich and later became a professor at Berkeley,
translated the German manuscript into English, entitled Creation in Form and Color: A Textbook for Instruction in Art [7].
However, the attempt to find an American publisher also failed.
In Germany, Nazi pressure began to mount, in particular in Munich,
where Hofmann lived. Hitler notoriously had a radical and irremediable aversion
to modern art and the definitive and final condemnation of any non-traditional
form of art became an integral part of Nazi ideology (think of the propaganda
writing of Paul
Schultze-Naumburg, already reviewed in this blog). Instead, in California
Hofmann's popularity was growing, to the point that some passages of the
textbook drafts in the American version of Wessels began to appear in American
specialized magazines and became central to the teaching of art in Berkeley.
Among them we should remember the articles On
the Aims of Art and Plastic creation
of 1932. Those pages enthused the young artists who will become the founders of
abstract expressionism, to the point that some say that Berkeley became - in
fact - the Californian branch of the Munich school. The success finally brought
Hofmann to New York, where the artist opened the American branch of his
Munich art school, in 1933: the Hans
Hofmann School of Fine Arts. In reality, the coexistence between the two quarters
in New York and Munich did not last long: the Nazis, who came to power in the
same year, shut down Hofmann's first school in the Bavarian capital in 1934. By
now the artist's destiny was largely in America, even if he travelled
frequently to Germany and his wife remained in Munich until 1938. The New York
school and the branch in the Provincetown seaside residence (opened in 1935)
welcomed an extraordinary number of successful young American artists. In 1941,
shortly before the United States went to war against Nazi Germany, Hofmann
managed to take American citizenship at the age of sixty-one.
Hofmann as a European
reference point for American Abstract Expressionists
In 1948 Hofmann, once again, took up the project he had started in
1915 and continued in 1931. The result was a new text (also in German),
entitled Das Malerbuch: Form und Farbe in
der Gestaltung (The Artist's Book. Shape and color in creation). Even this
German edition did not find publishers willing to publish it. The same happened
for the English translation, once again conducted by one of his students,
Georgina M. Huck (1883-1963) and entitled The
Painter's Primer: Form and Color in the Creative Process.
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| Fig. 2) The title page of the collection of essays Search for the Real of 1948. |
However, in 1948, a collection of Hoffmann's writings finally began
to circulate in print, albeit still in a small circle, with the small volume Search for the Real and Other Essays,
published by the Addison Gallery of American Art, curated by its director
Bartlett H. Hayes Jr (1904-1988) and translated by the young Sara Thompson
Weeks (1926-2016). It was a collection of short texts, also all originally in
German: the first essay gave the title to the entire work, a second article
focused on sculpture, a third on painting and culture. Furthermore, the
articles On the Aims of Art and Plastic creation of 1932 were-proposed.
The publication was linked to an exhibition held in Andover, a small town near
Boston with a tradition of culture and high school education, but certainly at
the margins of American culture. The text soon became an editorial rarity.
 |
| Fig. 3) Clement Greenberg's 1961 essay on Hans Hofmann, published by Georges Fall |
Hoffmann's interviews, testimonies and short articles appeared regularly in the American media throughout the 1950s. In the meantime, the painter - who in a long phase of his life was above all a teacher – was returning more and more to his original passion as an artist, encountering growing success, also thanks to the passionate support of the art critic Clement Greenberg (1909 - 1994), another one of his former students. Numerous solo exhibitions were dedicated to Hofmann at the Kootz Gallery of New York, where all abstract expressionists were displayed. The painter contributed to the catalogues of his exhibits with numerous introductory texts which became the main means of spreading his thought in the 1950s. In parallel, he started a new attempt, in 1952, to revise and publish his treatise.
In 1956 Hofmann, now very old, closed the New York school and, two
years later, also the Provincetown branch. Those were the years of his
qualitative leap, as regards his notoriety as a painter in the United States, with retrospectives at
the Baltimore Museum of Art (1954) and the Whitney Museum of Art (1957) in New
York.
World-wide success in the
sixties
In the first half of the sixties, Hofmann was enjoying a global
notoriety. The start was, once again, in the United States, but the success expanded all
over the world, involving Turin in our country.
As already mentioned, a famous retrospective was held in New York in
1963 at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMa), curated by the art historian William
C. Seitz (1914-1974). To prepare that exhibition, originally dedicated to
Hofmann and his pupils, Seitz worked both on the painter's archives and on the
testimonies of the students who had attended his school, preparing a
typewritten text of 117 pages on Hofmann and his school. Then he changed his
plans, also under pressure from Hofmann, refocusing the object of the
exhibition on the artist's painting in relation to his aesthetic thought. On
this he finally produced the exhibition catalogue, which was focused on Hofmann's Philosophy of Painting. The
pillars of this philosophy were, in his view:
“NaturePerception: reality, appearance, effect, empathyThe artistCreationThe mediumThe picture planePictorial elementsPush and pullMovementColorRelationsArt and metaphysical reality.”
In preparation for that event and to help Seitz, Hofmann resumed the
attempts to systematize his ideas about art in manual form and produced a new
typescript (this time directly in English), entitled The Painter and His Problems — A Manual Dedicated to Painting [8].
This was a much shorter text than all the previous ones, a real shortened
version. Even this version - the latest attempt to produce the treaty he had
already conceived in 1915 - remained however unpublished.
The exhibition at the MoMa (from 11 September to 28 November 1963)
was replicated all over the world over the next two years, touching New
Orleans, Buffalo, Berkeley, Washington, Buenos Aires, Caracas, Amsterdam,
Turin, Stuttgart, Hamburg.
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| Fig. 4) Sam Hunter's essay on Hans Hofmann, issued in New York by the publisher Abrams in 1963 |
Also in 1963, the American scholar Sam Hunter (1923-2014) published a volume for the publisher Harry Abrams of New York which, in addition to a very rich iconographic apparatus, proposed five essays by Hofmann:
- The Plastic Creation (the
aforementioned article of 1932);
- The Search for the Real in Fine Arts (from Search for the Real and Other Essays of 1948);
- The Rebirth of the Plastic Arts (from a catalogue of an exhibition held
at the Kootz Gallery in 1954);
- The Problem of Color in Pure
Painting and its Creative Origin (from a catalogue of a further exhibition
at the Kootz Gallery in 1955);
- Sculpture (from Search for the Real and Other Essays of
1948).
I have already made reference to Turin, which in those years was
particularly active in promoting modern art, and in particular informal art.
Hofmann was well known in Italy since his exhibition at the Venice Biennale in
1960. In May-June 1963 Turin hosted an exhibition on Hofmann promoted by
ICAR, or the International Center of
Aesthetic Research, animated by personalities such as the French art critic
Michel Tapié (1909-1987) who was the inventor of the concept of 'informal art'.
ICAR of Turin had privileged relations with Paris, New York and Osaka.
 |
Fig. 5) The Italian edition of Sam Hunter's essay,
published by the Edizioni d’Arte Fratelli Pozzo in Turin in 1964 |
The following year the Italian edition of the aforementioned volume by Sam Hunter was released in Turin by the "Edizioni d’arte Fratelli Pozzo", in a collection directed by Ezio Gribaudo, a well-known art critic of his time and one of the animators of the International Center. Compared to the English original, it was enriched by a text (in French) by the aforementioned Tapié, which saw in Hofmann one of the American inspirers of the European informal. Hunter's essay was reproduced in English. Hofmann's texts appeared in an Italian translation instead.
Finally, in 1965, the exhibition on Hofmann of the MoMA in New York
arrived in Turin. The Italian catalogue was - as in the case of the New York
original - edited by William C. Seitz. The exhibition was hosted by the Civic
Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art of the Savoy city (now GAM), where
Vittorio Viale (1891-1977) worked as still well- remembered director.
 |
Fig. 6) The catalogue of the exhibition on Hans Hofmann, held at the Municipal Modern Art Museum in Turin in 1965
The following year Hans Hofmann passed away. In 1967 the collection
of writings Search for the Real and Other
Essays was re-published in the United States, no longer on the initiative
of a small private gallery (as in 1948) but by the highly prestigious MIT
University [9] (the work was again published in 2013 by a different publisher
[10]).
The posthumous fortune of
Hofmann's thought
 |
| Fig. 7) Hans Hofmann's collection of writings Search for Real, in the MIT edition 1967 and in the Literary Licensing reprint 2013 |
It has already been said that the treatise on which Hofmann worked so much never came out, not even posthumously. However, the writings published by Hofmann in life continued to be the subject of study by scholars of American art literature even in the following years. When in 1968 Herschel B. Chipp published his famous anthology of contemporary artliterature, he did not hesitate to assign to Search for the Real and other Essays a fundamental role in the transmission of abstract art culture from Europe to the United States. In 1973, the American art critic Irving Sandler (1925-2018) dedicated an article to Hofmann's theories starting from the examination of his archives [11]. Dore Ashton, in her 1985 anthology 'antagonist' to Chipp's, certainly did not overlook Hofmann and cited the interview conducted by the art historian and curator Katherine Kuh (1904-1994) and published in the collection The artist's voice in 1960: although Ashton tended to assign much less importance than Chipp to the theoretical study of aesthetics, the passage in her anthology also testified to how Hofmann had brought the late 19th-century German theory of absolute visibility to the United States. More recently, Michael Schreyach has made new contributions to the study of Hofmann's aesthetics [12].
Finally, it is surprising that - while an Italian translation of
some of the artist's writings has existed since 1964 - there is no collection
of texts published in German, or in the language in which almost all of the
production was conceived. As an artist, Hofmann exhibited in Kassel at Documenta in 1959, and certainly there
have been many of his exhibitions in Germany that have revived him as a painter
[13]. His role as an art teacher and theorist, on the other hand, seems to have
been forgotten in his homeland.
Why did the treaty never
get published?
After reading the many draft treaties available on the Archives of American Art website, I have
asked myself continuously what the reasons for their failed publication may
well be, given the success of Hofmann's teaching experience.
As we will see in the following three parts in which this post is
structured, there may have been certainly linguistic and cultural reasons. One problem may have been complexity. In fact, Hofmann built a conceptually German-structured theory on the reality of objects and their representation
on the pictorial level, but he never managed to draw sufficiently simple
conclusions from it that could summarize his thinking in a world like the
American one, which instead was used to immediacy and straightforwardness.
Furthermore, the metaphysical framework of Hofmann's thought - typical of
aesthetic discussions in Europe - did not reconcile with American culture, where
other disciplines of the human sciences, such as sociology and psychology, were
prevailing.
There is, however, in my opinion, a deeper reason. We have already
seen how, since the foundation of the Munich school, Hofmann has continuously
tried to finalise a comprehensive text offering a combined reading of form and
color (Form und Farbe). Well, that
synthesis never succeeded completely, to the point that the written texts
remained incomplete. In short, if Hofmann was a great teacher, he was never
completely satisfied with his own thought and in particular failed in the
synthesis he aimed at. In the drafts of the 1931 and 1948 versions, Hofmann
acribly described the problems of form, but never managed to deal with color.
In the attempt of 1952 he shifted the focus of his writings to the discussion
of color, which ended up increasing dramatically, but to the cost of form. It
will be Seitz, in his 1963 compendium, to attempt a unitary reading, not
without noting that Hofmann had created two parallel systems of thought when
discussing form and color.
End of Part One
Go to Part Two
NOTES
[1] Texts of Hofmann have been included in several catalogues or
publications. See, for instance: Morris, Catherine; Sandler, Irving; Rush, Michael - Hans Hofmann: Circa 1950, Catalogue of
the exhibition of the exhibition at the The Rose Art Museum, Waltham, Massachusetts,
US, 2010, 144 pages; Rogala, Dawn V. - Hans
Hofmann: The Artist's Materials, Getty Publications, Los Angeles, 2016, 150
pages; Barnes, Lucinda; Landau, Ellen G.; Schreyach, Michael - Hans Hofmann: The Nature of Abstraction,
Catalogue of the Exhibition at the University of California, Berkeley Art
Museum and Pacific Film Archive, 2019, 184 pages.
[2] See the texts published by The New School in New York: http://timothyquigley.net/vcs/hofmann-writings.pdf
[3] Sandler, Irving – From the Archives: Hans Hofmann: The
Pedagogical Master, in Art in America, May/June 1973. See:
https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/features/archives-hans-hofmann-pedagogical-master-63547/https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/features/archives-hans-hofmann-pedagogical-master-63547/
[4] Seitz, William
- Hofmann Students Dossier, MoMa, 1963. The
involved students of Hofmann are (in alphabetical order) Robert Beauchamp, Nell
Blaine, Cameron Booth, Fritz Bultman, Nicolas Carone, Giorgio Cavallon, Perle
Fine, Jean Follett, Miles Forst, Mary Frank, Helen Frankenthaler, William
Freed, Jane Freilicher, Paul Georges, Michael Goldberg, Robert Goodnough, John
Grillo, John Haley, Paul Harris, Julius Hatofsky, Dorothy Heller, Carl Holty,
Alfred Jensen, Wolf Kahn, Allan Kaprow, Karl Kasten, Albert Kotin, Lee Krasner,
Linda Lindeberg, Michael Loew, Ede Loran, Mercedes Matter, George McNeil, Jan
Müller, Louise Nevelson, Robert De Niro, George Ortman, Stephen Pace, Felix
Pasilis, Robert Richenburg, Larry Rivers, Ludwig Sander, Richard Stankiewicz,
Joseph Stefanelli, Myron Stout, Albert Swinden, Anne Tabachnick, Vaclav
Vytlacil, Glenn Wessels and Wilfred Zogbaum.
[5] Seitz, William
Chapin - Hans Hofmann with selected writings by the artist, Catalogue of the
Exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1963, 84 pages. Quotation at
page 8.
[6] Quote from https://bampfa.org/program/push-and-pull-hans-hofmann.
[7] See: http://www.hanshofmann.org/writings-by-the-artist
[9] Hofmann, Hans - Search for the Real and Other Essays, Edited by
Sara T. Weeks and Bartlett H. Hayes, Jr., Cambridge, Mass., M.I.T. Press, 1967,
96 pages.
[10] Hofmann, Hans - Search For The Real, And Other Essays, Edited
by Sara T. Weeks and Bartlett H. Hayes, Jr., Whitefish, MT, Literary Licensing,
LLC, 2013, 92 pages.
[11] Sandler, Irving – From the Archives: Hans Hofmann (quotes). On
the same topic, see also the thesis "Hans Hofmann: Master Teacher of
Painting" with which Diane S. Newbury graduated from Loyola University
Chicago in 1979
(https://ecommons.luc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=2914&context=luc_diss)
[12] Schreyach, Michael -Re-created Flatness: Hans Hofmann’s Concept
of the Picture Plane as a Medium of Expression, Trinity University, 2015.
See: https://digitalcommons.trinity.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1013&context=art_faculty
[13] See, for instance: Friedel, Helmut; Dickey, Tina; Hills,
Huidson - Hans Hofmann: Wunder Des
Rhythmus und Schönheit Des Raumes, Catalogue of the exhibition at the
Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus in Munich and at the Schirn-Kunsthalle un
Frankfurt, 1997, 117 pages.
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