In order to achieve simultaneous two- and three-dimensionality in painting, Hans Hofmann developed the technique of ‘push and pull’ which contrasted two colours as force and counterforce. In The Hedge, he explores the effect of primary colours in a thick, impasto application of paint. The aim is not the realistic depiction of natural phenomena, but rather to capture the manifold aspects of nature solely by means of the plastic qualities of paint. Hofmann fled Munich to escape National Socialism and founded the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts in New York in 1933 where he taught young American painters what he had learned from Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque during his time in Paris. As a result, he became a mentor to Helen Frankenthaler and Lee Krasner, among others.
Hans Hofmann (1880–1966)
The Hedge, 1950
Currently exhibited: Yes (Gallery: Painting as a Home)
Material: Oil on wood
Size: 58.5 x 43.2 cm
Inv-Nr.: B_101
Image rights: VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
Keywords:
Previous owner: Kootz Gallery, New York
Acquisition: Reinhard Ernst Collection, Christie’s, New York, 2010
No other artist embodies the replacement of Paris by New York as the centre of contemporary art after 1950 quite as clearly as the painter Hans Hofmann. Born in Bavaria in 1880, Hofmann passed through several artistic centres – Munich, Paris, New York – and moved in just as many artistic directions. He met the painters Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and Robert Delaunay when he went to Paris in 1904. With the art school he founded in Munich in 1915, he stood for a French-influenced modernism in Germany until he fled to New York to escape National Socialism. He founded the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts in New York in 1933 where he taught young American painters what he had learned from Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque in Europe. As a result, he became a mentor to Helen Frankenthaler and Lee Krasner, among others, and Clement Greenberg and Arshile Gorky attended his lecture series. From 1935, Hofmann organised a Summer School in the coastal town of Provincetown, which Helen Frankenthaler attended in 1950 and immortalised in her painting Provincetown Harbour.
Hans Hofmann developed the technique of ‘push and pull’ in order to achieve a three-dimensionality in painting on the two-dimensional canvas. He described the contrast between two colours as the interplay of force and counterforce: ‘Expanding and contracting forces […] the picture plane reacts automatically in the opposite direction to the stimulus received; thus action continues as long as it receives stimulus in the creative process. Push answers with pull and pull with push.’ [1]
Hofmann often uses clear, strong fields of colour in his work. In The Hedge, he explores the effect of primary colours in a thick, impasto application of paint. The aim is not the realistic depiction of natural phenomena, but rather to capture the manifold aspects of nature solely by means of the plastic qualities of paint. This is how Hofmann addressed one of the fundamental questions of painting: how can the three-dimensional world be translated onto the flat two-dimensional picture without resorting to perspective? In contrast to Josef Albers, he investigated the effect of colour in free pictorial composition. As The Hedge demonstrates, Hofmann was also interested in the plastic qualities of paint.
[1] Hans Hofmann, in: Search for the Real and Other Essays: Hans Hofmann, ed. by Sara T. Weeks, Bartlett H. Hayes Jr. (1948; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1967), p. 45, cited in Lucinda Barnes: ‘Hans Hofmann: The Nature of Abstraction’, in publication of the same name, ed. by the same. (et al.), University of California Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive, 2019, pp. 14–43, here pp. 32/33.
