Guide to the Hans Hofmann Collection
Processed by The Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive staff; machine-readable
finding aid created by Rick Rinehard; revised by Gabriela A. Montoya
Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive
University of California, Berkeley
2625 Durant Avenue
Berkeley, California 94720-2250
Phone: (510) 642-4889
Fax: (510) 642-7589
Email: rinehart@uclink2.berkeley.edu
URL: http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/
© 1998
The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.
Guide to the Hans Hofmann Collection
Berkeley Art Museum
University of California, Berkeley
Berkeley, California
Contact Information:
- Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive
- University of California, Berkeley
- 2625 Durant Avenue
- Berkeley, California 94720-2250
- Phone: (510) 642-4889
- Fax: (510) 642-7589
- Email: rinehart@uclink2.berkeley.edu
- URL: http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/
- Processed by:
- The Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive staff
- Encoded by:
- Rick Rinehart; revised by Gabriela A. Montoya
© 1998 The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.
Descriptive Summary
Title: Hans Hofmann Collection
Creator:
Hofmann, Hans, 1880-1966
Repository:
Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive
Berkeley, California 94720-2250
Languages:
English
Administrative Information
Access
While many collection items at the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film
Archive are accessible and on display, general access to the collection is
restricted. Please contact the institution with requests to visit the
collection.
Publication Rights
Copyright has not been assigned to the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive. All
requests for permission to publish or quote from manuscripts must be submitted in writing
to the Director. Permission for publication is given on behalf of the Berkeley Art
Museum/Pacific Film Archive as the owner of the physical items and is not intended to
include or imply permission of the copyright holder, which must also be obtained by the
reader.
Preferred Citation
[Identification of item], Hans Hofmann Collection, Berkeley Art Museum, University of
California, Berkeley.
Provenance
In the summer of
1931, when
Hans Hofmann (1880-1966) was teaching at the
University of California
at Berkeley, his work was exhibited on the top floor of
Haviland Hall. In
1934 a space for the regular presentation of art
exhibitions on campus opened in a former steam-heating plant. This "Barrows Lane Gallery"
was the site of many fondly remembered exhibitions on campus, but it was small and
without climate control orproper art storage areas. Some thirty years after the Barrows
Lane Gallery opened,
Hans Hofmann made possible the realization of
President
Clark Kerr's dream for a university art center by offering
a gift of forty-seven paintings and a quarter of a million dollars on the condition that
the university construct a proper art museum to house the collec-tion. Professor
Erle Loran of the Art Department was given responsibility for
selecting the paintings, and in
1965 Peter Selz was
brought from the
Museum of Modern Art in New York to direct the new
museum, which was completed in
1970.
We are grateful to Professor Emeritus
Erle Loran and his colleagues,
many of whom are unfortunately no longer with us, for bringing
Hans Hofmannto this country; to
Peter Selz , for agreeing to write
the preceding essay about the collection; and to the
National Endowment for the
Arts for supporting this publication (first/print edition). But most of all we
are grateful to
Hans Hofmann for his legacy -this building, these
paintings, and his teacher's spirit, which left its mark on so many.
J acquelynn Baas
Director, Berkeley Art
Museum/Pacific Film Archive
Biography
Hans Hofmann created a distinctive primordial world of color and
light. He realized that in painting, unlike in nature, cause and effect are reversed: on
canvas, color creates light. Hofmann wrote, "Every color emanates a very characteristic
light," and the special luminosity and radiance of his paintings are proof of his claim.
Along with other painters of his generation, Hofmann moved from representational and
narrative paintings towards
abstraction, where the basic elements of
a picture-space, line, color, light, scale, shape, and texture-assert themselves as the
primary aspects of a work. Abstraction does not mean, however, the disavowal of the human
touch. In our culture, almost everything around us, visual imagery included, is produced
by technologies that do not require human intervention. Painting (and sculpture) are the
last handmade objects, and Hofmann makes certain that we are aware of this in his art. He
is truly Homo Faber, Man the Maker, composing and controlling what we see and letting us
know how he has made it. He creates agitated textures and vibrating surfaces by poking
and prodding the pigment, making the paint ooze, and sometimes caressing the surface
lightly with a loaded brush. Whether Hofmann splashes paint onto the canvas, or brushes
it in heavy impasto, he turns the surface into a seemingly living witness to his
manipulation of paint.
Hofmann lived to be 86 years old, and his biography reads like a capsule version of the
history of
twentieth-century art. Born in
1880in a small town near
Munich, he attended school in the
Bavarian capital, which at the time was a sparkling center of culture, home to
Thomas Mann, Richard Strauss, and
Lovis Corinth.Wassily Kandinsky, who arrived
there in 1886, called Munich a"spiritual island." Although Hofmann had scientific talent
and had made a number of useful inventions while still in his teens, he decided upon art
school, and moved to
Paris in 1904. For ten years, he immersed
himself in the artistic life of the city whose artists-
Picasso, Braque, Gris, Matisse,and others-changed the history of art. In 1905, he witnessed the color
explosions of Matisse and the
Fauves at the Salon d'Automne. He
sketched beside Matisse, and became a close friend of the
Cubists'great colorist,
Robert Delaunay. Though none of the
paintings from his Paris period survive, it was there that Hofmann developed his
influential theories.
Hofmann was also very much aware of
Franz Marc and Kandinsky in
Munich, where he returned at the outbreak of World War 1. There, in
1915,
he opened his own art school. Before long, it achieved an interna-tional reputation as
the place to learn new approaches to painting, and attracted, among others, young
American students such as
Louise Nevelson and
Alfred
Jensen.
Destined to play a critical for the
University Art Museumwas another of Hofmann's American students,
Worth Ryder. Ryder, who later became chairman of the Art Department
at
UC Berkeley, invited Hofmann to teach at Berkeley in the summer
of
1930. Another of his students,
Glenn Wessels,
accompanied Hofmann to Berkeley and served as his interpreter and the first translator of
his theoretical writings. Hofmann came back to Berkeley the following summer. In
1931, the
California Palace of the Legion of Honor in
San Francisco gave him his first solo exhibition since the one held
in
Berlin in
1910.
In appreciation of his time in Berkeley and in response to his close contact with his
former students,over three decades later-in
1963 -Hofmann made the
substantial gift to the University of California of fortyseven paintings and funds
towards housing them. This generous gift, accepted by the Regents of the University on
the enthusiastic recommendation of President
Clark Kerr, became a
compelling reason to hasten the construction of the museum building itself. As the
founding director of the new museum, I was privileged to assist Professor
Erle
Loran, another of Hofmann's former students, in selecting pictures from
Hofmann's studio for the collection.
By the summer of
1931, Hofmann was well aware of the danger Nazism posed to
artists and intellectuals, and decided to remain in this country. He took a teaching
position at the
Art Students League in
New York, where a year later he again opened his own school. His combina-tion of
modern art theory and the freedom he granted his students made Hofmann
arguably the most important art teacher in the United States during the 1930s and
1940s-the years when this country assumed preeminence in art. For art students in
America, he offered exposure to the latest advances in European art
from someone who had firsthand knowledge of both Picasso and Matisse. Among his students
were the painters
Burgoyne Diller, Helen Frankenthaler,Lee Krasner, and
Larry Rivers.There were also the artists who later invented the "Happening"-
Allen
Kaprow and
Red Grooms. And there was the most important
critic of his day,
Clement Greenberg, who derived much of his
formalist theory-that painting defines itself by its own purely visual
properties of flatness, shape, and color-from Hofmann's teachings.
An early painting in the collection,
Table with Fruit and Coffeepot(1936), gives an idea of Hofmann's work at this time. Bold, even brash, this
picture pushes the color rhythms of Matisse and the Fauves to a new intensity (at first
glance there seems to be too much red). Having absorbed the structural lessons of
Cezanne and Cubism, Hofmann here loosens form to let color determine
structure. Color creates space as well: the visually advancing and receding colors are
basic to his often-cited "push-pull" principle, whereby a visual back and forth in space
results from forms and colors reacting to one another.
When the
Surrealists fled
Europe during World War
II and settled in New York, Hofmann had the chance to re-evaluate their work, along with
Picasso's. He created paintings such as
Idolatress 1 (1944), a grotesque
and ferocious Dionysiac female figure. In paintings such as
The Wind(about 1942) and
Fantasia (about 1943), he experimented with the
spontaneous invention and automatic response of the Surrealists with a free flow of
random drips and spatters resulting in calligraphic webs of paint. Similarly,
Effervescence (1944) consists of pools of pigment poured and dripped onto
the canvas with little premeditation. By welcoming chance effects, Hofmann introduced the
aesthetic of controlled accident into his work and his teaching.
This new approach to the picture plane-using free and intuitive methods depending largely
on the gestural energy of the artist-replaced the Cubist grid to such an extent that
Hofmann's work of the early 1940s foreshadows
Jackson Pollock'stechnique of dripping paint on the canvas. It may even have exerted a direct
impact on the younger artist. After experimenting with the drip technique, Hofmann
proceeded to other explorations, such as imprinting his own hand onto a canvas of freely
painted color blotches (
The Third Hand, 1947). With this symbolic as well
as very immediate gesture, he brought the interaction between artist and medium into
highly active discourse. The term
"Abstract Expressionist" was, in
fact, first applied to the work of an American painter when Hofmann's work was shown at
Betty Parsons' Mortimer Brandt Gallery in
1946.
In his works of the 1950s, Hofmann reasserted his European
modernsources: Fauvism, with its brilliant color, and Cubism, with its planar
structure. In a picture such as
Scintillating Space (1954), he joins his
earlier use of oversized, pointillist flecks with large, clearly structured color
rectangles, creating a pulsating texture of accented brushstrokes that seem to contradict
the flat planes of pure color. The result is an almost voluptuous equilibrium of color
and form. With paintings like
Morning Mist (1958),
Equinox(1958),
Indian Summer (1959),
Goliath (1960),
Magnum Opus (1962),
Sanctum Sanctorum (1962), and his
largest work, the monumental
Combinable Wall I and II (1961), Hofmann
continued in this mode of combining hard-edge, oblong forms with reckless, loosely
brushed areas. He created a visual tension between impulsive gestural areas and floating
geometric forms. Rectangles seem to advance and recede against the ground, inducing a
dynamic back and forth in space that epitomizes Hofmann's "push-pull." In a way, Hofmann
produced a synthesis of Fauvism and Cubism. Or, in terms of the younger generation of
American artists, a synthesis of the gestural painting of
Willem de Kooning,Jackson Pollock, and
Franz Kline,and the color-field painting of
Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko, and
Barnett Newman.
Unlike most of the
New York painters, however, Hofmann did not work in
series nor cultivate a single, signature style. Each painting was a new discovery. Some
paintings, like
The Prey (1956), lack all geometric form and consist
instead of freely painted blasts and splashes. Yet in this work, spontaneous passages
seem to form a target-like configuration on the lower left and a bird with a huge wing on
the right. The images could not have been premeditated. Hofmann told the critic
Harold Rosenberg when discussing this picture, "For this you need to
be in the rarest of states."
In the Wake of the Hurricane (1960), another
unequivocally Abstract Expressionist work, recalls by its title the flotsam and jetsam
deposited on a beach after a storm on Cape Cod, where Hofmann spent summers teaching from
1935 onward. It is revealing of Hofmann's experimental approach that this
spontaneously painted picture appears in the same year as the thoughtfully structured
Goliath, and just a year before the thinly painted, monochromatic Agrigento.
A strong binary aspect runs throughout Hofmann's work: a synthesis of the age-old
contrast between Apollonian and Dionysiac, classical and romantic, disciplined and
intuitive, rational and impulsive. Such forces are made visible, palpable, in Hofmann's
coherent and ohen brilliant amalgam of force and counterforce, of "push and pull."
In the last years of his long career, Hofmann slowed down not at all. He alternated
between making heavy, painterly works such as
And Thunderclouds Pass (1961
) or
Gloriamundi (1963), and pictures where paint is applied sparingly and
geometric forms are relinquished altogether. Paintings like
The Bat (1964)
and
Maiden Dance (1964) suggest a lighthearted sense of airy openness and
delight. On the occasion of the Hofmann retrospective in
1963 at the
Museum of Modern Art in New York, my former colleague there,
William C. Seitz, spoke of "the beauty, the profundity and
monumentality" of Hofmann's paintings and, above all, of "the purpose for which they were
painted-delectation." It is this affirmation of the joy of existence that we discover in
Hans Hofmann's work, and that, along with his formal explorations, has inspired and
challenged countless artists. With its collection of works by Hans Hofmann, the
University Art Museum plans to keep his powerful vision before the eyes of generations of
artists to come.
Peter Selz
Professor Emeritus
University of California at
Berkeley
Note
Unless otherwise noted, all works are gifts of the artist to BAM
(previously UAM).
Japanese Girl
1935
Physical Description:
casein and oil on plywood
44 x 36 inches
Interior Composition
1935
Physical Description:
oil and casein on plywood
44 x 36 inches
Table with Fruit and Coffeepot & Yellow Table on Yellow Background
Additional Note
These two paintings are on two sides of the same panel.
Table with Fruit and Coffeepot
1936
Physical Description:
casein and oil on plywood
60, 1/8 x 48, 1/2 inches
Yellow Table on Yellow Background
1936
Physical Description:
gouache, casein, and oil crayon on plywood
60, 1/8 x 48, 1/8 inches
Table with Teakettle, Green Vase, and Red Flowers
1936
Physical Description:
oil on plywood
54, 1/2 x 40, 1/8 inches
Self-Portrait I & II
Additional Note
These two self-portraits were originally painted on the front and back of the same panel,
and have since been separated onto two separate panels through conservation efforts.
Self-Portrait I
1942
Physical Description:
oil on gessoed plywood
13, 1/2 x 11, 1/2 inches
Gift of James W. Foster
Self-Portrait II
1942
Physical Description:
oil on gessoed plywood
13, 1/2 x 11, 1/2 inches
Gift of James W. Foster
The Wind
ca. 1942
Physical Description:
oil, duco, gouoche, and india ink on poster board
43, 7/8 x 28 inches
Fantasia
ca. 1943
Physical Description:
oil, duco, and casein on plywood
51, 1/2 x 37, 1/2 inches
Effervescence
1944
Physical Description:
oil, india ink, casein, and enamel on plywood
54, 3/8 x 35, 7/8 inches
Idolatress I
1944
Physical Description:
oil and aqueous media on upsom board
60, 1/8 x 40, 1/8 inches
Ecstasy
1947
Physical Description:
oil on canvas
68 x 60 inches
The Third Hand
1947
Physical Description:
oil on canvas
60, 1/8 x 40 inches
Le Gilotin
1953
Physical Description:
oil on canvas
58 x 48 inches
Scintillating Space
1954
Physical Description:
oil on canvas
84, 1/8 x 48, 3/8 inches
The Garden
1956
Physical Description:
oil on plywood
60 x 46, 3/8 inches
The Prey
1956
Physical Description:
oil on composition boord
60, 1/8 x 48, 1/8 inches
Equinox
1958
Physical Description:
oil on canvas
73 x 61 inches
Morning Mist
1958
Physical Description:
oil on canvas
55, 1/8 x 40, 3/8 inches
Above Deep Waters
1959
Physical Description:
oil on canvas,
84, 1/4 x 52 inches
Indian Summer
1959
Physical Description:
oil on canvas
60, 1/8 x 72, 1/4 inches
The Vanquished
1959
Physical Description:
oil and enamel on canvas
36, 1/8 x 48, 1/8 inches
Bald Eagle
1960
Physical Description:
oil on canvas
60, 1/4 x 52, 1/4 inches
Goliath
1960
Physical Description:
oil on canvas
84, 1/8 x 60 inches
In the Wake of the Hurricane
1960
Physical Description:
oil on canvas
72, 1/4 x 60 inches
The Lark
1960
Physical Description:
oil on canvas
60, 1/8 x 52, 3/8 inches
Summer Bliss
1960
Physical Description:
oil on canvas
60, 1/8 x 72, 1/4 inches
Note
Gift of the artist to the Art Department of the University of California, Berkeley, in
memory of Worth Ryder. Transferred to the University Art Museum.
Agrigento
1961
Physical Description:
oil on canvas
84, 1/4 x 72 inches
And Thunderclouds Pass
1961
Physical Description:
oil on canvas
83, 3/4 x 60, 1/4 inches
Combinable Wall I and II
1961
Physical Description:
oil on canvas, overall
84, 1/2 x 112, 1/2 inches
Note
This work consists of two panels brought together to form one painting.
Tormented Bull
1961
Physical Description:
oil on canvas
60, 1/8 x 84, 1/4 inches
Lucidus Ordo
1962
Physical Description:
oil on canvas
84, 1/8 x 78 inches
Magnum Opus
1962
Physical Description:
oil on canvas
84, 1/8 x 78, 1/8 inches
Rope Swinger
1962
Physical Description:
oil and enamel on canvas
60, 1/8 x 48, 1/8 inches
Sanctum Sanctorum
1962
Physical Description:
oil on canvas
84, 1/8 x 78, 1/8 inches
Heraldic Call
1962
Physical Description:
oil ond duco on canvas
60, 1/4 x 48, 3/8 inches
Nocturnal Splendor
1963
Physical Description:
oil on canvas
72, 1/4 x 60, 1/8 inches
In the Vastness of Sorrowful Thoughts
1963
Physical Description:
oil on canvas
78, 1/8 x 84 inches
Polyhymnia
1963
Physical Description:
oil on canvas
7, 21/8 x 60, 1/4 inches
Song of the Philomel
1963
Physical Description:
oil on panel
83 x 36, 1/2 inches
Gloriamundi
1963
Physical Description:
oil on canvas
60, 1/8 x 52 inches
And Out of the Caves the Night Threw a Handlful of Pale Tumbling Pideons into the Light (Rainer Maria Rilke, "Sonnets to Orpheus")
1964
Physical Description:
oil on plywood
84, 1/8 x 60, 1/8 inches
The Bat
1964
Physical Description:
oil on canvas
50, 1/8 x 40, 1/8 inches
The Clash
1964
Physical Description:
oil on canvas
52, 1/8 x 60, 1/4 inches
Imperium in Imperio
1964
Physical Description:
oil on canvas
84, 1/8 x 52 inches
Maiden Dance
1964
Physical Description:
oil on canvas
60, 1/8 x 52, 1/8 inches
SilentNight
1964
Physical Description:
oil on canvas
84 x 78, 1/4 inches
The Castle
1965
Physical Description:
oil on canvas
60, 1/8 x 40, 1/8 inches
Struwel Peter
1965
Physical Description:
oil on canvas
72, 1/8 x 60, 1/4 inches