Hans Hofmann:
The Father of Abstract Expressionism
February 3 – May 31, 2025
Landscape No. 108, 1941, oil on panel, 23 1/4 x 29 1/4 in.
Few artists have had such an outsized impact as Hans Hofmann, whose paintings and teachings have reverberated throughout generations of artists. While his pedagogy gave shape to artistic practices for himself and others, it is his paintings that have marked Hofmann as one of the greatest American painters after World War II.
Heather James is proud to mount this exhibition of Hans Hofmann covering three decades of works, with a large curation of paintings coming from a single, private collector. What does it mean to collect an artist deeply? Perhaps a better or more interesting question is, to paraphrase Yeats, how can we know the collector from the collection? The two are intrinsically linked. To understand one, a person must also understand the other. We can reveal the personality of the collector through the quirks of the collection.
With a collection comprising as many Hans Hofmann paintings as this one, the works speak to a collector who valued pieces that speak to both the heart and the mind. Like people, collections are often never complete, a continual process of building and sometimes of letting go. Collectors are temporary stewards of a cultural heritage, and the breadth and quality of this collection, with its emphasis on the 1940s, speaks to this collector’s sustained love for Hofmann. Gathering them together, they represent, in their own way, a visual essay into Hofmann, giving us new insight into this giant of the 20th century.
Moving through three decades of paintings, from the 1940s to the 1950s, the exhibition drops into each period, guiding us through the deep revolutions Hofmann initiated, not just within his own oeuvre but on art history in general.
Exhibition Artwork
“Art is the expression of the artist’s overflowing soul.”
– Hans Hofmann
Who is Hans Hofmann
“Painters must speak through paint, not through words.” – Hans Hofmann
Born in 1880, a generation removed from the oldest Abstract Expressionists such as de Kooning or Rothko, Hofmann spent the crucial decade between 1904 and 1914 in Paris, knew Picasso and Matisse, and was on the scene when the great Cézanne retrospective opened in 1906. So, it is unsurprising that after arriving in New York in 1932, Hofmann took a somewhat circuitous path through a range of styles. Yet, he always held true to core ideas about painting.
Decades before he painted vibrant rectangles of pure, floating color, commonly known as ‘slabs,’ Hofmann brushed, stained, and dripped paint with a looser, chance-based hand. Whether he or Pollock pioneered the “drip” painting technique is still unsettled. Less controversy surrounds the impact of his teaching on Joan Mitchell and several of the younger painters who turned toward a more lyrical brand of Abstract Expressionism — one more closely aligned with nature.
1940s
“Art leads to a more profound concept of life, because art itself is a profound expression of feeling.” – Hans Hofmann
Any analysis of Hans Hofmann’s oeuvre is incomplete without considering his small landscapes, which occupied him between 1940 and 1944. These works capture a pivotal moment in his artistic evolution, transitioning from Matisse-inspired figurative still lifes, portraits, and interiors to the pure abstraction that would later define his career. Rooted in Fauvism and resonant with Kandinsky’s early work, these works remain a robust testament to Hofmann’s evolving visual language during this transformative period.
However, in the latter half of the decade, there is a clear shift in Hofmann’s practice. This shift should not be underappreciated as, by 1947, Hofmann was still painting at age 65, and rather than becoming entrenched to a single approach to the canvas, Hofmann pushed himself to discover new possibilities of painting. During this period, Hofmann’s reliance on linearity provided a departure from the more fluid, painterly dynamism of his earlier works. From 1944 to 1951, this linear impulse permeated his practice, signaling a prolonged exploration of modes of expression in which he grappled with reconciling abstraction and structure.
Hofmann was able to synthesize the earlier breakthroughs of European Modernism like Surrealism and Cubism with the gestural freedom of American Abstract Expressionism. Hofmann’s deliberate explorations during the late 1940s underscore his unique ability to create works that resist easy categorization, standing apart as deeply personal explorations of form and color.
1950s
“To sense the invisible and to be able to create it – that is art.” – Hans Hofmann
The 1950s saw Hofmann enter his 70s still as curious and groundbreaking as ever. A 72-year-old Hans Hofmann worked his canvases deliberately and thoughtfully to achieve impact through restraint. Hofmann’s work is never strongly associated with Surrealism and yet in this decade, he appeared to call back to that earlier avant-garde movement, synthesizing it with Abstract Expressionism, and underscoring the adaptibility of his famous “push-pull” theory, where the expanding and contracting forces of color and form create surface tension, depth and movement.
It was also during this decade that Hofmann began to explore and incorporate passages of color, allowing them to float in space where they produce a sense of tension against buoyant brushstrokes, harmonizing together through ebullience.
1960s
“I can’t understand how anyone is able to paint without optimism. Despite the general pessimistic attitude in the world today, I am nothing but an optimist.” – Hans Hofmann
In 1960, Hofmann was selected as one of the four artists to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale. The world obsesses over youth and young prodigies. From this perspective, Hans Hofmann was a late bloomer. However, look at the Abstract Expressionists who Hofmann guided – many didn’t hit their strides until their 40s. Or David Park who didn’t pioneer the Bay Area Figurative Movement until his 40s. Or more recently, Etel Adnan, who didn’t achieve acclaim for her paintings until the last decades of her long life. Age brings with it experience and perspective.
Maintaining his push-pull doctrine of applied oppositions onto the canvas, this decade continued to see Hofmann push the possibilities of paint. Some works show the graceful, lively brushstrokes of single colors flitting across the canvas. Some works show daubs of paint floating above a churning sea of color. Some paintings appear to be carefully planned while others seem to be the result of frenzied chance. But nothing seems extraneous or wasted. Everything counts on the canvas.
The 1960s saw Hofmann reach higher levels of renown and respect, even as he was reaching the last years of his life. Perhaps, it is the vitality and dynamism through color and brushstroke that grew Hofmann’s reputation. Perhaps, it was the growing acknowledgement of his influence on a generation of painters including Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, and Wolf Kahn. Perhaps, it is the idiosyncrasies of an artist that never settled into rote repetition, his paintings acting as visual research, bounding with optimism and joy.
Artists on Hofmann
“As a man and as an artist, positive, energetic, and elegant. A sport.” – Helen Frankenthaler in 2003
“Hofmann’s abstraction is hard won: it comes from depicting the world around him… Have I overpraised him? I think not: for me this still underrated artist stands out as one of the great painters of the century.” – Anthony Caro in 1990
“Hans Hofmann paints as if he could look into those infinitesimal particles of violence that could split the earth like an orange. He shows us the vitality of matter, its creation and its destruction, its angels of dark and light.” – Tennessee Williams in 1949
“I really didn’t get the first impact, the full impact of it [Cubism], until I worked with Hofmann.” – Lee Krasner in 1938
The Human Spirit
“Art is to me the glorification of the human spirit, and as such it is the cultural documentation of the time in which it is produced.” – Hans Hofmann
Hans Hofmann was an authentic early modernist. Later, as a mature artist in full command of his abilities, his achievements were stimulated — made possible even — by the exhilarating New York milieu that gave rise to Abstract Expressionism. So perhaps it is not surprising that unlike most of the Abstract Expressionists who pursued a single iconographic look — Rothko’s soft-edged rectangles, Franz Kline’s enlarged calligraphic strokes, Clyfford Still’s dark, ragged shapes — Hofmann was constantly reaching for different and contradictory effects.
His paintings were wildly varied, and they carved a wide swath toward the most exciting avenues available to contemporary abstraction. Hofmann was a gallant experimenter who had refused to settle on a single style for long and stated those intentions clearly. “What I would hate most is to repeat myself over and over again – to develop a false style…I want to invent, to discover, to imagine, to speculate, to improvise — to seize the hazardous in order to be inspired.”
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