Word: hofmann
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...Hans Hofmann is 80, and his claim to a place in the top ranks of American painters is secure. Yet Hofmann's renown is not grounded in a lonely, inarticulate struggle of artist and canvas. He, more than anyone else, has managed to combine the roles of teacher, example and influence in leading U.S. art to its flowering of abstract expressionism in the past 15 years. This long effort has scarcely seemed to age Painter Hofmann. He looks like a jolly burgomaster who has just turned 50, and as his latest show in Manhattan's Kootz Gallery proves...
...Hofmann was born in Weissenburg, Bavaria, and his well-meaning father, a stolid civil servant, had hopes that the boy would one day be a famous scientist. Young Hofmann had the aptitude: he pored over engineering books, when scarcely out of school invented an electromagnetic comptometer. But at 18 he abandoned his tinkering to devote himself fulltime to art. He went to Paris, had a brief flirtation with the Fauves-the radical "wild beasts" who were moving away from objective naturalism-and with the cubists. The affair was "rather a platonic one," says he, for he was already preoccupied with...
...Canvas Is a Door. From his study of physics, he had become fascinated with the notion of a universe made up of energy. This was the invisible life that beat behind and beneath all surfaces, and Hofmann wanted to record it. In his view, there is no such thing as emptiness: what appears to be emptiness is merely a space filled with force that has its own volume and form. Nor is there such a thing as motionlessness, for everything that exists must react to something else. A color automatically dilutes or enhances a neighboring color. Objects gouge out forms...
...Among them: Abstract Expressionists Ferren, James Brooks. Adolph Gottlieb, Hans Hofmann, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning; Sculptors David Smith and David Hare; Critics Alfred Frankfurter and Thomas Hess of Art News; Fine Arts Professors James S. Ackerman (Harvard) and Meyer Schapiro (Columbia...
Push and Pull. Romance faded but inspiration remained. Almost immediately, he began to attract attention. He became the pupil of Hans Hofmann, dean of the uninhibited "push and pull" technique. But no sooner was Rivers safely launched as a promising abstract expressionist than boredom...