Hans Hofmann on Paper

Hans Hofmann (1880–1966) is acclaimed as both a giant of post-war twentieth century abstraction and one of the most influential teachers of the modern era. His voluptuous, muscular paintings are seen as paradigms of how essential elements of surface, shape, and hue can be made into potent carriers of emotion and drama. His teaching, lectures, and writings, first in his school in Munich and later, in New York and Provincetown, helped to shape several generations’ conceptions of what a work of art could be. Hofmann’s students included Helen Frankenthaler, Michael Goldberg, Alfred Jensen, Wolf Kahn, Lee Krasner, Louise Nevelson, Red Grooms, Paul Resika, Marisol, Judith Rothschild, Al Kresch, and Ludwig Sander, among many others, and the critic Clement Greenberg frequently said that hearing Hofmann’s lectures on art in 1939 was crucial to the formation of his aesthetic. Today, discerning museums and private collectors in the United States and, increasingly, in Europe rightly treasure their Hofmanns. Exhibitions are regularly organized to celebrate his achievement, elegantly produced books are published, documentaries aired, and more. And this substantial reputation continues to grow.

Yet despite the esteem in which Hofmann is held and the growing attention to his achievement, one aspect of his work remains little known: his works on paper. This is particularly surprising, since working on paper was integral both to Hofmann’s practice and to his evolution. From his early sojourn in Paris, as an ambitious young artist in the years before World War I, to his last years in New York, Hofmann drew extensively and, in addition, frequently made colored images on paper, using crayon, watercolor, gouache, and other mediums that lent themselves to spontaneous improvisation. Drawing was also an important component of Hofmann’s teaching, as he translated his ideas about the evocation of space and energy into linear “diagrams,” sometimes imposing these drawn plottings of spatial dynamics on the work of his students. (Frankenthaler famously refused to let him draw on her charcoal nude, but made him outline his corrections next to the figure.) Students recall that they never saw their teacher paint in the classroom, but only draw. During the years that he ran his school in Munich, from 1915 until 1932, in fact, Hofmann had no time for painting and channeled much of his creative energy into drawing; most of the few extant works from his years in Europe, before he came to the U.S., are black and white drawings, plus a small number of watercolors.

Hofmann introduced himself to American audiences through his drawings. He initially came to the U.S. in 1930, invited to teach a summer course by an American alumnus of his Munich school who was now head of the art department at the University of California, Berkeley. Hofmann’s first American exhibition, seen at U. C. Berkeley, and the Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco, was held in 1931, when he returned to teach that summer. (He would return for a third session in 1932 and remain in America permanently.) That first show was exclusively of black and white drawings, made either in Europe, when he traveled across the U.S. from New York to the West Coast, or in the Berkeley area. As Worth Ryder, the former student whose invitation brought Hofmann to Berkeley, wrote in the accompanying brochure “This exhibition of Hofmann’s work, the first to be held in America, unfortunately contains none of his paintings. But in these drawings, so small in size yet so vast in scope, the greatest achievements of modern art are in solution.” These vigorous, energetic works record the artist’s responses to the south of France, where he held summer sessions in 1928 and 1929, and to his first encounter with what would become his adopted country. Drawing, it could be argued, was Hofmann’s means of discovering and assimilating new places.

Perhaps because working on paper in responsive, fluid media, such as India ink or watercolor, encouraged a sense of the provisional and the improvisatory, Hofmann tackled subjects that he left largely uninvestigated on canvas and often approached these subjects in...