Hans Hofmann Quotes (1880-1966)

“Since light is best expressed through differences in color quality, color should not be handled as a tonal gradation, to produce the effect of light.”

“Art is magic. So say the surrealists. But how is it magic? In its metaphysical development? Or does some final transformation culminate in a magic reality? In truth, the latter is impossible without the former. If creation is not magic, the outcome cannot be magic. To worship the product and ignore its development leads to dilettantism and reaction. Art cannot result from sophisticated, frivolous, or superficial effects.”

“It makes no difference whether a work is naturalistic or abstract; every visual expression follows the same fundamental laws.”

“And so artistic creation is the metamorphosis of the external physical aspects of a thing into a self-sustaining spiritual reality.”

“In nature, light creates the color; in the picture, color creates light. Every color shade emanates a very characteristic light — no substitute is possible.”

“I do not want to avoid immersing myself in trouble — to be a mess — to struggle out of it. I want to invent, to discover, to imagine, to speculate, to improvise — to seize the hazardous in order to be inspired. I want to experience the manifestation of the absolute — the manifestation of the unexpected in an extreme and unique relation. I know that only by following my creative instincts in an act of creative destruction will I be able to find it.”

“Sometimes I wonder, laying in a great black stripe on a canvas, what animal bones (or horns) are making the furrows of my picture.. ..black grows deeper and deeper, darker and darker before me. It menaces me like a black gullet. I can bear it no longer. It is monstrous. It is unfathomable. 'As the thought comes to me to exorcise and transform this black with a white drawing, it has already become a surface.. .Now I have lost all fear, and begin to draw on the black surface' [Hofmann is referring here to a quote of Jean Arp ]. Only love – for painting, in this instance – is able to cover the fearful void.”

“It isn't necessary to make things large to make them monumental; a head by Giacometti one inch high would be able to vitalize this whole space.”

“Push answers with pull and pull with push.. .At the end of his life and the height of his capacity Paul Cézanne understood color as a force of push and pull. In his pictures he created an enormous sense of volume, breathing, pulsating, expanding, contracting through his use of colors.”

“Hofmann's abstraction is hard won: it comes from depicting the world around him. Over the years his paintings cover a vast territory: they are uneven in quality, various in style; he paints his own history of the most relevant 20th Century art, a kind of Hofmannesque Fauvism, Cubism, Abstract Expressionism.”

“A passionate teacher, he got his students to work! I studied with Hans for three weeks in Provincetown, summer 1950. Having had a thorough lesson in Cubism well before I knew him, perhaps I was never one of his many student disciples but a great admirer. To this day I think he remains extremely overlooked as an artist and an influence.”

“When I brought Hofmann up to meet Pollock [her husband] and see his work which was before we moved here, Hofmann's reaction was — one of the questions he asked Jackson was, 'do you work from nature?' There were no still lifes around or models around and Jackson's answer was, 'I am nature.' And Hofmann's reply was, 'Ah, but if you work by heart, you will repeat yourself.' To which Jackson did not reply at all.”

“And I came [to New York, 1945].. ..to study with Hofmann.. .And I went to Hofmann's class and I couldn't understand a word he said so I left, terrified. But he and I became friends later on. Friends, but I never studied with him..”

“Hofmann had a heavy hand, a virtual inability to hold back, whether he was spreading planes of paint across a surface or drawing his own features with firm, broad strokes of a thick pen. Much of his extant work turns the volume to fortissimo, from the rapidly worked 'wet-into-wet' interiors of the 1930's to the abstractions of the 1950's and 1960's, in which patches of paint and emphathic shreds of drawing appear to have been slapped on to the canvas or squeezed directly from the tube.”