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Lot Essay
“In me there develops a real relationship to my paintings, and this is mostly a poetic relationship because what they say is poetry. This is poetry expressed in color”
Hans Hofmann
In an explosion of pure color, Hofmann’s dualistic creative approach merges unbridled emotion and strict intellectual control across the highly active surface of Evening Blue. Painted in 1958, the present work captures Hofmann’s ruthless self-discipline and newfound energy in this emphatically important year when the artist shuttered his renowned art school, turning his complete attention toward his own creative production. Hofmann had a profound impact teaching two generations of New York school artists; coronated as the ‘dean’ of the Abstract Expressionists, his diligent pedagogical efforts crafted the likes of Jackson Pollock and Robert Rauschenberg. Upon retirement at the age of seventy-eight, Hofmann was then able to channel decades of tutorship and studio practice into an expansive effort towards refining his style. Born in Germany in 1880, Hofmann trained in the European tradition before immigrating to New York. His searching eye learned the improvisatory handling evident in Wassily Kandinsky’s work as well as the strict planning of depersonalized form in Piet Mondrian's oeuvre. Hofmann channeled these two disparate attitudes onto his canvases, saturating pure emotion and predefined intellectualism into his work.
Here, Hofmann expertly partitions his composition into nine roughly equal rectangular segments, each comprising of a unique mélange of primary and blended color. The light blue area at the top left contains diluted blue pigment evenly brushed horizontally across the canvas, contrasting in tone and texture with the more thickly applied blue in the center of the composition, and in coloration with the heavily blended midsection below, where ochres and greens assimilate toward a rustic palette expressed by meandering longitudinal strokes. Hofmann intermittently interrupts the generally smooth application of paint across the picture pane with areas of impasto, wherein thickly built-up layers of pigment obscure and distort the underlying layers, allowing mere suggestions of the below colors to emerge.
For Hofmann, the essence of any picture is the two-dimensional picture plane, upon which illusions of space can occur. Hofmann describes space as “not a static, inert thing. Space is alive; space is dynamic; space is imbued with movement expressed by forces and counterforces; space vibrates and resounds with color, light and form in the rhythm of life” (quoted in J. Yohe, ed., Hans Hofmann, New York, 2002, p. 16). Hofmann proceeds with Evening Blue in a twofold manner in order to establish his conception of space across the picture pane: he allows the canvas to become an intoxication of pure color interlocked and suspended within the differentiated segments whilst simultaneously expressing movement through his vigorous brushstrokes which deviate in terms of width, speed, and direction across the tableau. Hofmann’s color in the present work is enlivened with a lucidity and vivacity through the use of lighter washes and thinned pigment, allowing spots of the canvas’ ground to peak through the work. The composition’s simplicity and candor forcefully argue for elementary color’s identification as the breathing essence of pictorial life. In this way, Hofmann’s technique here functions similarly to Henri Matisse’s deft handling of primary color in his chromatic schemes, both artists expressing wonderment and a refined hedonism towards the possibilities of color.
Hofmann’s creates the greatest interaction of color in the rightmost section of the canvas. The uppermost layer is a thickly-applied cadmium red, which the artist pushed around the painting’s surface in an almost squeegeed motion, leaving thickets of impasto against the otherwise smooth canvas. Hofmann then levies gashes against this layer, perhaps using the back of his paint brush to scrape away the red layer, revealing two parallel lines of bright yellow as well as areas of green. This method, anticipating by thirty years Gerhard Richter’s powerful Abstraktes Bild, attains the same phenomenological achievement, the artist deploying his decades of practice in the medium to interrogate the picture plane, probing and obfuscating the various paint layers, striving towards a poignant rediscovery of painting’s purpose after the revelations of Modernism and Abstract Expressionism.
A riot of color, informed by the many decades Hofmann spent teaching New York’s artistic elite yet open to the emerging possibilities which painting would seek out in the intervening years, Evening Blue is a revelation, an exempla of the artist’s most productive and innovative period from 1958 to his passing. The present work evidences Frank Stella’s assertion that Hofmann’s paintings from this period “were without precedent except in Hofmann’s own work. Amazingly, they were without equal when they were painted and are without equal since they were painted” (F. Stella, “The Artist of the Century” in op. cit., 2002, p. 277).
Hans Hofmann
In an explosion of pure color, Hofmann’s dualistic creative approach merges unbridled emotion and strict intellectual control across the highly active surface of Evening Blue. Painted in 1958, the present work captures Hofmann’s ruthless self-discipline and newfound energy in this emphatically important year when the artist shuttered his renowned art school, turning his complete attention toward his own creative production. Hofmann had a profound impact teaching two generations of New York school artists; coronated as the ‘dean’ of the Abstract Expressionists, his diligent pedagogical efforts crafted the likes of Jackson Pollock and Robert Rauschenberg. Upon retirement at the age of seventy-eight, Hofmann was then able to channel decades of tutorship and studio practice into an expansive effort towards refining his style. Born in Germany in 1880, Hofmann trained in the European tradition before immigrating to New York. His searching eye learned the improvisatory handling evident in Wassily Kandinsky’s work as well as the strict planning of depersonalized form in Piet Mondrian's oeuvre. Hofmann channeled these two disparate attitudes onto his canvases, saturating pure emotion and predefined intellectualism into his work.
Here, Hofmann expertly partitions his composition into nine roughly equal rectangular segments, each comprising of a unique mélange of primary and blended color. The light blue area at the top left contains diluted blue pigment evenly brushed horizontally across the canvas, contrasting in tone and texture with the more thickly applied blue in the center of the composition, and in coloration with the heavily blended midsection below, where ochres and greens assimilate toward a rustic palette expressed by meandering longitudinal strokes. Hofmann intermittently interrupts the generally smooth application of paint across the picture pane with areas of impasto, wherein thickly built-up layers of pigment obscure and distort the underlying layers, allowing mere suggestions of the below colors to emerge.
For Hofmann, the essence of any picture is the two-dimensional picture plane, upon which illusions of space can occur. Hofmann describes space as “not a static, inert thing. Space is alive; space is dynamic; space is imbued with movement expressed by forces and counterforces; space vibrates and resounds with color, light and form in the rhythm of life” (quoted in J. Yohe, ed., Hans Hofmann, New York, 2002, p. 16). Hofmann proceeds with Evening Blue in a twofold manner in order to establish his conception of space across the picture pane: he allows the canvas to become an intoxication of pure color interlocked and suspended within the differentiated segments whilst simultaneously expressing movement through his vigorous brushstrokes which deviate in terms of width, speed, and direction across the tableau. Hofmann’s color in the present work is enlivened with a lucidity and vivacity through the use of lighter washes and thinned pigment, allowing spots of the canvas’ ground to peak through the work. The composition’s simplicity and candor forcefully argue for elementary color’s identification as the breathing essence of pictorial life. In this way, Hofmann’s technique here functions similarly to Henri Matisse’s deft handling of primary color in his chromatic schemes, both artists expressing wonderment and a refined hedonism towards the possibilities of color.
Hofmann’s creates the greatest interaction of color in the rightmost section of the canvas. The uppermost layer is a thickly-applied cadmium red, which the artist pushed around the painting’s surface in an almost squeegeed motion, leaving thickets of impasto against the otherwise smooth canvas. Hofmann then levies gashes against this layer, perhaps using the back of his paint brush to scrape away the red layer, revealing two parallel lines of bright yellow as well as areas of green. This method, anticipating by thirty years Gerhard Richter’s powerful Abstraktes Bild, attains the same phenomenological achievement, the artist deploying his decades of practice in the medium to interrogate the picture plane, probing and obfuscating the various paint layers, striving towards a poignant rediscovery of painting’s purpose after the revelations of Modernism and Abstract Expressionism.
A riot of color, informed by the many decades Hofmann spent teaching New York’s artistic elite yet open to the emerging possibilities which painting would seek out in the intervening years, Evening Blue is a revelation, an exempla of the artist’s most productive and innovative period from 1958 to his passing. The present work evidences Frank Stella’s assertion that Hofmann’s paintings from this period “were without precedent except in Hofmann’s own work. Amazingly, they were without equal when they were painted and are without equal since they were painted” (F. Stella, “The Artist of the Century” in op. cit., 2002, p. 277).