Cascade

An explosion of pure color, Hans Hofmann’s dualistic creative approach unifying unbridled emotion with a strict intellectual control is expertly expressed in his masterpiece Cascade. Hofmann partitions his tableau into three segments, each comprising a unique combination of color and texture. Hofmann mingles both primary and blended color across his canvas, allowing contrasts in tone and texture to establish an intense and intricate composition. The bold passages of the vibrant red paint built into cascading crescendos of impasto unify the work, in some places thickly built up to obscure and distort the underlying areas, in others thinly applied in a thin application of paint. Cascade evokes the essence of Hofmann's painterly theory, which he eloquently expresses in relation to poetry: “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” (quoted in Hans Hofmann, ed. J. Yohe, New York, 2002, p. 9).
The present work is a tour-de-force of the artist’s distinctive style of paint handling, capturing Hofmann’s ruthless self-discipline and newfound energy as he turned his complete attention toward his own creative production after many years running his renowned art school. Adding to the drama of his celebrated interrogations of color, Hofmann’s generously applied brushstrokes give the surface of the painting a distinct sense of energy and animation. Set against the scorching red ground, his daubs of vibrant green, electric blue, and pale yellow and creams offer up a tantalizing display of color and texture. Unlike Mark Rothko’s iconic Multiforms, in which the artist allows the colorful shapes to navigate their own forms as the liquid pigment soaked directly into the canvas, Hofmann very clearly conducts his gestures in the service exploring his ideas. Direct contrasts between bold blocks of color occur alongside more subtle interactions as his ‘wet-on-wet' technique allows other interesting dialogues to take place. Hofmann states, “my aim in painting as in art in general is to create pulsating, luminous and open surfaces that emanate a mystic light, determined exclusively through painterly development, and in accordance with my deepest insight into the experience of light and nature” (quoted in K. Kuh, The Artist’s Voice: talks with Seventeen Artists, New York, 1962, p. 128). 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 André Derain’s deft handling of primary color in his chromatic schemes, both artists expressing wonderment and a refined hedonism towards the possibilities of color.
Painted in 1960, Cascade has benefited from the exceptional provenance of its former ownership, having been acquired by the noted translator Mari Michener and renowned novelist James A. Michener in 1962 from Hofmann's lifelong dealer, Sam Kootz. James first fell in love with contemporary art after visiting the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Micheners began collecting the artists of their time soon after marrying in 1955. They gave generously to the arts, funding writing programs and supporting art museums across the country, developing deep ties to the University of Texas at Austin, and at one point, becoming the single largest donors to the University. They eventually donated their collection to the museum, where it became a foundation part of the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin, and the present lot is being sold to raise funds to benefit the Mari and James A. Michener Acquisitions Endowment Fund, to further the museum’s national reputation for innovative programming, bold leadership, and expansive range of educational and community programs.
In 1961, Cascade was Hofmann’s selection for the Whitney Annual, where it was exhibited alongside other masterworks by Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Ellsworth Kelly, Philip Guston, and Yayoi Kusama. As part of the Michener Foundation, Cascade toured the Americas as an emblematic example of Hofmann’s style. First entering the Blanton Museum of Art in 1968 as a promised gift, Cascade has resided at the museum for almost six decades.
Although fundamentally abstract, Hofmann’s paintings were nevertheless grounded in his perception of the natural world. According to the artist, our visual understanding of the world was defined by the relationship of three-dimensional objects as perceived within the negative space around them. “We live in a world of volume and space,” Hofmann observed (quoted in W. Seitz, Hans Hofmann: With Selected Writings by the Artist, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1963, p. 11). Hofmann developed a theory in which contrasting colors created a kind of push (the object coming into focus) and pull (the recessional pull of deep, perspectival space). In Cascade, he creates a painting in which both elements
Influential postwar art critics like Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg were passionate advocates of Hofmann’s late career work, especially the way that his paintings obeyed the essential a priori elements of painting itself. By its nature as pigment on a flat surface, a painting should not contrive to recreate nature in a fundamentally false rendering, but instead, work only within the prescribed flatness of its two dimensionality. As Hofmann himself observed, "Depth, in a pictorial sense, is not created by the arrangement of the objects one after another toward a vanishing point, in the sense of Renaissance perspective, but on the contrary by the creation of forces in the sense of push and pull" (quoted in S. Hunter, Hans Hofmann, New York, 1963, p. 14).
In 1958, at the age of seventy-eight, Hofmann retired from his enormously influential teaching career to focus on his own work. With each year that went by, Hofmann’s paintings became ever more indicative of his “push/pull” theory. As in Cascade, Hofmann pared down his earlier work into more structured arrangements, coming to land upon the rectangle as the single most important driver of the rich color relationships he developed.
A revelation of color, informed by many decades training New York’s most accomplished artists yet open to the emerging possibilities of paint, Cascade is an exempla of the artist's most productive and innovative period, evincing Frank Stella's assertion that Hofmann's works “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," republished in Hans Hofmann, op. cit., p. 277).