拍品專文
Hans Hofmann painted Paling Moon one year before his death, at what many feel to be the peak of his career as a painter; a moment glorified by some of the most exuberant and lively works of the time. Born in Munich in 1880 and present in Paris during the cubist period, Hofmann arrived in the United States in 1930 to teach at Berkeley. From 1932 to 1958, he established and taught in his own schools in New York and Provincetown, where he lived five months a year. After he closed his schools in 1958 and devoted his energies only to painting, Hofmann's work displayed a final flowering notable for its extraordinary use of color and a delight in its placement of what had become its principal form, the rectangle.
As one of the principal precepts of the picture plane, Hofmann emphasized the connection between the planar "push and pull" and color, the "vital forces that become the real sources of painterly life." He described the ways in which color relations create "tensional difference" and "simultaneous contrast" and suggested that the synchronized development of form and color is the foremost problem to be solved in painting.
The principal spatial organizer of his late compositions was the rectangle, and Hofmann developed a method of preparing his paintings using rectangles of color pinned to the canvas to judge the success of his attempts to organize planes and color relations. Clement Greenberg wrote of the work of this period: "the very fact it teeters on the edge of a kind of art like Mondrian's is one of the things that give it its climactic quality...that sums up the realizations of a whole epoch of modernist art, and at the same time points toward the next one" (C. Greenberg, Hofmann, Paris 1961, p. 38).
After the death of his first wife, Miz in 1963, Hofmann married Renate Schmitz and soon painted freely, and with great delight, his most joyous works. The paintings refer overtly to Nature and the natural world and, in works such as Gloriamundi and Nirvana from 1963, use colors and elements that recall the night sky and forms that look like the moon. Rising Moon and Paling Moon from 1965 developed from these works, combining these elements with a background plane inflected with thickly painted intervals which are reminiscent of the forms in his early 1950s landscapes. In Paling Moon, the artist combined a gestural background in orange and red with thickly painted intervals, and then added a single dominant rectangle of an early morning skyblue, floating slightly off center as if hovering in a sky at sunrise.
Hofmann had written in 1962 of the importance of the act of painting and it is clear that his connections to the outside works were subsumed by the act itself in his search to express the subject: "I am often asked how I approach my work. Let me confess: I hold my mind and my work free from any association foreign to the act of painting. I am thoroughly inspired and agitated by the actions themselves which the development of painting continuously requires. From the beginning this puts me in a positive mood, which I must persistently follow until the picture has found realization through paint. This seems simple but it is actually the fruit of long research" (H. Hofmann, "Hans Hofmann on Art," Art Journal 22, Spring 1963, p. 18).
As one of the principal precepts of the picture plane, Hofmann emphasized the connection between the planar "push and pull" and color, the "vital forces that become the real sources of painterly life." He described the ways in which color relations create "tensional difference" and "simultaneous contrast" and suggested that the synchronized development of form and color is the foremost problem to be solved in painting.
The principal spatial organizer of his late compositions was the rectangle, and Hofmann developed a method of preparing his paintings using rectangles of color pinned to the canvas to judge the success of his attempts to organize planes and color relations. Clement Greenberg wrote of the work of this period: "the very fact it teeters on the edge of a kind of art like Mondrian's is one of the things that give it its climactic quality...that sums up the realizations of a whole epoch of modernist art, and at the same time points toward the next one" (C. Greenberg, Hofmann, Paris 1961, p. 38).
After the death of his first wife, Miz in 1963, Hofmann married Renate Schmitz and soon painted freely, and with great delight, his most joyous works. The paintings refer overtly to Nature and the natural world and, in works such as Gloriamundi and Nirvana from 1963, use colors and elements that recall the night sky and forms that look like the moon. Rising Moon and Paling Moon from 1965 developed from these works, combining these elements with a background plane inflected with thickly painted intervals which are reminiscent of the forms in his early 1950s landscapes. In Paling Moon, the artist combined a gestural background in orange and red with thickly painted intervals, and then added a single dominant rectangle of an early morning skyblue, floating slightly off center as if hovering in a sky at sunrise.
Hofmann had written in 1962 of the importance of the act of painting and it is clear that his connections to the outside works were subsumed by the act itself in his search to express the subject: "I am often asked how I approach my work. Let me confess: I hold my mind and my work free from any association foreign to the act of painting. I am thoroughly inspired and agitated by the actions themselves which the development of painting continuously requires. From the beginning this puts me in a positive mood, which I must persistently follow until the picture has found realization through paint. This seems simple but it is actually the fruit of long research" (H. Hofmann, "Hans Hofmann on Art," Art Journal 22, Spring 1963, p. 18).