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Lot Essay
A masterful example of Hans Hofmann’s late period, Joy-Sparks of the Gods is a celebration of all the artist’s pictorial accomplishments presented with a level of clarity and expansiveness rarely seen in the artist’s work before or after. Hofmann was an expert practitioner of juxtaposing planes of color into relationships that summoned a sense of space on the otherwise flat expanse of a painting. Yet, when compared to paintings like The Gate from 1960 in the collection of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, or Cathedral of 1959 in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, both made only a few years earlier, one immediately notes the new openness in the later canvas compared to the densely-packed structures of color. In Joy-Sparks of the Gods, Hofmann has made the heretofore unseen decision to privilege the surface of the primed canvas as the principal color of Joy-Sparks of the Gods. Against this creamy white background, two perfectly delineated rectangles of red and green, looser patches of yellow and teal of the same size, and a motley assortment of brushstrokes in a rainbow of colors, are choreographed into a dazzling dance across the surface of the painting. Gestural strokes combine with drips and thick, staccato paint to create a mosaic of polychromatic textures that emerge and recede. Painted only two years before the artist’s death in 1966, Joy-Sparks of the Gods is the synthesis of a lifetime’s worth of experimenting with color and thinking in paint.
Described by fellow artist and curator, Walter Darby Bannard, “as one of the great geniuses of painting in our time” (D. Bannard, Hans Hofmann, exh. cat. Washington, D.C.: Hirshhorn Museum, 1976), and lauded by critic Clement Greenberg, “Hofmann’s name continues to be the one that springs to mind when asked who, among all recent painters in this country, deserves most to be called a master in the full sense of the word” (C. Greenberg, “Hans Hofmann, Paris: Editions Georges Fall, 1961), many would argue that Hofmann didn’t come to maturity as an artist until well into his mid-fifties. After Hofmann settled in New York City in 1932 and opening the Hans Hofmann School of Art there in 1934, the “accumulated wisdom of decades of making and teaching art” began to produce a new kind of abstraction (D. Bannard, ibid.) Central to the artist’s investigations is the idea of the “push and pull” theory of color to achieve a sense of depth and perspective. As the artist said, “Depth, in a pictorial, plastic sense, is not created by the arrangement of objects one after another toward a vanishing point, in the sense of the Renaissance perspective,” he remarked, “but on the contrary ... by the creation of forces in the sense of push and pull” (H. Hofmann, “The Search for the Real in the Visual Arts,” in J. Yohe (ed.), Hans Hofmann, New York, 2002, p. 46).
An erudite student of the masters of the early twentieth century, Hofmann learned from Matisse an exuberant use of color that dared to stray beyond the palette of reality into acid-tinged greens, sun-saturated yellows and the deepest of reds. From Picasso and Braque during their analytical Cubist phase, he learned to fracture space into planes to depict three-dimensional reality in motion from multiple perspectives as one. Always beginning with what Hofmann called “a visual ensemble” or staged scenarios in his studio such as a still life arrangement, Hofmann would replace the Cubist fragments of space with planes of color, carefully chosen to interact spatially. Clement Greenberg noticed the structural aspects of Hofmann’s paintings and compared them to Mondrian: “The very fact that it teeters on the edge of a kind of art like Mondrian’s is one of the things that gives it its climactic quality,” Greenberg wrote of Hofmann’s new painting style in this period, “that sums up the realizations of a whole epic of modernist art, and at the same time points toward the next one” (C. Greenberg, Hofmann, Paris, 1961, p. 38). Noting how cool colors recede into the canvas to create an artificial sense of depth (the pull of Hofmann’s color theory) and warm colors seemed to “push out” of the surface of the canvas, Hofmann selected colors to enhance these effects. The result is one in which colors undulate and create a sense of space, volume, and dimensionality without relying on perspective or modeling and without having to depict reality. As Hofmann said, “An artist must look to nature for the essence of space—but appearance must be thoroughly understood. Space was never a static, inert thing, but alive, and its life can be felt in the rhythm in which everything in a visual ensemble exists.” (H. Hofmann quoted by E. de Kooning in “Hans Hofmann Paints a Picture,” ArtNews, Feb. 1950).
The developments Hofmann made in the realm of abstraction are in and of themselves notable. That he translated and codified these pictorial experiments into theories which he taught at art schools in Munich, Berkeley, Los Angeles, New York City, and Provincetown, Massachusetts meant that his ideas seeded the fertile minds of an entire generation of artists who would grow into the Abstract Expressionists and Color Field painters in their own maturity. Such artists include Louise Nevelson and Alfred Jensen, at the Schule fur Bildenes Kunst (School of Fine Arts) in Munich. In this way, Hofmann is the bridge between the Fauvism of Henri Matisse, the space of Cubism, the structure of de Stijl and the Abstract Expressionism of Joan Mitchell and Lee Krasner, and the color field paintings of Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland.
Described by fellow artist and curator, Walter Darby Bannard, “as one of the great geniuses of painting in our time” (D. Bannard, Hans Hofmann, exh. cat. Washington, D.C.: Hirshhorn Museum, 1976), and lauded by critic Clement Greenberg, “Hofmann’s name continues to be the one that springs to mind when asked who, among all recent painters in this country, deserves most to be called a master in the full sense of the word” (C. Greenberg, “Hans Hofmann, Paris: Editions Georges Fall, 1961), many would argue that Hofmann didn’t come to maturity as an artist until well into his mid-fifties. After Hofmann settled in New York City in 1932 and opening the Hans Hofmann School of Art there in 1934, the “accumulated wisdom of decades of making and teaching art” began to produce a new kind of abstraction (D. Bannard, ibid.) Central to the artist’s investigations is the idea of the “push and pull” theory of color to achieve a sense of depth and perspective. As the artist said, “Depth, in a pictorial, plastic sense, is not created by the arrangement of objects one after another toward a vanishing point, in the sense of the Renaissance perspective,” he remarked, “but on the contrary ... by the creation of forces in the sense of push and pull” (H. Hofmann, “The Search for the Real in the Visual Arts,” in J. Yohe (ed.), Hans Hofmann, New York, 2002, p. 46).
An erudite student of the masters of the early twentieth century, Hofmann learned from Matisse an exuberant use of color that dared to stray beyond the palette of reality into acid-tinged greens, sun-saturated yellows and the deepest of reds. From Picasso and Braque during their analytical Cubist phase, he learned to fracture space into planes to depict three-dimensional reality in motion from multiple perspectives as one. Always beginning with what Hofmann called “a visual ensemble” or staged scenarios in his studio such as a still life arrangement, Hofmann would replace the Cubist fragments of space with planes of color, carefully chosen to interact spatially. Clement Greenberg noticed the structural aspects of Hofmann’s paintings and compared them to Mondrian: “The very fact that it teeters on the edge of a kind of art like Mondrian’s is one of the things that gives it its climactic quality,” Greenberg wrote of Hofmann’s new painting style in this period, “that sums up the realizations of a whole epic of modernist art, and at the same time points toward the next one” (C. Greenberg, Hofmann, Paris, 1961, p. 38). Noting how cool colors recede into the canvas to create an artificial sense of depth (the pull of Hofmann’s color theory) and warm colors seemed to “push out” of the surface of the canvas, Hofmann selected colors to enhance these effects. The result is one in which colors undulate and create a sense of space, volume, and dimensionality without relying on perspective or modeling and without having to depict reality. As Hofmann said, “An artist must look to nature for the essence of space—but appearance must be thoroughly understood. Space was never a static, inert thing, but alive, and its life can be felt in the rhythm in which everything in a visual ensemble exists.” (H. Hofmann quoted by E. de Kooning in “Hans Hofmann Paints a Picture,” ArtNews, Feb. 1950).
The developments Hofmann made in the realm of abstraction are in and of themselves notable. That he translated and codified these pictorial experiments into theories which he taught at art schools in Munich, Berkeley, Los Angeles, New York City, and Provincetown, Massachusetts meant that his ideas seeded the fertile minds of an entire generation of artists who would grow into the Abstract Expressionists and Color Field painters in their own maturity. Such artists include Louise Nevelson and Alfred Jensen, at the Schule fur Bildenes Kunst (School of Fine Arts) in Munich. In this way, Hofmann is the bridge between the Fauvism of Henri Matisse, the space of Cubism, the structure of de Stijl and the Abstract Expressionism of Joan Mitchell and Lee Krasner, and the color field paintings of Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland.