HANS HOFMANN Renate Series HANS HOFMANN: THE RENATE SERIES HANS HOFMANN o > THE RENATE SERIES LU CC < U- o LU CO Z < o 0- o DC (- LU LU I I- Published 1972. All rights reserved Designed by Peter Oldenburg Color photography by Malcolm Varon Photograph of Hans Hofmann by Wilfrid M. Zogbaum Printed in West Germany by Bruder Hartmann, Berlin Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 72-81727 International Standard Book Number: 0-87099-119-1 * ;r Acknowledgments In his last year Hans Hofmann assembled the nine paintings of the Renate Series and dedicated the series to his young wife. All the paintings were done in 1965. It was his intention that they be kept together. Thus we can safely conclude that, from his view­ point, the series stands as an esthetic testament. We are proud that these important works will enter the Museum's collection, and we are grateful to Renate Hofmann for the spirit of generosity she has shown toward us. I herewith thank Douglas Dillon, President of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, whose generosity made this publication possible. I also thank Andre Emmerich and Robert Miller of the Andre Emmerich Gallery for their assistance; Robert Warshaw, Robert Hoenigsburg, Robert Barclay, and Mai L. Barasch, all of whom helped to further this project; Christopher Scott, who helped me with the essay; and Kay Bear- man, Penelope Beck, and Lynn Duryea of the Department of Twentieth-Century Art, delightful and effective colleagues all. HENRY GELDZAHLER, Curator Twentieth-Century Art October 1972 185356 The Renate Series America nows suffers spiritual poverty, and art must come more fully into American life before her leisure can become culture. We are connected with our own age if we recognize ourselves in relation to outside events; and we have grasped its spirit when we influence the future.1 Hans Hofmann was a unique figure in American painting as it developed after World War II. Having his first one-man show as a mature artist at the age of sixty, he was a man the full measure of whose genius had remained unproven for an astonishingly long time, even in comparison to the younger American painters of the postwar years who struggled for more than a decade to achieve a level of confidence that com­ manded attention. Although Hofmann's personal triumph was stimulated and fed by the upsurge of creativity that became known as the abstract expressionist revolution, he remained somewhat disassociated from abstract expressionism as a movement. But he cherished his association with the artists themselves because he had been inspired by their energy and high ambition and because their community provided him with a chance to share his insights. With France's failure to produce a new generation of revolutionary painters after the war, it was possible to see NewYork as having replaced Paris as the center of the modernist movement. The new impressiveness of American painting has been linked with the facts that the founders of the NewYork school had evolved their styles out of cubism and surrealism; that they had been inspired by the European modernists who spent the war years in NewYork; that the scale and "overall" quality in the work of Jackson Pollock and Barnett Newman, along with the common practice of painting formal subjects in series, were inspired by what was at the time a radical apprecia­ tion of Monet's later painting; that Newman, Mark Rothko, and Adolph Gottlieb learn­ ed much from the work of Milton Avery and his striking use of Matisse's example. However, American art of the decades following the war can also be seen as something other than simply an extension of the modernist art of the earlier part of the century. Irrespective of their indebtedness to French modernism, Pollock, Rothko, Gottlieb, and eventually Newman won international respect for having painted visionary abstractions that marked an abrupt discontinuance of the use of numerous modernist conventions. And the wall-sized canvases painted in New York in the postwar years simply do not look as if they belong to a tradition continuous with Monet's waterlilies or Matisse's late cut-outs. With the exception of Willem de Kooning and Hofmann, the major postwar American painters have pictured disem­ bodied fields of vision by painting frontal views, without focusing on specific objects, or at least without giving objects what might be called, by current standards of repre­ sentation, a specific identity. The indistinct subject matter of these paintings has been based on one or a combination of such traditional images as dramatic ex­ panses, fields or upsurges of energy, glowing or smoldering orbs suspended in space, ethereal cloudscapes, turbulent seascapes, columns of monumental height, and veiled personages. French modernist painting, on the other hand, emphasized materiality, or in the extreme, physical beings, objects, and surfaces seen in a con­ trolled light. In contrast, postwar American painting has most often sought to picture visions of the sublime. By using the surrealist-derived technique of landscape ab­ straction, the technique that came to them most naturally in their study of European modernism, postwar American painters revived and refined the romantic imagery common to English, German, and American landscape painting of the nineteenth century, a tradition that continued into their own childhoods in the storybook illustra­ tion of Howard Pyle, Maxfield Parrish, and others. Thus, when we look at the work of the abstract expressionists, in addition to citing the evidence of their modernist train­ ing and the ways in which they transformed certain modernist techniques, it is useful to note that they were heirs as well to the Anglo-German tradition, long since aban­ doned, of romantic landscape painting. Throughout his course as artist and teacher, Hofmann was devoted to the task of adapting the principles of French modernism to the ways of seeing and the means of representation that were his heritage as an artist born and raised in Germany. For him, settling in New York was a decisive factor in the flowering of this work. On the 8 one hand, the success of the New York School justified his native vision in opposition to the overwhelming prestige of the essentially alien vision of the French. On the other hand, Hofmann's successful incorporation of the lessons of the school of Paris, namely cubist structure and fauve color, made him a highly respected elder among American artists and students for whom the emulation of French modernism had proved so frustrating. This French modern tradition was so inimical to their mentality and style that the most daring of American artists had abandoned it in favor of a kind of painting that depended upon the grandeur of the sublime rather than on the art­ fully simple drawing-in-color of the French masters. Thus, New York presented Hof- man with three objectives: the bringing to fruition of his own work, teaching what he had learned and what he continued to learn, and seeing that his work was worthy of standing both in affirmation of and criticism of the new American abstraction. The classes Hofmann taught in New York and in Provincetown were a great suc­ cess in their time; he was a much respected and sought after teacher.2 Hofmann had opened his first school in Munich in 1915. From then on, through the years of learning and maturing, his formal teaching sustained him until 1958 when his work was receiv­ ing enough exposure to make the gallery and museum his forum. Teaching had al­ lowed him to develop at his own pace and on his own terms, free from commercial pressures. Most importantly, the experience of preparing lectures, answering ques­ tions, and criticizing students' work had helped him to discover his feelings and to form his thoughts. But when Hofmann finally reached the point of outlining the fun­ damentals of his method of painting, it could be seen that once his precepts attained a level of utter clarity and simplicity, they were subject to being adopted wholesale by his admirers as the ideological basis of a new movement that Hofmann would then appear to be leading. Had this happened, his position would no longer have been suf­ ficiently flexible to allow him to see his own painting through to the stage he envis­ aged as its final development. As soon as Hofmann realized this, his teaching must suddenly have presented itself as an obstruction, perhaps even a threatening activity. In 1957 he wrote: "As a teacher I approach my students purely with the human desire to free them from all scholarly inhibitions. And I tell them, 'painters must speak through 9 paint-not through words.' "3 Hofmann was about to apply the full implication of this lesson to his own work. During the 1960s great excitement was generated by what younger artists were pro­ ducing in reaction to the dominant abstract expressionism of the '50s. Color-field painting, the geometric abstraction of Frank Stella and his followers, and pop art were each hailed as an alternative to the mannered action of painting of de Kooning's emulators among the second generation of abstract expressionists. Partially obscured at the time was the pre-eminence of the late masterworks done in the early '60s by artists whose careers stretched back beyond even the abstract expressionism of the '40s and '50s. In the United States these were the memorable achievements of David Smith in sculpture and Hans Hofmann in painting.4 American art of the first five years of the '60s may be best remembered for the late sculpture of a native American who monumentalized the cubist esthetic with an unprecedented boldness and clarity, and for the late canvases of a German-American who slowly painted his way to mastery through six decades of self-questioning.