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Renate Series

HANS HOFMANN: THE RENATE SERIES

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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

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;r Acknowledgments In his last year Hans Hofmann assembled the nine 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 , 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

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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 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 that became known as the abstract expressionist revolution, he remained somewhat disassociated from 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 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 and ; 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 and , 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 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 , 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 painted in 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 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 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 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 of and his followers, and 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 these were the memorable achievements of 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. The extraordinarily high quality of Hofmann's best paintings, many of which he did in his last decade, is becoming increasingly clear. These works are far from being used up as images; they remain as dense and complex as when we first saw them, but they are beginning to look more and more like Hofmanns. It is now easier to rec­ ognize the qualities of style and personality that bind the individual works together. Yet it will be some time before we understand their full historical significance. This is one indication of Hofmann's greatness. It is now clear that we need make no apolo­ gies for his practice of painting a variety of subjects in a variety of manners within any given year. Artists of persuasive power such as Newman, Rothko, Gottlieb, and , with signature images perhaps more recognizable (although their styles were by no means easily arrived at), achieved a finality, a look, in a way that Hofmann resisted. Hofmann's style is well described as painterly abstraction, but among the artists whose work placed them in this category, he alone knew from the beginning that despite the soundness of the new possibilities that had been opened within abstraction, it remained true that if the act of painting is to be self-renewing, it

10 must be continually inspired by the observation of nature. Yet the depiction of nature as the subject of painting is not a literal matter. The artist's intelligence and sensi­ bility intervene, as do the inherent laws of picture-making. The revolution in postwar American painting was based on a relatively narrow understanding of artistic events in Europe that Hofmann had witnessed at first hand, and on works whose principles he had so thoroughly practiced and criticized as to make them identical with his own experience. As a consequence he could afford to paint in disregard of what New Yorkers at the time considered to be historical im­ peratives, and he could do so with the full assurance that he would eventually be ac­ corded his just place in the broader history of in the twentieth century. After a struggle of many years Hofmann arrived at a fully achieved, final manner in his eighth decade. The period from 1958, when he closed his school, until his death in 1966, was the most productive of his career. All the Renate paintings were done in 1965, his last full year of production, and they may be seen as the final summation of the themes, thoughts, and stylistic inventions with which Hofmann was so success­ fully concerned in the last years of his life. It was not until the mid '50s, with paintings like Le Gilotin, 1953, and Fragrance, 1956, that Hofmann found the elements of his radiantly successful and personal style. During this decade, and especially in its final years, he forcefully posited the several manners in which he was to paint his most masterful pictures. That Hofmann wished to emphasize the various ways in which he painted is evident in the range of style of the nine Renate paintings. Rhapsody, with its large rectangles of purple, red, and blue that establish the picture plane and control the turbulence and spatial depth that lie visually behind them, is a masterpiece in Hofmann's best-known manner. Ac­ tually, six of the paintings employ the device of the rectangle, though not all are domi­ nated by it. Little Cherry, the other large painting in the series, is a consummate ex­ ample of the stained painting, sometimes thinly painted in its totality, here, with one color used thickly and thinly, both floated and clotted on a large expanse of . Lonely Journey, a lovely smaller painting, perfectly melds five differently colored sur-

11 face rectangles with a stained brown underlayer. The whole is brought to energetic life by a thick line of red orange squeezed directly from the tube onto the canvas. Summer and Lust and Delight, as their titles indicate, are open and joyous. In Summer, the more structured of the two, the space and the surface are exactly defined with rectangles of warm, light color. Lust and Delight, also with pink as the dominant color, is less regimented; the rectangles are set at an angle rather than echoing the sides of the canvas, and the paint is spattered as well as brushed. The miracle in these paintings is as much in the artist's sure sense of when to desist as it is in their fullness and richness. They are never thin or empty, nor are they ever fussed over. Hofmann knew when to leave a painting at the moment of greatest free­ dom. William Seitz, in his monograph on the artist,5 quotes Hofmann as saying, "At the time of making a picture I want not to know what I'm doing; a picture should be made with feeling, not with knowing." This modern concern with the act of picture-making, the processes of the art, is something that Hofmann always emphasized in his teach­ ing. If you are making a picture of anything it must first be an accurate picture of your feelings; if it is also an abstracted landscape, still life, or personage, that is only the obvious content. Every mark the artist puts down reveals something of himself. In a moving passage on the content of art, his art in particular, Hofmann states the case for the human content in so-called : "In this life an intuitive artist dis­ covers the emotive and vital substance which makes a . In the passage of time, the outward message of a work may lose its initial meaning; the communicative power of its emotive and vital substance, however, will stay alive as long as the work is in existence. The life-giving zeal in a work of art is deeply imbedded in its quali­ tative substance. The spirit in a work is synonymous with its quality. The Real in art never dies, because its nature is predominantly spiritual."6 In Hofmann's paintings, every mark must be seen and felt in relation to every other mark. Nothing is left to chance; if accidents occur, they may be left, modified, or covered, but all must be willed. The automatic gesture is of the greatest value, but it must be judged by the eye, the mind, and the heart. This is Hofmann's greatness when

12 the work goes well. Everything he learned in a lifetime of painting is available to him at the moment of concentration. Thus, many of his paintings may depart from the same premise (such as the rectangle as organizer of the surface, stained or splat­ tered paint, or mosaics of thick, juxtaposed brushstrokes), but each time a painting is made the processes by which it is constructed are rethought and renewed. In his best work Hofmann never translates from one picture to another, or from one year to another. Every time he says something well it is for the first time. Nothing is ever stale, serial, or repeated. Hofmann wrote: "Every work of art represents a new Reality which exists nowhere else outside of its own existence. It is always a 'spiritual' reality, and as such it represents another-a new-pearl in the string of human cultural docu­ mentation. It comes into existence by growth like everything in nature. A work of art is documented by a common denominator. This common denominator is the per­ sonality of the artist—his soul and his mind, his sensibility, and his temperament. Through it 'experience' is summarized into pictorial language—that is to say, into a pictorial message. This message is of deepest concern to the artist. It will be a pic­ torial formulation of his ethical and esthetical creeds with which to participate, as an artist, in the cultural justification of his time. 'Art for Art's sake' is its antithesis."7 I first met Hofmann in Provincetown in the summer of 1959. Subsequently I came to know him well. He always struck me as confident and joyous, and the greatness of the man was in his ability to project these qualities in his paintings. His personality impressed upon me a lesson I had never learned in art-history courses: that there is a continuity between an artist's character and his work. An honest man paints honest pictures. A man who fools himself about his message and the difficulties of transmitting it paints slick and empty pictures. Hofmann epitomized the moral heroism of the artist; he had struggled for decades to arrive at solutions to painting problems and possibilities that must have seemed to him virtually irreconcilable in his earlier years. The joy and force and confidence of the man I came to know in the 1960s (remember that Hofmann was eighty years old when I met him) were the attributes of an artist who had his genius, turbulent and shining as it was, under full control and at his command. It is these qualities that are evident in the Renate Series. H. G.

13 Notes 1 • Hans Hofmann, Search for the Real, and Other Essays, pp. 48, 60.

2. A partial list of Hofmann's students: , Nicholas Carone, , , , Michael Goldberg, Robert Goodenough, , Alfred Jen­ sen, Allan Kaprow, , George McNeil, Conrad Marca-Relli, Marisol, Jan Muller, , George Ortman, Stephen Pace, Milton Resnick, , Ludwig San­ ders, Richard Stankiewicz, Wilfrid Zogbaum.

3. Hans Hofmann, "Statement," It Is, A Magazine for Abstract Art, Winter-Spring, 1959, p. 10.

4. An equivalent figure in the School of Paris was Joan Miro; his astonishing paintings of the '60s were the most youthful, ambitious, and successful of the decade on the Continent- paintings avowedly indebted, incidentally, to the freedom of Miro's American colleagues.

5. William Seitz, Hans Hofmann, p.48.

6. Hans Hofmann, Search lor the Real, p. 54.

7. University of Illinois, Contemporary American Painting, Champaign-Urbana, 1952 (including statements by Hofmann), p. 200. Biography Hans Hofmann was born March 21, 1880, in Weissenberg, Bavaria; he died in February 17, 1966. He was the second son of five children, three boys and two girls. His father was a government official. His mother came from a family of brewers and vintners. In 1886 the Hofmann family moved to Munich. Here, Hofmann attended public schools and then a Gymnasium, where he excelled in science and mathematics. He also studied music, playing the violin, piano, and organ. During this period he began to draw. At the same time, pursuing his scientific bent, he made several experimental inventions, among them an electromagnetic comptometer. Throughout his childhood and after the move to Munich, Hofmann spent much time on his grandparents' grain farm, where he reveled in nature. In 1898, at the age of eighteen, he began to study painting at several Munich schools, going against his father's wishes that he follow his scientific proclivities. Willi Schwartz, one of his teachers, had been to Paris; he introduced young Hofmann to impressionism. In 1900 Hofmann met Miz Wolfegg. They were married in 1923. She died in 1963. In 1904, through the patronage of a Berlin department-store owner, Philip Freudenberg, Hofmann was able to go to Paris. Freudenberg's support con­ tinued until the outbreak of World War I. In Paris Hofmann attended classes at the Ecole de la Grande Chaumiere, where Matisse worked at sketching in the evenings. Hofmann met Braque and Picasso, became close friends with Delaunay and Pascin, and fully entered into the advanced art world of the place and period. He painted still lifes, landscapes, and portraits in the cubist style, many of which he sent to his patron in Berlin. All of these have been lost. In the winter of 1909, Matisse was given a show in Berlin by the dealer Paul Cas- sirer; he saw Freudenberg's Hofmanns and encouraged Cassirer to give Hofmann an exhibition, which he did in 1910. In the previous year Hofmann had also exhibited in Berlin, with the Neue Sezession. In 1915, kept out of the army by the aftereffects of a lung ailment, Hofmann opened an art school in Munich. It was a success from the start. For the next fifty-three years he supported himself primarily through his teaching. From 1922 to 1929 he took his students on painting trips in the summers: in 1922 to Tegern See, Bavaria; in 1924 to

15 Ragusa, Yugoslavia; in 1925, '26, and '27 to Capri; in 1928 and '29toSt.Tropez. In 1930, at the invitation of Worth Ryder, one of several American artists who stud­ ied with him in Munich, Hofmann taught at the summer session at the at Berkeley, where Ryder was Chairman of the Department of Art. Hofmann returned to Munich that winter, went back to California to teach at the Chouinard School of Art in Los Angeles in the spring, and was again at Berkeley in the summer of 1931. In August 1931 Hofmann had his first American exhibition: his drawings were shown at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. In 1932, re­ acting to the unfavorable political attitude toward artists and intellectuals, he closed the Munich school and taught for a season at the Art Students League in New York. In the autumn of 1934 Hofmann opened the Hans Hofmann School of Fine in New York; by the time of its closing in 1958 he was a respected and self-supporting Ameri­ can painter. From the summer of 1935 through the summer of 1958 he conducted a summer school in Provincetown, , which was also a great success. In 1965 Hofmann married Renate Schmitz. Hofmann's life story is perhaps better told through his one-man exhibitions in art galleries and museums that marked the stages of his maturity as an artist and the sophisticated public's appreciation of his achievement.

16 One-man Shows

1910 Paul Cassirer, Berlin

1931 California Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco (first U.S. exhibition; drawings)

1941 Isaac Delgado Museum of Art, New Orleans

1944 Art of This Century, New York (first exhibition in New York, arranged by ) (34 paintings of 1941 -44)

1945 Howard Putzel-67 Gallery, New York

1946 Mortimer Brandt Gallery, New York (arranged by ) American Contemporary Gallery, Hollywood, California

1947 Betty Parsons Gallery, New York Kootz Gallery, New York

Pittsburgh Arts and Crafts Center and Abstract Group of Pittsburgh

1948 Addision Gallery of American Art, Andover, Massachusetts (large retrospective)

1949 Kootz Gallery

1950 Kootz Gallery

1951 Kootz Gallery

1952 Kootz Gallery

1953 Kootz Gallery 1954 Kootz Gallery , Baltimore Museum of Fine Arts

1955 Kootz Gallery Bennington College, Bennington, Vermont (retrospective selected by )

17 1956 Art Alliance, Philadelphia (retrospective) Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey

1957 Kootz Gallery

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (retrospective)

1958 Kootz Gallery

1959 Kootz Gallery, Paintings of 1958, then Early Paintings (the latter selected by Clement Greenberg)

1960 Kootz Gallery

1961 Kootz Gallery 1962 Kootz Gallery Frankische Galerie am Marientor, Nuremberg (large retrospective exhibition; subsequently shown at Kolnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, and Kongresshalle, Berlin) Neue Galerie im Kiinstlerhaus, Rolf Becker, Munich (oils on paper, 1961-62)

1963 Kootz Gallery Santa Barbara Museum of Art Museum of , New York (retrospective)

1964 Kootz Gallery

1965 Kootz Gallery

1966 Kootz Gallery

1967 Andre Emmerich Gallery, New York

1968 Andre Emmerich Gallery

1969 Andre Emmerich Gallery, Hans Hofmann—Ten Major Works David Mirvish Gallery, Toronto Mackler Gallery, Philadelphia

1970 Andre Emmerich Gallery, Hans Hofmann—Paintings of the '40s, '50s, and '60s Waddington Galleries II, London The Katonah Gallery, Katonah, New York

18 1971 Andre Emmerich Gallery

1972 Andre Emmerich Gallery Harcus-Krakow Gallery, Boston Onnasch Gallery, Cologne Richard Grey Gallery, Chicago David Mirvish Gallery

19 Rhapsody

1 1965, oil on canvas, 84V4x60 /2 in.

Lonely Journey

1965, oil on canvas, 50x401/, in.

Little Cherry

1965, oil on canvas, 85V4x78V,in.

Legends of Distant Past Days

1965, oil on canvas, 4074x5074 in. 2£ ^Sffi^"3^mm^^^ mJ mm ^1 I iM •M Mm 4 ^V >'. t j IK r i ' ; • f 4 ^^ '* *lt • "" i

1y * T9H •iHi •^B : 1 *%Sk / mWk 4

at ••; -n^ •-^sWr,.. ^ Jfli • 1 '91 . 4J^ ^^. "VNHj

S Hi Heraldic Call

1965, oil on canvas, 6iy,x60y, in.

Profound Longing

1 1965, oil on canvas, 50 /, x40'/1sin.

Deep within the Ravine

1965, oil on canvas, 84'/, x 607, in.

Summer 1965, oil on canvas, 72x48 in. / Lust and Delight

1965, oil on canvas, 84y4x6074in. mure • tor *W • i. .

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Selected Bibliography MONOGRAPHS

Greenberg, Clement. Hofmann. Paris: Georges Fall, 1961. Hunter, Sam. Hans Hofmann. Introductory essay by , five essays by Hans Hofmann. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1963. Seitz, William C. Hans Hofmann. New York: , 1963. Wight, F.S.Hans Hofmann. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957.

WRITING BY THE ARTIST

Addison Gallery of American Art. Search for the Real and Other Essays. Introduction by Bartlett H.Hayes, Jr. Edited by Sarah T.Weeks and Bartlett H.Hayes, Jr. An- dover, Massachusettts, 1949. Arts and . "The Color Problem in Pure Painting-Its Creative Origin," February 1956. Bennington College Alumnae Quarterly. Fall 1955. (Hofmann is asked to explain his paintings).

ARTICLES

De Kooning, Elaine. "Hans Hofmann Paints a Picture," Art News, February 1950. Derriere le Miroir. January 1949. Contents: "A Salvo for Hans Hofmann," by ; "Hans Hofmann," by Peter Neagoe; "Hofmann ou la lumiere americaine," by Charles Estienne; "An Appreciation," by Tennessee Williams. Greenberg, Clement. Hans Hofmann: A Retrospective Exhibition of the Paintings of Hans Hofmann (catalogue). Bennington College, Bennington, Vermont, 1955. - "Hans Hofmann: Grand Old Rebel," Art News, January 1959. - "Hofmann's Early Abstract Paintings," in Hans Hofmann (catalogue). New York: Kootz Gallery, January 1959. Matter, Mercedes. "Hans Hofmann," Arts and Architecture, May 1946. Rosenberg, Harold. "Hans Hofmann: Nature into Action," Art News, May 1957. - "Hans Hofmann's Life Class," Portfolio and Art News Annual, Autumn 1969.

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