In the catalogue essay for Hans Hofmann’s first solo exhibi- bewildering characteristics—random, subject-less marks; tion in the US at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, in disordered compositions; and a pronounced rejection of the summer of 1931, his former student Worth Ryder wrote: naturalism. Perhaps, then, Hofmann’s mastery of certain “This exhibition of Ho!man’s work, the first to be held in Modernist tropes—the Romantic artists’ embrace of their America, unfortunately contains none of his paintings. But in own subjectivity; the Cubist geometricizing and flattening these drawings, so small in size yet so vast in scope, the great- of three-dimensional objects; the Impressionist reliance on est achievements of modern art are in solution.”1 natural observation; and the Post-Impressionists’ incredulous On one hand, this statement serves to justify the exhi- attitude towards their own observations—all present and bition itself and its lack of paintings, the medium for which intermingling, led Ryder to conclude that the greatest Modernism in Solution Hofmann would be remembered. But Ryder’s assessment that achievements of Modern art were not merely present, but in these drawings “the greatest achievements of modern art are completely dissolved in the works shown at Haviland Hall. ANNA TOME in solution” uses the drawings to place Hofmann securely in a However, closer examination demonstrates how Hofmann Modernist lineage, an argument that is easily supported—but subverts these approaches, not just by integrating them, but o"en challenged—by the drawings themselves. by incorporating his own mysterious and seemingly mean- In the field of chemistry, the term “solution” refers to ingless marks—lines, dots, and squiggles that fill many of two or more substances uniformly mixed. To be in solution the landscapes and portraits but have no discernable symbol- indicates a discrete substance, or solute, (in this case the ism or pictorial significance. This essay posits that Hofmann greatest achievements of Modernism) completely dissolved made these marks by channeling his physical experience of into a solvent (Hofmann’s drawings). When completely in nature, subverting the Modernist devices of his day, and al- solution a solute becomes invisible and, in theory, irreversibly lowing Ryder’s suggestion of Modern art in solution to also mixed. While certain achievements of Modernism are indeed hint at new approaches to the artistic process. uniformly dispersed throughout the drawings, the brevity of While he may have been the first, Ryder was not the last Ryder’s statement and the drawings themselves allow room to cast Hofmann as a consummate Modernist. In a 1967 obit- to infer that these achievements are dissolved into a new solu- uary in the New York Times, Hilton Kramer wrote: “Hofmann tion, or mode of image-making. The same drawings include was, above all, a codifier of the modernist tradition—while

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remaining an exponent of romantic expressionism. Con- before World War I—a crucial chronological detail when con- many of the developments he heralded were not new.4 twentieth-century Modernism, and it informed both the ceptually, he availed himself of all the modern conventions, sidering whether Modernism is “in solution” in Hofmann’s Hofmann himself was aware of this. In an unpublished subject and the execution of the drawings Hofmann’s exhib- and indeed though of the same generation as Matisse and works circa 1931. Kramer rightly asserts that at this stage of and undated note, Hofmann wrote to himself, “Motto: An ited at the Legion of Honor and Haviland Hall. The land- Picasso—could only realize his ambitions late in life, when his career, Hofmann’s practice is less resolved than that of his Artist is never the product of a teacher but the product of a scapes made in Europe were likely created en plein air when these conventions proved to be susceptible to his own vigor- peers. Indeed, it would not be until the interwar and postwar cultural atmosphere to which he creatively contributes.” Key Ho!man took his students to locations outside Munich each ous programs of pedagogic distillation.”2 decades, really, that his concentrated approach—what Irving to the thinking from which both modern art and Hofmann summer from 1916 to 1930. Similarly, the landscapes made on It is interesting that Kramer too used a term from chemis- Sandler called a “synthesis of dualities,”3 referring to the rec- emerged in Germany at the turn of the century was the con- his arrival in California may have been made by the roadside, try—“distillation”—perhaps a nod to Hofmann’s background onciliation of three-dimensional forms in nature with the cept of Gestaltung. The artist uses the term in the prospectus or from the passenger seat of a car. working as a scientist and engineer for the German Ministry two-dimensionality of painting in Hofmann’s work—begins for his first Schule für Bildende Kunst (1916), calling for an In his text “Nature and Art: Controversy and Misconcep- of the Interior until the age of nineteen. To consider the artist fully to cohere and flourish. “expressive Gestaltung.”5 Gestaltung, weakly translated as tion,” Hofmann wrote: “Nature’s purpose in relation to the as a scientist, deploying restless experimentation, modeling Returning to the sixty-six works on paper—mainly por- “composition” or “design,” referred to a work whose overall visual arts is to provide stimulus—not imitation. . . . Nature hypotheses to be tested, taught, and reshaped over time, is traits and landscapes—from the Legion of Honor and a similar idea transcended the combined sum of its parts. Predicated on provides this stimulus through its creative behavior. From its an analogy well suited to Hofmann. But Kramer takes a po- show of works on paper, staged concurrently at the Haviland the distinction between the inner, formative world of the art- ceaseless urge to create springs all life—all movement and sition slightly di!erent from Ryder’s. To “distill” is to extract Hall at University of California Berkeley, where Hofmann ist and the observable world outside, the concept allowed the rhythm—time and light, color and mood.”7 This declaration a pure essence, and Kramer proposes that Hofmann’s puri- had been invited to teach that year, it is helpful to consid- artist freedom to experiment with representational e!ects and shows how deeply the Romantic artists’ belief in nature as fied version of Modernism, achieved through his secondary er them first in the context of the 1920s and early 1930s. By composition. As Hofmann explained in the 1916 prospectus, primary inspiration informed Hofmann’s art. He believed but focused career as an educator, was ahead of its time, and 1931, nearly two decades a"er the first Armory Show in New “a perfect a"erimage of reality” would eliminate the possibili- nature’s brilliant, self-sustaining creativity to be both stimulus only reached its full potential later in life. Perhaps Kramer was York, Modernism broadly defined a range of artistic move- ty for Gestaltung, for if artists are too focused on imitating the and model for the artist’s project, and saw its irreducible com- picking up where Ryder le" o!—while the greatest achieve- ments that explored the artist’s subjectivity as it related to outside world, they cannot find their own unique inspiration. plexity as something to emulate. ments of Modernism were in solution in Hofmann’s work of the medium of painting—especially Analytic and Synthetic True art is the result of a highly considered, designed, system of Hofmann’s emphasis on nature comes directly from Paul the early 1930s (and further advanced by his concurrent ped- Cubism, Expressionism, and Fauvism—and was already wide- pictorial meaning, whose driving force is not purely intellec- Cézanne. View of St. Tropez (1929) seems to evoke the Post- agogical activity), they had become distilled and codified by ly exposed to the public and by now characterized as the tual, but inflected also with emotion.6 Impressionist’s acute, even uncanny, attunement to his the artist at the time of his death in 1966. zeitgeist. In terms of the Haviland Hall and Legion of Honor Art should not represent reality, but fuse individual ex- landscape subject, as well as his doubts about his ability to Kramer is more specific than Ryder, noting Hofmann’s works on paper, other Modernist developments such as the pression with an overall compositional coherence. The role of render it. The mountains are pulled apart and flattened, and indebtedness to the Romantic tradition, an a#nity duly cor- role of nature as both inspiration and instigation for art-mak- Gestaltung in Hofmann’s practice is tied to his commitment the negative space is filled with random dots, nullifying any roborated by the artist’s essays, lectures, and theories on the ing, the concept of artistic subjectivity, and the exploration of to nature in art-making. The primacy of the inner world of illusion of depth. In his 1945 essay “Cézanne’s Doubt,” profound importance of nature and the expression of the gestalt, all prevalent themes in Hofmann’s pedagogical mate- the artist in no way meant that Hofmann and his modern- Maurice Merleau-Ponty argues that Cézanne intensely self. Kramer also places Hofmann in the same generation rials from the time, had solidified into convention. While the ist predecessors discounted the observable world. Indeed, doubted his ability to accurately perceive (and therefore as Matisse and Picasso—all three of whom were in Paris Bay Area exhibitions introduced Hofmann’s work to the US, nature played a paramount role in late nineteenth- and early represent) what he saw—his discrete mental, physical, and

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emotional experiences of Mont St. Victoire, for example—and air—if understood from a phenomenological standpoint—al- wider context—by correlating language and image. “This re- Cézanne’s very directive by pursuing its logical end. Perhaps he wanted to articulate this doubt in paint.8 lowed him to explore directly the bounds of his perception by lation to what the picture is named a!er, to what transcends he is instinctively playing with Benjamin’s idea that an image Merleau-Ponty turns doubt into rebellion when he later testing his physical ability to represent it. the marks, is what is created by the composition.” The picture ultimately exists in the mind. And the quickness of the marks argues in Eye and Mind that “only the painter is entitled to There is another way in which the stray marks, squiggles, is understood by its name. Indeed, certain drawings in the se- support the theory that he was doing this by experimenting look at everything without being obliged to appraise what he and lines Hofmann employed in the drawings of this period ries would be impossible to identify were it not for the titling, with the correlation between the immediate gestures of his sees.”9 In other words, he arrogates to painters the freedom undermine the familiar methods of Expressionist and Cubist St. Tropez, Vue sur les Montagnes de St. Raphael [IX/4] (1929, hand and what his eyes could see. to automatically process what they perceive onto the canvas painting and drawing. They are not necessarily composition- plate 16), for example.13 But even with the title, Hofmann’s Given these particularities, the drawings shown at or the page without analyzing it. He continues, “my body al, and at times seem to work against pictorial coherence. markings are di"cult to corral. Haviland Hall and the Legion of Honor seem to be work- moves itself,” suggesting that the painter’s hand may move of Sometimes they absent-mindedly fill negative space, as in the For Benjamin, language is a medium that transcends and ing towards a slightly di#erent relationship between mark its own volition. In many of Hofmann’s landscapes there are Saint-Tropez landscapes (1929), and, at other times, they’re infiltrates the picture, adding a layer of meaning. The marks and composition—and between form and meaning—than lines and passages of dots that seem stray, populating the neg- meant to suggest three dimensionality—albeit unreliably— make up the picture, whose composition solicits a title, which that established by Hofmann’s peers circa 1931. The greatest ative space, but referring to nothing, as if Hofmann’s hand such as the dots on the lapel collar in the portrait of Mimi corroborates its subject for the viewer. The idea that an im- achievements of Modernism are most certainly in solution moved rapidly across the page, his eyes seeing the shape and (1929). age is ultimately activated in the mind, as opposed to on the here, and Hofmann is quite literally agitating them into in- form of the undulating hills and cresting waves, and his body The di"culties raised by Hofmann’s abstract dots call to page, relates back to the fundamentals of vision that Cézanne, decipherable particles of ink and graphite. Other contradic- automatically—not naturalistically—recording it. By opening mind Walter Benjamin’s essay “Paintings, Signs, and Marks” Hofmann’s hero, was so interested in. In Cézanne’s letters to tions—incomplete linear perspective, inconsistent three- his practice to phenomenological experimentation of this (1913–16),10 in which he asserts that all marks are absolute, an Émile Bernard he writes: “Treat nature by means of the cyl- dimensional objects and spaces, and fluctuating density and kind, Hofmann is taking a modernist nature-as-inspiration absolute mark being one that bears no inherent meaning.11 inder, the sphere, the cone, everything brought into proper thickness of line—support the overall idea that Hofmann is approach to art-making and turning it into one of nature-as- Benjamin explores the contradictory relationship between perspective so that each side of an object or a plane is directed synthesizing his personalized observations with an unprece- impetus. Instead of trying to negotiate nature’s vastness with the meaning of an image and the absolute, or meaningless, towards a central point.”14 Cézanne believed that translating dented, non-representational system of marks. With these sub- the finitude of a work of art, Hofmann is using his experience marks that compose it: “The actual problem of painting can nature onto the canvas required approximating it into objects tle transgressions, Hofmann is breaking down the tried and of nature to impel the creation of a new kind of picture-mak- be discerned in the statement that the picture is indeed a set the eye could perceive as having depth and perspective. true tropes of early twentieth-century Modernism, stirring ing. In this sense, what Worth Ryder may have been referring of marks; that conversely, the marks in the narrower sense ex- Hofmann seems to be pushing all of these ideas further. them into an experimental solution of his own. It seems that to as the greatest achievements of Modernism (mentioned ist only in the picture…”12 The dynamic between mark and The cubes, tubes, and cylinders little resemble the sunlit me- Hofmann, who would become most famous as painter and above) are alloyed into a new technique. picture is dissolved by Hofmann, who allows his marks to dis- dieval villas and lapping waves of Saint-Tropez, and the land- pedagogue—and who was first trained as a scientist—found When Hofmann insists in his 1916 Schule für Bildende sociate themselves from the composition, and therefore from scape is o!en so exaggerated it doesn’t seem that he is search- works on paper to be the ideal lab for experimenting with the Kunst prospectus that “true art cannot stand in the a!erimage the subject of the picture—a further subversion of the devices ing for the purer methods of Cézanne but rather, questioning established ideas of his day. of reality,” he is not just referring to the gestalt of an image. of Modernist art around this time. Hofmann is interested in his own subjectivity just as much Benjamin resolves the dualistic relationship between as he is in his subject, and the practice of working en plein absolute mark and composition by placing the picture in a

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N O T E S 1 Worth Ryder, “Hans Hofmann,” in Hans Hofmann Exhibition, exh. cat. (San Francisco, CA: Palace of the Legion of Honor, 1931), np. 2 Hilton Kramer, “Hofmann in Perspective,” The New York Times, January 29, 1967. 3 Ir ving Sandler, “Hans Hofmann: The Dialectical Master,” in Hans Hofmann, ed. Cynthia Goodman, exh. cat. (New York, NY: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1990), 77–97. 4 In Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition (New York, NY: Harper and Row, 1975), Robert Rosenblum argues that Emile Nolde, Franz Marc, and Vasily Kandinsky, the latter a key influence on Hofmann, were inadvertently reviving the Romantic movement of the early nine- teenth century. Specifically, Rosenblum cites Kandinsky’s revival of Symbolism and apocalyptic upheaval as direct descendants of early German Romanticism. Communion with nature was a primary mode of creation for the German and English Romantic painters, and Hofmann takes up this practice with his Schule für Bildende Kunst. 5 Hofmann ’s use of the word Gestaltung at this moment reflects another current in the German cultural atmosphere of this time: art education’s shi! in focus from producing artists-as-cra!smen to training artists-as-creators, a change best exemplified by the rise of the Bauhaus School. By 1916, when Hofmann was using the term Gestaltung to refer to an expressiveness of artistic form, it comprised a complex network of meanings, including the idea that the artist invents (rather than imitates)—and that nature itself may be a divine invention. 6 This concept is further developed in Kandinsky’s Point and Line to Plane (1926), in which the author breaks down abstraction into units: a point, which may accrue to create a line, and whose movement in space generates a plane. The interconnectedness—o!en spiritual and indubitably personal—of each requisite part is what creates meaning, or an “expressive Gestaltung.” 7 Hans Hofmann “Nature and Art: Controversy and Misconceptions,” 26 October 1957. In New Paintings by Hans Hofmann, exh. brochure (New York: Kootz Gallery, 1958), n.p. 8 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt,” Sense and Non-Sense (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964). 9 Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” The Primacy of Perception (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. 1964) 159–190. 10 W alter Benjamin, “Painting, Signs, and Marks,” Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 1: 1913-1926 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 83–86. 11 Ibid., 84. “The contrast between the mark and the absolute mark does not exist, for the mark is always absolute and resembles nothing else in its manifestation.” 12 Ibid., 85. 13 The dots, squiggles, and lines could also be an intuitive rebellion against the artistic devices of his day, with Hofmann unwittingly foreshadow- ing the unbridled mark-making of Abstract Expressionism. 14 P aul Cézanne to Émile Bernard, Aix-en-Provence, 15 April 1904, “Letters from Paul Cézanne to Émile Bernard,” The Art History Project. Online.

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