Artist Hans Hofmann Was Known for Art Full of Colors and Shapes Fresco
More than a unproblematic essay in praise of a great artist, this pays tribute to Hofmann's vast influence on American abstraction also as on Greenberg, himself. Unfortunately, the "omissions" that Greenberg mentions in his offset paragraph continue to this day. Hofmann the artist, as opposed to Hofmann the famous instructor, seems never to quite get hs due...
-- TF
H ANS H OFMANN'S Art is recognized increasingly equally a major fountainhead of way and ideas for the "new" American painting, notwithstanding its value, independent of its influence and of Hofmann's function as a teacher, is still the object of qualifications. His omission from the "New American Painting" show that The Museum of Modern Art sent to Europe (1958 - 59) is a case in indicate (an omission which did more to distort the picture than did the number of highly questionable inclusions). A proficient share of the arraign rests with the public of advanced art, which has its own kind of laziness and obtuseness, and unremarkably asks that a "hard" artist confine himself to a single readily identifiable manner before information technology will accept trouble with him. (Ane would retrieve that the exhilaration and satisfaction to be gotten from post-obit advanced fine art were propor-tionate to the endeavour of discrimination required, but about of those who do the post-obit do non seem to concur. Having accepted advanced fine art in principle, they want it to exist fabricated piece of cake within its own context, apparently.) But Hofmann himself is likewise to blame in some part-and actually, the more than excellence I find in his art the more I incline to shift the arraign toward him. The variety of manners and even of styles in which he works would conspire to deprive even the most sympathetic public of a articulate idea of his achievement. At the aforementioned time, such a variety of manners makes one doubtable an undue absorption in bug and challenges for their own sake. Or else that this artist likewise implicitly follows wherever his inventive fertility leads him instead of bending that fertility to his vision. And Hofmann'southward inventiveness is truly enormous, to the point where he might exist called a virtuoso of invention-such as merely the Klee of the 1930s was before him. But, in fine art one cannot scatter one'due south shots with dispensation, and Hofmann has paid a certain price, in terms of quality every bit well equally credence, for doing so. The toll is certainly not as large equally the cost Klee paid in the 1930s, simply it may be larger than the ane Klee paid in his prime (when his "manus-written" approach and the small formats to which he restricted himself conferred a real unity of style upon all the different notational systems h used). And different Picasso since 1917, Hofmann has no ostensible main manner to which all his others are kept subordinate; he tin can work in every bit many as three or 4 dissimilar ones in the bridge of a year and requite them all equal accent. The notion of experiment has been much abused in connection with modernist art, merely Hofmann'due south painting would seem to justify its introduction if anything does.
Hofmann is maybe the near difficult creative person alive-difficult to grasp and to appreciate. But by the same token he is an immensely interesting, original, and rewarding one, whose troubles in clarifying his fine art stem in large part precisely from the fact that he has and then much to say. And though he may belong to the same moment in the evolution of easel painting equally Pollock, he is even less categorizable. He has been called a "German language Expressionist," still footling in what is known as Expressionism, aside from Kandinsky's swirl, predicts him. His color and color textures may exist "Nordic," just one clutches at this describing word in despair at a resolute originality in which the "Mediterranean" is assimilated. I would maintain that the merely way to begin placing Hofmann'due south fine art is by taking cognizance of the uniqueness of his life's course, which has cutting across as many art movements as national boundaries, and put him in several dissimilar centers of art at the precise fourth dimension of their most fruitful activity. On top of that, his career as an creative person has cutting across at least three artists' generations.
Born and educated in Frg, Hofmann lived in Paris on shut terms with the original Fauves and the original Cubists in the decade 1904 to 1914, during which both movements had their birth and efflorescence. (He was particularly shut to Delaunay.) He made frequent trips to French republic and Italy in the twenties, after having founded his schoolhouse in Munich. In 1931 he settled permanently in this land. For xv years he hardly picked up a brush but drew obsessively-equally he says, to "sweat Cubism out." Only in 1935 or 1936, when he was in his mid--fifties, did he begin to paint again consistently-and just when he was already sixty, at a fourth dimension when many of his own students had long since washed so, did he commit himself to abstraction. His first 1-man show in New York was held at Peggy Guggenheim's early in 1944, and since and so he has shown in New York annually, equally an creative person with his reputation to make or suspension along with artists thirty to forty years younger, and asking for no special indulgence.
Hofmann himself explains the lateness of his development by the relative self-approbation fostered in him during his Paris years by the regular back up of a patron, and by the time and energy he needed, subsequently, to perfect himself equally a teacher. Only I would propose, further, that his Paris experience confronted him with too many faits accomplis by artists his ain age or only a few years older; that he had to wait until the art movements of those and the inter-war years were spent earlier making his ain move; that he had start to "get over" Fauvism and Cub-ism, and over Kandinsky, Mondrian, Arp, Masson, and Miro equally well.
His own move started with Fauvish landscapes and large still-life interiors that he began painting presently afterwards 1935. The interiors anneal Matisse with Cubism in a fully personal way, but are if anything a footling too brilliantly wrought. The landscapes, however, especially the darker ones, open a vision that Nolde alone had had a previous glimpse of, and Hofmann opens it upwards from a unlike management Their billowing, broadly brushed surfaces declare depth and volume with a new, mail service-Matissean, and post-Monetian intensity of color, establishing unities in which both Fauvism and Impressionism acquire new relevance. Although there are already a few Hofmanns from 1939 in which no point of deviation in nature tin can exist recognized, the effective transition to abstract art takes identify in the first years of the forties. Figures, landscapes, and all the same lifes go more and more schematically rendered, and finally vanish. What appear to be allusions to Kandinsky'due south most-abstruse manner of 1910-xi constitute no existent debt in my opinion; Hofmann would have arrived at the aforementioned place had Kandinsky never painted (though perhaps not if Miro, himself in debt to Kandinsky, had not). Rather than being influenced by Kandinsky, Hofmann seems to have converged with him at several points on the way to brainchild-a way that in his case was much broader, since it ran through the whole of Matisse and the whole of Cubism.
No one has digested Cubism more than thoroughly than Hofmann, and mayhap no one has better conveyed its gist to others. Withal, though Cubism has been essential to the formation of his art, I doubt whether any important artist of this postwar era has suffered past it as much as Hofmann has. It is what I would call his "Cubist trauma" that is responsible, among other things, for the distractedness of his fine art in its abstruse phase. Without the control of a subject in nature, he will besides often impose Cubist drawing upon pictorial conceptions that are already complete in themselves; it will exist added to, rather than integrated with, his redoubtable manipulations of pigment. It is as if Hofmann had to demonstrate to himself periodically that he could still control the linguistic communication with which Braque and Picasso surprised him l years ago in Paris. Withal the moments of his best pictures are precisely those in which his painterly gift, which is both pre- and post-Cubist, has freest rein and in which Cubism acts, non to command, simply only to inform and imply, as an awareness of style simply not as style itself.
Cataclysm, 1945
To the aforementioned painterly powers are owed most of the revelations of Hofmann'south first abstract period, earlier 1948-when, it is interesting to annotation, he painted most exclusively on board. In a picture like Effervescence of 1944 he predicted an aspect of Pollock'due south "drip" method and at the aforementioned time Clyfford Still's anti-Cubist drawing and his bunching of dark tones. In Fairy Tale of the same twelvemonth he expanded and deepened a hint taken unawares from Masson (whom Hofmann has never admired) in a way that predictable Pollock's great Totem No. 1 of a few months later. In the tempera-on-gesso Calamity of 1945 (subtitled Homage to Howard Putzel) even so another aspect of Pollock's later "drip" manner was anticipated ("drip" is inaccurate; more than correct would be "pour and spatter"). These works are the get-go I know of to state that dissatisfaction with the facile, "handwritten" edges left by the brush, stick, or knife which animates the most radical painting of the present. The open calligraphy and "gratis" shapes that rule in "Abstract Expressionism" were foretold in many other pictures Hofmann did before 1948, and especially in numerous gouaches and h2o colors in which paint is wielded with a disregard of "construction" that represents the most inspired possession of it. Most of these pictures are more important as art than as prophecy, but it is simply in the light of what they did prophesy that people like myself take learned to capeesh them; ten years ago and more, when they were outset shown, they were too new.
In certain other pictures, notwithstanding, Hofmann anticipated himself alone. Summertime Celebrity of 1944 and Conjurer of 1946 declare the impastoed, non-linear manner which, in my view, was his near consis-tently successful one in the 10 years after 1948. Here color determines form from the inside as it were; thick splotches, welts, smears, and ribbons of paint dispose themselves into intelligible shapes the instant they hit the surface; out of the fullness of colour come drawing and design. The red and dark-green Flowering Desert of 1954 is done in this manner, and and then are many much smaller paintings in which warm greens (a color of which Hofmann is the unique main) predominate, as they do also in a principal-slice similar Le Gilotin of 1953 (which, in drying, has unfortunately lost nearly all of its original luster); and there is also the Boutonniere of l YS1.When Hofmann tries to reinforce contrasts of colour and shape with taut profile lines, and when he trues shapes into a Cubistic simply irrelevant regularity, information technology is and so that his art tends to go off in eccentric directions. Given that the originality of his color consists often in oppositions of intense hues of the same degree of warmth and even of the aforementioned value; that a cool color like blueish or an cryptic i like greenish volition be infused with unaccustomed heat; and that such things can taxation the centre the manner an unresolved chord taxes the ear-given all this, design becomes a very precarious thing in which it is safer to stop also soon than likewise late. To insist on line or border tin be excessive or disruptive. And sometimes the energy of Hofmann's line tin be more than nervous, more machined, than pictorial, and information technology can force an illegitimately sculptural effect. Or, as more recently, an overloaded effect is created by the coercion to articulate every foursquare inch of the surface with chromatic and graphic detail. For Hofmann's overriding weakness has nothing to exercise essentially with drawing, but lies in a tendency to push a motion picture also far in every direction. In that location is the endeavor to accomplish, as it would seem, an sometime-fashioned synthesis of "drawing" and "colour"-a yard-manner synthesis. This is an appetite that identifies Hofmann with his own chronological generation of artists and separates him from the generation he actually paints with. But it separates him just insofar equally it distracts him, and in his bad paintings, not his good ones.
But if not all of his bad pictures are due to displaced draftsmanship, neither are all of his adept ones a role of color first and foremost. There are many oils on paper, gouaches, and water colors in which Hofmann's Cubism develops a Matissean rather than Con-structivist grace of line. At that place are paintings, similar Flare-up into Life of 1952 and The Casualty of 1956, in which thick pigment is handled calligraphically over clear white areas. And in that location is the large and superbly original Undulating Area of 1955, which, along with four or v other, and smaller, paintings in the aforementioned series of studies-all inspired by the pos-sibility of an architectural commission-is rapidly and near transpar-ently castor-fatigued on the bare priming. These pictures strike one of the freshest notes to be detected anywhere in the painting of the last ten years, but information technology is feature of Hofmann not to have pursued further an thought that another creative person would have built a whole career on. Pictures like these ostend, at any rate, ane'southward impression that his first impulses are usually his all-time ones; when he fails it is most oft because he forgets what he himself has drummed into his students: that science and field of study which have not become instinct are cramping rather than enabling factors.
A good deal of what is so rashly chosen "Abstruse Expressionism" amounts essentially to a kind of Late Cubism (which takes nothing away from it in principle). In some of his best work Hofmann is almost as much a Tardily Cubist as Gorky or de Kooning. In another and even better part of it, however, he points to and enters a way that is fully mail service-Cubist, and when he does and so he follows his deepest bent, whether he himself recognizes information technology or non, and fulfills his about personal vision. Klee and Soutine were maybe the first to address the pic surface consciously as a responsive rather than an inert object, and painting itself as an affair of prodding and pushing, scoring and marking, rather than of simply inscribing or covering. Hofmann has taken this arroyo further, and fabricated it do more. His pigment surfaces breathe as no others do, opening upwards to breathing the air around them, and information technology is by their open up, pulsating surfaces that Hofmann'southward very best pictures surpass near of Kandinsky's, as I feel they do. And it is thanks in function to Hofmann that the "new" American painting in general is distinguished by a new liveness of surface, which is responsible in plow for the new kind of "light" that Europeans say they detect in it.
Just that part of the "new" American painting which is non Late Cubist has distinguished itself further by its freedom from the quasi--geometric truing and fairing of lines and edges which the Cubist frame imposed. This freedom belongs with Hofmann'south open up surfaces as information technology does not with de Kooning'due south or Kline's, and his hesitancy in fully availing himself of it-despite the big role he had in the winning of information technology-must be blamed on his reluctance to cutting himself off from Cubism as a base of operations. And equally I have already suggested, this reluctance seems the most immediate, if not the but, reason for the lack of self-evident coher-ence in the evolution of his art.
Yet having said all this, we are still far from done with Hofmann and his art. His name continues to be the i that springs to mind when nosotros ask who, amongst all contempo painters in this land, deserves virtually to be chosen a principal in the total sense of the word. This may have something to do with his age, but it has more to exercise with his range and variety. It has besides to do with his accomplishedness, his literal mastery. But it has even more than to do with the fact that merely a primary could remain problematical over then long a period and continue to challenge taste in so sustained a way.
Hofmann's inconsistency itself is part of the challenge. His fully successful works may seem relatively few and far betwixt, but each ~ of them sums up so much that their fewness has to exist explained equally the result of something other than mere unevenness. It is every bit though he worked his way toward each success equally toward and so many dissimilar cli-maxes of so many different processes of distilling and decanting. The less successful pictures point toward the more than successful ones, and in the retrospective light of these they learn a necessity that tin endow them with conclusive qualities of their own. Thus the fewness itself of Hofmann's successful works becomes open up to incertitude-and all the, more and then when we remember how long it took us to recognize his masterpieces of 1943 -48 for what they were. At that place is also the fact-not equally minor as information technology looks-that, merely as some of his thickly impastoed pictures (like the already mentioned Gilotin) lose quality when they dry out, so others gain quality in doing so. For these and other reasons-not least among which is the fact that, though in his early eighties, he is even so in his total artistic prime-Hofmann's art contains promises whose fulfillment is not as yet made any the more foreseeable past the large part of it already pre-sent in paintings which go back twenty years and more.
Single-minded innovators usually brand themselves understood quicker. The more puzzling ones-who often precede the single-minded ones-are those who introduce reluctantly, and in spite of themselves, because they find in innovation the only means to conservation. Amid the puzzling, reluctant innovators, Hofmann, the first "drip painter," belongs. Every bit I have said, he continues to dream of quondam-fashioned "syntheses." And as I have also said, this dream tin can practise violence to his inspiration-but information technology can also furnish inspiration in itself. As far as the "history of forms" is concerned, the main event in postwar painting seems to me to exist the transition to a newer and looser notion of the easel picture. Hofmann's dream of syntheses expresses a sure opposition to this. Only his pigment-ing itself, as singled-out from what he wants of it, renders this opposition fruitful by assimilating the very tendencies it resists. It is the habit of his art to admit contradictory impulses without weakening their force, and to refuse to overcome their contradictoriness except in the most difficult way possible, which is by transcending it. Non only will Hofmann principal-tain emphatic, Fauvist colour against emphatic, Cubist drawing: he volition oppose compression to improvidence, centripetality to centrifugality, in one and the aforementioned picture. (The "explosiveness" of Hofmann's paintings has been remarked on, but I do not see why their "implosiveness" is not equally remarked on.) Here unity is attained, if information technology is attained, by fusion rather than by reconciliation, and fusion itself is attained by dint of a heightening of intensity that is without similar in contemporary art. At more than than one group prove I have had the feel of seeing even a rather indifferent Hofmann make all the other works present, including those by more cried-up artists, seem a little less than nowadays by contrast with its own intense weight of presence. This weight equates itself not and then much with violence of colour or shape-it can exist there in a quiet Hofmann too-but with something more pervasive that might be chosen the picture's concentrated radiance, its effulgence and plenitude as an identity: an identity gained as the result of a complete insistence on the pigment-covered rectangle every bit a dramatically self-independent and involuted statement. And what makes the paint-covered rectangle all the more such statement is its admitting of so many accents in the way of color, shape, and the line that seem to negate involution. The chance incurred used to strike me as foolhardy or perverse; then it stopped hit me that way: information technology began to explain why Hofmann's pictures manage in the long run to keep on succeeding a petty even when they seem most to neglect.
At that place is, even so, i gamble-if information technology is a risk-that Hofmann refuses to have. He has not joined that trend to oversize canvases which has become prevalent lately in American abstruse painting. Not that he cannot handle the oversize format-possibly he can handle it more easily, and with more than frequent or obvious success, than the one of twenty square feet or and then that he generally favors-but it is typical of him not to take the path of least resistance. At the same time, yet, I translate him as feeling that "balance and luminous charge of mass and saturated volume" (to utilize his ain words out of context) cannot be obtained from a surface so big that every part of it is not within easy arm's attain of the artist planted earlier information technology. The big canvas can, of class, achieve a charge and saturation of its ain (every bit Hofmann's own Undulating Ex-panse of 1955 shows), but it is not the immediate, about corporeal kind that Hofmann asks. The big canvas dictates too ineluctable an open-ness. Actually, Hofmann frequently appears to be demanding of abstruse, shallow-depth painting the kind of closely wrought, intensive effects that seem possible merely to illusionist painting with its trompe-l'oeil depth within depth.
Matisse was the beginning to understand how the increasingly stringent modernist interdiction of trompe-50'oeil fabricated it necessary for the painter to seek in the extension of the sheer surface an equivalent of the infinite he used to find in the in-tension of illusioned depth. Matisse's reliance on mat and uniformly thin paint was a further inducement to the use of large surfaces, for no matter how saturated, thin pigment that swallows light instead of reflecting information technology needs to be spread over a relatively large area if it is to acquire intensity. Matisse was the artist of this cen-tury from whom Hofmann learned nigh, and about colour above all, but Hofmann's reluctance to follow Matisse in the matter of the big format is connected, I experience, with his terminal independence from him every bit a colorist -an independence won in his very first abstract paintings.
Unlike Matisse, Hofmann has come to require his color to be saturated corporeally likewise as optically. The weight and density of his paint-attributes it has even when it is not thickly impastoed-contribute to the presence his pictures have as objects as well every bit pictures. This is not the same every bit the superb physical identity (also niggling noticed) with which the Old Masters, even as they tried to conceal fine art with art, endowed their pictures by covering them with multiple films and scumbles of paint. The Old Masters were apt to conceive of the picture show, with its enclosing shape and flat surface, as a receptacle into which things were put, whereas modernist painting tends increasingly to erase this distinction and make the motion picture as such coincide with its physical, literal self. _
Where the corporeality of an Onetime Master painting was supposed to contain the picture as something separate lying backside the paint surface and inside the frame, the pigment surface and frame of a modernist painting are assumed to be just as plain and essentially pictorial as the con-figurations they back up and enclose. In his very offset abstract works, Hofmann took this approach further peradventure than anybody else (non excluding Rouault) had up to that fourth dimension. Information technology was he-not Pollock or Dubuffet-who launched the "heavy" surface in abstract art, that fat, heavy, and eloquent surface which so many younger painters, both in America and in Europe, are at present mechanically driving into the footing. Hither again, Hofmann preserved the easel picture by going to certain extremes in the style of its subversion, and here still over again, not bad but difficult pictorial qualities were built-in out of contradiction because they could not exist born out of anything else.
Though color is the element in which Hofmann is most independent and original, information technology is simultaneously his chief means of conservation. He could be said to take the easel tradition into regions of chromatic experience it never before penetrated. In these regions he preserves the easel picture's identity past showing how oppositions of pure color tin can by themselves, and without help of references to nature, establish a pictorial order equally firm equally whatsoever that depends on conspicuousness of contour and value contrast. Since the pass up of stained-glass painting the tendency of Western tradition has been more or less to exclude colour from a decisive role in pictorial art. The Impres-sionist and Fauve episodes may have checked this trend, simply they did not really reverse it. Color however gets taken for granted equally a secondary element. Not one of all those self-proclaimed nihilists of art, from Duchamp and Picabia to the "Neo-Dadaists," who profess to refuse artful norms in toto, seems to consider color of import enough to treat unconventionally. On the other hand, the opinion is still common, in the avant-garde besides equally the university, that a primary emphasis on color means surrender to the purely decorative. Even Matisse'south enor-mous example seems non to have dissipated this idea. Yet despite his reliance on the autonomous powers of colour, the decorative has never been even an issue for Hofmann, either every bit an nugget or liability; and like Matisse, he has actually had only indifferent success with outright decoration on the few occasions when he has put his hand to it. 1 might say even that this is because the decorative presents itself to him also much as a question of cartoon and not enough as one of color.
What Hofmann has discovered, or rather rediscovered, is that colour, when its resources are sufficiently called on, can galvanize the about inertly decorative pattern into a pictorial entity. This could not exist made explicit-at least not in our time-until the arrival of fully abstract art, and Hofmann, every bit it seems to me, has made this even more than explicit than Delaunay did (however much he himself may owe to Delaunay). Cézanne said, and peradventure he demonstrated (though I am not certain), that fullness of color insured the fullness of form or shape; Hofmann, freed from all obligations to three-dimensional course, has shown how colour can subsume class; and in doing then he has linked upward, over Delaunay'south and over Matisse's head, with Monet'due south last phase. Monet is not a painter whom Hofmann seems ever to have specially admired, only merely in him do we notice any possible precedent for the elisions of light-and-nighttime contrast that Hofmann dares to brand for the sake of pure, singing colour. But Hofmann goes beyond Monet and beyond all other precedent, Western or Oriental, when he contrives to make the variables of satura-tion and texture, also as those of pure hue, determine drawing and pattern as consequences rather than equally preconditions of themselves. Perhaps Soutine had a like vision of a fully chromatic art, but it was with hardly anything like a similar sensation or control of such variables. Hofmann has not solved all the issues these present, but his being the offset to broach them is plenty of itself to give him a secure place in the history of painting.
I take dwelt on the difficulty of post-obit Hofmann's evolution, and I attributed information technology, along with what seemed some of the failures of his art in itself, to his excessive zipper to Cubism. But even as I was putting the present text together, the coherence of one important theme of his recent development emerged with sudden and unforeseen clarity. In this theme, Hofmann'southward Cubism, while becoming more outspoken than ever before in oil, began at the same time both to vindicate and transcend itself-as if purposely to refute what I had already said most it. It was one more than example of the way in which his art kept 1 off balance.
Cathedral, 1959
The beginnings of this particular theme go back to 1954. A number of paintings of that year show, confronting larger, brushed-in forms, little knifed-on oblongs of thicker paint that resemble mosaic pieces. (Orchestral Dominance in Green is a peculiarly successful but characteristically knotty example.) In every year since then, pictures increasingly dominated by these "mosaic pieces" have appeared forth with pictures in a variety of other directions. The little oblongs, though multiplying over the surface, practise not grow particularly in size until 1959, when they suddenly swell out into large square, or nearly foursquare, slabs of equally uniform color that settle themselves-though without being evenly aligned-on firmly horizontal axes. These slabs practise not monopolize the surface entirely; fifty-fifty in a picture like Cathedral, where they threaten most to do and then, enough of a freely brushed and variegated ground shows through to compromise the proposition of a purely geometrical art. Mayhap the kind of color involved would suffice to practice this all by itself; but even without the color and without the ground, the tactile connotations of the slightly raised edges and the thickened pigment surfaces of the squares would be enough to suppress any real feeling of geometrical "purity." Still the very fact that Cathedral teeters on the border of a kind of art similar Mondrian's is one of the things that give it its climactic quality every bit a work that sums up the realizations of a whole epoch of modernist art, and at the same time points toward the side by side one-in which geometrical and painterly cartoon will go indistinguishable considering they volition take cancelled each other out under the pressures of color. Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko take already entered that epoch, and so have ii or three younger American painters, only information technology has been left to Hofmann to establish firmly, and interestingly, the explicit no less than implicit continuity with the past of the new vision of color that is at stake.
Hofmann's Cathedral vein takes up Analytical Cubism, in club to continue it, at the very same point at which both Mondrian and Pollock took it up in order to continue it, which was where Braque and Picasso left it in 1912 when they saw information technology threatening to behave them all the fashion over into abstract art. The facet-planes of Analytical Cubism were left hanging equally it were, until Mondrian flattened them out into verbal rectangles that were later enlarged into surface area-shapes. Thirty years later Pollock pinned the facet-plane downward one time once again, smaller in scale than originally, in the interstices and flecks of the skeins of paint that fill up his 1947-so pictures. In its kickoff stages, Hofmann's "mosaic" series seems closer to Pollock, and so it seems to recapitulate Mondrian's expanding and squaring-up of the facet-plane. But Hofmann'southward actual course diverges from Mondrian'south as much Mondrian's does from Pollock's, and in the end he is further away from both than either is from the other. Mondrian and Pollock recollect and experience throughout in terms of light and dark. Mondrian drives Analytical Cubism to an ostensibly simplifying decision in gild to raise the silhouetting, the draftsman's office of value contrast. Pollock pulverizes value dissimilarity in club to loosen the Cubist surface (past prying it abroad from itself and so to speak), merely color stays in a subordinate role. Hofmann reaches his ostensibly simplifying determination in club precisely to aggrandize the office of color. Mondrian'south edges assert themselves by their stark straight-ness; Hofmann's edges more than or less efface themselves by the same means their straightness serving to render the contrasts of the color areas they carve up more than manifestly, more sheerly defined in terms of color. Because the cartoon is geometrical, it is simple, and because information technology is simple, it is expectable, and existence expectable, information technology leaves all the more room for a rich and unexpected complexity of colour relations.
Such color relations are, of all things in the fine art of painting, the hardest to betoken to with words. Suffice it to say that in Cathedral the film plane is dissolved both past warm hues that advance and absurd ones that retreat, notwithstanding restored at the same time past the interaction of warm and cool, light and nighttime, sparse and thick, saturated and diluted. The deep blues, oranges, mauves, and browns in the upper third of the canvas loom over and weigh downwards the ochers, pistachio greens, and various whitened yellows in the lower 2 thirds, only these throw off the weight of the heavier colors above by virtue of their own greater brilliance, and too by virtue of the greater size, individually and collectively, of the squares they occupy. The event, like the result in every profoundly successful film, is a stability that is sovereign because it is hard-won and precarious.
Hofmann offers a lesson in patience. That lesson, from him and from others, I shall never finish learning. It includes one'due south own mistakes. 1 is also reminded of how in fine art the tortoise then oft overtakes the hare. Not all, just also many of the best writers, composers, and artists of our time begin to exist acclaimed only when they no longer accept annihilation to say and take to performing instead of stating. This is how they first become accessible to broad gustatory modality, which is lazy sense of taste, and by the same token to the processes of publicity and consecration. Equally long equally they were trammeled up in the urgency of getting things said they were besides hard, too "controversial." With the all-time volition in the earth Hofmann could not plow himself into a performer; far from e'er being without enough to say, he volition ever have to cope with the opposite problem of having besides much to say.
The induction of 1'south reputation may be a cause too every bit an issue of decline. Hofmann has one of the profoundest instincts for cocky-preservation I have ever become aware of, and I am inclined to think that, subliminally, he prefers, and needs, to delay his canonization. It is mostly, as I said at the offset, his own doing. Though his proper name does not exactly go uncelebrated, though museums and collectors larn his piece of work, and though he does not refuse the honors that come his way or adopt attitudes of intransigence, he manages to keep at a altitude the corrupting olfactory property of incense.
-- Paris: Editions Georges Fall, 1961
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