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Hans Hofmann Zitate
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Johann Georg Albert Hofmann war ein deutsch-US-amerikanischer Maler, Lehrer und Kunstprofessor, der in seinen frühen Werken eine Synthese aus Fauvismus und Kubismus anstrebte. Nach seiner Emigration in die Vereinigten Staaten gründete er in New York eine Kunstschule, die großen Einfluss auf die Entwicklung des Abstrakten Expressionismus hatte. Hofmann gilt als Künstler der ersten Generation der sogenannten New York School. Wikipedia  

✵ 21. März 1880 – 17. Februar 1966
Hans Hofmann: 67   Zitate 0   Gefällt mir

Hans Hofmann: Zitate auf Englisch

“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 paint — not through words.”

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Hans Hofmann

As quoted in It ls., No. 3 (Winter-Spring 1959)
1950s

“Just as counterpoint and harmony follow their own laws, and differ in rhythm and movement, both formal tensions and color tensions have a development of their own in accordance with the inherent laws from which they are separately derived. Both, however, aim toward the realization of the same image. And both deal with the depth problem.”

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Hans Hofmann

'Search for the Real in the Visual Arts', p. 45
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)

“Everything rhythmically organic is true. Everything, which results from the proper feeling for rhythmically organized spiritual units, is true and alive — alive within itself. When we lose the sense for such true beauty we lose our natural sense for the rich flavor of life, which is the basis for all inspirational work.
Things generally taken for beautiful are nothing other than the product of frozen, stereotyped taste, bound by sterile rules and purely exterior judgment.”

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Hans Hofmann

'Painting and Culture' p. 57
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)

“It isn't necessary to make things large to make them monumental; a head by Giacometti one inch high would be able to vitalize this whole space.”

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Hans Hofmann

As quoted in Can Painting be Taught by Dorothy Seckler, Art News No. 50 (March 1951), p. 64
1950s

“I can't understand how anyone is able to paint without optimism. Despite the general pessimistic attitude in the world today, I am nothing but an optimist.”

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Hans Hofmann

As quoted in The Artist's Voice : Talks With Seventeen Modern Artists (1962) by Katharine Kuh, p. 119
1960s

“In nature, light creates the color; in the picture, color creates light. Every color shade emanates a very characteristic light — no substitute is possible.”

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Hans Hofmann

As quoted in Readings in American art, 1900 -1975 (1975) by Barbara Rose, p. 117
1970s and later
Variante: In nature, light creates the color. In the picture, color creates the light.

“A line cannot control pictorial space absolutely. A line may flow freely in and out space, but cannot independently create the phenomenon of push and pull necessary to plastic creation. Push and pull are expanding and contracting forces which are activated by carriers in visual motion. Planes are the most important carriers, lines and points less so... the picture plane reacts automatically in the opposite direction to the stimulus received; thus action continues as long as it receives stimulus in the creative process. Push answers with pull and pull with push. … At the end of his life and the height of his capacity Cézanne understood color as a force of push and pull. In his pictures he created an enormous sense of volume, breathing, pulsating, expanding, contracting through his use of colors.”

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Hans Hofmann

'Search for the Real in the Visual Arts', p. 44
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)

“[visiting Jackson Pollock’s studio]: You do not work from nature. This is no good, you will repeat yourself. You work by heart, not from nature. [Pollock reacted: 'I am nature]”

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Hans Hofmann

1970s and later

“The impressionistic method leads into a complete splitting and dissolution of all areas involved in the composition, and color is used to create an overall effect of light. The color is, through such a shading down from the highest light in the deepest shadows, sacrified an degraded to a (black-and-white) function. This leads to the destructions of the color as color.”

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Hans Hofmann

Hofmann's quote in: 'Space pictorially realized through the intrinsic faculty of the colors to express volume' in New Paintings by Hans Hofmann (1951); also in Hans Hofmann (1998) by Helmut Friedel and Tina Dickey
1950s

“When the impulses which stir us to profound emotion are integrated with the medium of expression, every interview of the soul may become art. This is contingent upon mastery of the medium.”

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Hans Hofmann

'Painting and Culture' p. 58
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)

“Art is something absolute, something positive, which gives power just as food gives power.
While creative science is a mental food, art is the satisfaction of the soul.”

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Hans Hofmann

'Painting and Culture' p. 56
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)

“A work based only on a line concept is scarcely more than a illustration; it fails to achieve pictorial structure. Pictorial structure is based on a plane concept. The line originates in the meeting of two planes … we can lose ourselves in a multitude of lines, if through them we lose our senses for the planes.”

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Hans Hofmann

'Terms' p. 71
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)

“Since light is best expressed through differences in color quality, color should not be handled as a tonal gradation, to produce the effect of light.”

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Hans Hofmann

'Terms' p. 74
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)

“The difference between the arts arises because of the difference in the nature of the mediums of expression and the emphasis induced by the nature of each medium. Each means of expression has its own order of being, its own units.”

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Hans Hofmann

'Painting and Culture' p. 57
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)

“It takes intelligence and training, self-discipline and fine-sensibility, to gain renewed life through leisure occupation. America now suffers spiritual poverty, and art must become more fully American life before her leisure can become culture.”

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Hans Hofmann

'Painting and Culture' p. 56
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)

“The product of movement and counter-movement is tension. When tension — working strength — is expressed, it endows the work of art with the living effect of coordinated, though opposing, forces.”

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Hans Hofmann

"Excerpts from the Teaching of Hans Hofmann", p. 66
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)

“"Now I have lost all fear, and begin to draw on the black surface'" (Arp). Only love — for painting, in this instance — is able to cover the fearful void.”

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Hans Hofmann

Robert Motherwell, partly quoting Jean Arp, in Motherwell & black (1981) p. 94 -->
Misattributed

“Art is magic. So say the surrealists. But how is it magic? In its metaphysical development? Or does some final transformation culminate in a magic reality? In truth, the latter is impossible without the former. If creation is not magic, the outcome cannot be magic. To worship the product and ignore its development leads to dilettantism and reaction. Art cannot result from sophisticated, frivolous, or superficial effects.”

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Hans Hofmann

'Search for the Real in the Visual Arts', p. 40
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)

“A glimpse heavenward at a constellation or even at a single star only suggests infinity; actually our vision is limited. We cannot perceive unlimited space; it is immeasurable. The universe, as we know it through our visual experience, is limited. It first came into existence with the formation of matter, and will end with the complete dissolution of matter.<!-- I TRIMMED this portion to simply cut down a little on quotes from this one essay. ~ 2009·03·21 02:36 Kalki} Where there is matter and action, there is space. Pictorial space exists two dimensionally. When the two dimensionality of a picture is destroyed, it falls into parts — it creates the effect of a naturalistic space. When a picture conveys only naturalistic space, it represents a special case, a portion of what is felt about three-dimensional experience. This expression of the artist’s experience is thus incomplete.”

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Hans Hofmann

'Search for the Real in the Visual Arts', p. 40-48
'Search for the Real in the Visual Arts', p. 43
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)

“At the time of making a picture, I want not to know what I am doing.; a picture should me made with feeling, not with knowing.”

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Hans Hofmann

Quote from an interview with w:Elaine de Kooning, 'Hans Hofmann paints a picture', 1950; in Artnews, February 1950, 38 (article 38-41 and 58-59)
1950s

“The reciprocal relation of color to color produces a phenomenon of a more mysterious order. This new phenomenon is psychological. A high sensitivity is necessary in order to expand color into the sphere of the surreal without losing creative ground. Color stimulates certain moods in us. It awakens joy or fear in accordance with its figuration. In fact, the whole world, as we experience it visually, comes to us through the mystic realm of color. Our entire being is nourished by it. This mystic quality of color should likewise find expression in a work of art.”

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Hans Hofmann

'Search for the Real in the Visual Arts', p. 45
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)

“A work of art is a world in itself reflecting senses and emotions of the artist's world.
Just as a flower, by virtue of its existence as a complete organism is both ornamental and self-sufficient as to color, form, and texture, so art, because of its singular existence is more than mere ornament.”

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Hans Hofmann

'Excerpts from the Teaching of Hans Hofmann', p. 59
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)

“The creative process lies not in imitating, but in paralleling nature — translating the impulse received from nature into the medium of expression, thus vitalizing this medium. The picture should be alive, the statue should be alive, and every work of art should be alive.”

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Hans Hofmann

'Painting and Culture' p. 55
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)

“Depth, in a pictorial, plastic sense, is not created by the arrangement of objects one after another toward a vanishing point, in the sense of the Renaissance perspective, but on the contrary (and in absolute denial of this doctrine) by the creation of forces in the sense of push and pull. Nor is depth created by tonal gradation (another doctrine of the academician which, at its culmination, degraded the use of color to a mere function of expressing dark and light).”

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Hans Hofmann

'Search for the Real in the Visual Arts', p. 44
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)

“There is in reality no such thing as modern art. Art is carried on up and down in immense cycles through centuries and civilizations.”

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Hans Hofmann

statement in Hans Hofmann: Recent Paintings (1952) Kootz Gallery
1950s

“Art leads to a more profound concept of life, because art itself is a profound expression of feeling. The artist is born, and art is the expression of his overflowing soul. Because his soul is rich, he cares comparatively little about the superficial necessities of the material world; he sublimates the pressure of material affairs in an artistic experience.”

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Hans Hofmann

'Painting and Culture' p. 56
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)

“One must realize that, apart from considerations of color and form, there are two fundamentally different ways of regarding a medium of expression: one is based on taste only — an approach in which the external physical elements of expression are merely pleasingly arranged. This way results in decoration with no spiritual reaction. Arrangement is not art. The second way is based on the artist’s power of empathy, to feel the intrinsic qualities of the medium of expression. Through these qualities the medium comes to life... In this life, an intuitive artist discovers the emotive and vital substance which makes a work of art.”

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Hans Hofmann

'Search for the Real in the Visual Arts', p. 46
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)

“The relative meaning of two physical facts in an emotionally controlled relation always creates the phenomenon of a third fact of a higher order, just as two musical sounds, heard simultaneously create the phenomenon of a third, fourth or fifth. The nature of this higher third is non-physical. In a sense it is magic. Each such phenomenon always overshadows the material qualities and the limited meaning of the basic factors from which it has sprung. For this reason Art expresses the highest quality of the spirit when it is surreal in nature; or, in terms of the visual arts, when it is of a surreal plastic nature.”

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Hans Hofmann

'Search for the Real in the Visual Arts', p. 41
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)

“The significance of a work of art is determined then by the quality of its growth. This involves intangible forces inherent in the process of development. Although these forces are surreal (that is, their nature is something beyond physical reality), they, nevertheless, depend on a physical carrier. The physical carrier (commonly painting or sculpture) is the medium of expression of the Surreal. Thus, an idea is communicable only when the surreal is converted into material terms. The artist’s technical problem is how to transform the material with which he works back into the sphere of the spirit.”

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Hans Hofmann

'Search for the Real in the Visual Arts', p. 40
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)

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