Hans Hofmann: Trending quotes (page 2)

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“It makes no difference whether a work is naturalistic or abstract; every visual expression follows the same fundamental laws.”

Hans Hofmann

'Excerpts from the Teaching of Hans Hofmann', p. 61
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)

Law

“It is the greatest injustice done to Mondrian that people who are plastically blind see only decorative design instead of the plastic perfection which characterizes his work. The whole De Stijl group from which Mondrian's art was derived must be considered a protest against such blindness.”

Hans Hofmann

'Search for the Real in the Visual Arts', p. 47
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)

People , Art , Perfection

“There is a world of visual beauty open to the one willing to undergo the practice and striving necessary to the understanding of its language.
This world is a important as culturally as is the world of words or of music. My ideal is to form and to paint as Schubert sings his songs and as Beethoven creates his world in sounds. That is to say, creation of one’s own inner world through the same human and artistic discipline.
An inner sensation can find external expression only through spiritual realization.”

Hans Hofmann

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

World , Beauty , Music , Understanding

“Robert Motherwell: Would you say that a fair statement of your position is that the 'meaning' of a work of art consists of the relations among the elements, and not the elements themselves?
Hofmann: Yes, that I would definitely say. You make a thin line and a thick line. It is the same with geometrical shapes. It is all relationship. Without all these relationships it is not possible to express higher art.”

Hans Hofmann

Interview in Modern Artists in America, First Series (1952), ed. R. Motherwell, Ad Reinhardt, and B. Karpel, p. 19, 39
1950s

Art

“The impulse of nature, fused through the personality of the artist by laws arising from the particular nature of the medium, produces the rhythm and the personal expression of a work. Then the life of the composition becomes a spiritual unity.”

Hans Hofmann

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

Life , Law , Nature , Personality

“To sense the invisible and to be able to create it — that is art.”

Hans Hofmann

Statement of 1950, as quoted in Hans Hofmann (1998), ed. Helmut Friedel and Tina Dickey
1950s

Art , Sense

“Sometimes I wonder, laying in a great black stripe on a canvas, what animal bones (or horns) are making the furrows of my picture… black grows deeper and deeper, darker and darker before me. It menaces me like a black gullet. I can bear it no longer. It is monstrous. It is unfathomable. As the thought comes to me to exorcise and transform this black with a white drawing, it has already become a surface.”

Hans Hofmann

Robert Motherwell, in a catalog note to the show Black or White (1950)
Misattributed

Animals , Drawing

“Each expression-medium has a life of its own. Regulated by certain laws, it can be mastered only by intuition during the act of creating. It is in the nature of the laws which govern every expression medium that two separate entities, related through empathy, always produce a higher third of a purely spiritual nature. This spiritual third manifests itself as a quality which carries emotional content. This quality is the opposite of illusion; it is the reality of the spirit.”

Hans Hofmann

'Excerpts from the Teaching of Hans Hofmann', p. 61
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)

Life , Law , Nature , Reality

“The physical carrier is overshadowed by a relation. The relation creates an overtone. The physical carrier is absorbed by this overtone. The overtone spontaneously transforms the means of creation into a spiritual reality. The mystery of creation is then revealed.”

Hans Hofmann

'Search for the Real in the Visual Arts', p. 49
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)

Reality

“Quote in: 'Hans Hofmann', (1986) by Cynthia Goodman, p. 103”

Hans Hofmann

1970s and later

Quotes

“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.”

Hans Hofmann

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

Teachers , Painting

“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.”

Hans Hofmann

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

Law , Color , Problem

“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.”

Hans Hofmann

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

Life , Beauty , Feeling , Nature

“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.”

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.”

Hans Hofmann

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

World , Optimism , Understanding , Painting

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

Hans Hofmann

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

Color , Nature , 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.”

Hans Hofmann

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

Life , Color , Sense

“[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]”

Hans Hofmann

1970s and later

Nature , Heart

“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.”

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

Color , Light