Hans Hofmann: Expression

“Every art expression is rooted fundamentally in the personality and temperament of the artist.”

Hans Hofmann

Quote in: 'Hans Hofmann' by Cynthia Goodman, in Portfolio (January - February 1981), p. 47
1970s and later

Art , Personality

“An idea can only be materialized with the help of a medium of expression, the inherent qualities of which must be surely sensed and understood in order to become the carrier of an idea.”

Hans Hofmann

'Excerpts from the Teaching of Hans Hofmann', p. 64
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)

Idea , Sense , Help

“Creation is dominated by three absolutely different factors: First, nature, which works upon us by its laws; second, the artist, who creates a spiritual contact with nature and his materials; third, the medium of expression through which the artist translates his inner world. Of those three components only one, the medium, is material.”

Hans Hofmann

As quoted in Hans Hofmann (1963) by William Chapin Seitz, p. 15
1960s

World , Law , Nature

“Painting is aesthetic enjoyment; I want to be a 'poet'. As an artist I must conform to my nature. My nature has a lyrical as well as a dramatic disposition. Not one day is the same. One day I feel wonderful to work and I feel an expression, which shows in the work. Only with a very clear mind on a clear day I can paint without interruptions and without food because my disposition is like that. My work should reflect my moods and the greatest enjoyment I had when I did the work…”

Hans Hofmann

Quote from 'Artists' Session at Studio 35', (1950); as cited in Abstract Expressionism Creators and Critics (1990), ed. Clifford Ross, p. 225 
1950s

Food , Feeling , Mood , Nature

“A thought that has found a plastic expression must continue to expand in keeping with its own plastic idiom. A plastic idea must be expressed with plastic means just as a musical idea is expressed with musical means, or a literary idea with verbal means. Neither music nor literature are wholly translatable into other art forms; and so a plastic art cannot be created through a superimposed literary meaning. The artist who attempts to do so produces nothing more than a show-booth. He contents himself with visual story-telling. He subjects himself to a mechanistic kind of thinking which disintegrates into fragments.”

Hans Hofmann

'Search for the Real in the Visual Arts', p. 40-46
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)

Art , Music , Literature , Idea

“The knowledge of reality, achieved by means of the complete sensory equipment, must be expressed artistically in terms of a medium which appeals to the memory of all sensory experience — but only through the eye.”

Hans Hofmann

'Search for the Real in the Visual Arts', p. 54
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)

Knowledge , Reality , Memory

“Speech has arisen through the need for expression. Certain factors have contributed to making it the paramount utilitarian method of expression. There are ideas and things expressible in words, but there are ideas better expressed in music, the person with no musical ear, or without discipline in the language of music, lacks the key to the door of the world of musical experience. But we live in a world of volume and space; it is hard to conceive of the person who is space-blind or volume-deaf. The great majority of people have the means of approach to plastic beauty as part of their natural equipment. The teacher can develop this natural endowment as Necessity, the greatest teacher, has developed speech.”

Hans Hofmann

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

People , World , Beauty , Music

“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

“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

“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

“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.”

Hans Hofmann

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

Art , Soul

“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.”

Hans Hofmann

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

Color , Light

“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.”

Hans Hofmann

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

Art , Nature

“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.”

Hans Hofmann

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

Art

“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.”

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)

Quotes , Star , Universe , Parting

“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.”

Hans Hofmann

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

World , Fear , Art , Color

“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.”

Hans Hofmann

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

Art , Nature

“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).”

Hans Hofmann

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

Color , Sense , Light