Hans Hofmann
Hans Hofmann
Hans Hofmannwas a German-born American abstract expressionist painter...
NationalityGerman
ProfessionPainter
Date of Birth21 March 1880
CountryGermany
empathy emotion plastic
To experience visually, and to transform our visual experience into plastic terms, requires the faculty of empathy.
dispute generally giving nobody
Nobody would dispute that I'm giving him a centrality he doesn't generally have.
spiritual art self
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.
art sophisticated superficial
Art cannot result from sophisticated, frivolous, or superficial effects.
spiritual art mean
The general misunderstanding of a work of art is often due to the fact that the key to its spiritual content and technical means is missed. Unless the observer is trained to a certain degree in the artistic idiom, he is apt to search for things which have little to do with the aesthetic content of a picture. He is likely to look for pure representational values when the emphasis is really upon music-like relationships.
reality artist may
The plastic artist may or may not be concerned with presenting a superficial appearance of reality, but he is always concerned with the presentation - if not the representation - of the plastic values of reality.
mean color creating
Color is a plastic means of creating intervals... color harmonics produced by special relationships, or tensions. We differentiate now between formal tensions and color tensions, just as we differentiate in music between counterpoint and harmony.
color law realization
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.
development worship reactions
To worship the product and ignore its development leads to dilettantism and reaction.
teacher desire students
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.
art reality civilization
There is in reality no such thing as modern art. Art is carried on up and down in immense cycles through centuries and civilizations.
black-and-white light color
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.
art children mean
The child is really an artist, and the artist should be like a child, but he should not stay a child. He must become an artist. That means he cannot permit himself to become sentimental or something like that. He must know what he is doing
art expression soul
Art is the expression of the artist´s overflowing soul.