Hans Hofmann
Hans Hofmann
Hans Hofmannwas a German-born American abstract expressionist painter...
NationalityGerman
ProfessionPainter
Date of Birth21 March 1880
CountryGermany
dispute generally giving nobody
Nobody would dispute that I'm giving him a centrality he doesn't generally have.
ideas giving function
A thing in itself never expresses anything. It is the relation between things that gives meaning to them and that formulates a thought. A thought functions only as a fragmentary part in the formulation of an idea.
art giving creative
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.
mean giving landscape
The truly monumental can only come about by means of the most exact and refined relation between parts. Since each thing carries both a meaning of its own and an associated meaning in relation to something else - its essential value is relative. We speak of the mood we experience when looking at a landscape. This mood results from the relation of certain things rather than from their separate actualities. This is because objects do not in themselves possess the total effect they give when interrelated.
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.
empathy emotion plastic
To experience visually, and to transform our visual experience into plastic terms, requires the faculty of empathy.
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.