AFA Winter 2019

Winter 80 www.afamag.com | w ww.incollect.com ans Hofmann (1880–1966), a central figure in the story of post-World War II abstract art, founded famously influential art schools in New York and Provincetown, Massachusetts, where he taught the principles of modern art and individual creative expression for more than twenty years, helping to define a new generation of American artists. By the time of his death just weeks before his eighty-sixth birthday, Hofmann also had achieved global recognition as a painter. He was distinguished for his vibrant use of color and his experimental approaches to technique and composition, always challenging the visual and expressive boundaries of traditional painting. In particular, Hofmann was known for his dedication to nature as a deep wellspring of creative inspiration. In nearly fifty paintings and works on paper from 1930 through to the end of his life in 1966, Hans Hofmann: The Nature of Abstraction , at the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts, presents a comprehensive and eye-opening examination of Hofmann’s prolific career. The exhibition begins with landscapes and still lifes from the mid-1930s—works that mark the artist’s return to painting after enduring years of creative disruption caused by two World Wars. At the invitation of the University of California, Berkeley, Hofmann was able to escape the Nazi occupation of his native Germany and build a new life in America. He brought with him the vital spirit of artistic breakthroughs—Cubism, Fauvism, and Expressionism—which he had experienced directly in avant-garde circles in early twentieth-century Munich and Paris. Organized in thematic sections, the exhibition at PEM invites visitors to dive into Hofmann’s foundational principles of line, shape, color, and his famous phrase, “push and pull,” as demonstrated by his own painterly development. His majestic late color plane abstractions, which command the final sections of the exhibition, reveal Hofmann’s full resolve to tap creative dimensions inspired by nature. Herbert Matter, Hans Hofmann Painting in the Dunes, 1942. © Herbert Matter Estate. Photograph courtesy of Staley-Wise Gallery, New York. by Lucinda Barnes and Lydia Gordon Abstraction The Nature of