AFA Winter 2019

Winter 84 www.afamag.com | w ww.incollect.com Hans Hofmann (1880–1966), In the Wake of the Hurricane, 1960. Oil on canvas, 72¼ x 60 inches. UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archives; Gift of the artist (1965.6). With permission of the Renate, Hans & Maria Hofmann Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. On painting abstractly from nature, Hofmann said, “Nature stimulates in me the imaginative faculty to feel the potentialities of expression which serve to create pictorial life.” The dynamic forces of nature influenced the energetic ways in which the artist approached the canvas. One such force was Hurricane Donna, which hit Massachusetts on September 12, 1960, with greater than 140-mile-per-hour winds and caused significant damage in Provincetown. Hofmann expressed the storm’s rapid motion and energy here with agitated short green brushstrokes, but grounded those vibrations in a sense of calm and stillness by applying swaths of warmer orange and yellow tones. Hans Hofmann (1880–1966), Sparks, 1957. Oil on canvas, 60 x 48 inches. The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, bequest of Caroline Wiess Law (2004.24). With permission of the Renate, Hans & Maria Hofmann Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. In Sparks , Hofmann applied thick paint with a palette knife, pushing his color planes around and about the picture plane. For Hofmann, making a painting was a physical act. Using a medley of tools and applications— brush, palette knife, splatters, drips, and fingerprints—he worked quickly and forcefully, aiming to finish a canvas “in one sweep.” Often in a single composition he employed multiple types of pigments, such as gouache, oil, and ink, exploiting their inherent material differences toward enhancing the visual richness of the surface. The central area of Sparks is crowded with colorful shapes. Horizontal and vertical strokes of color, painted in different densities and textures, create an animated mosaic atop a neutral background. Here Hofmann grounds his vibrant color planes, which punctuate the surface and vibrate in constant flux with each other in a state of stable equilibrium.