AFA Winter 2019

Antiques & Fine Art 87 2019 Hans Hofmann (1880–1966), The Castle, 1965. Oil on canvas, 60⅛ x 40⅛ inches. UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archives; Gift of the artist (1966.4). With permission of the Renate, Hans & Maria Hofmann Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. The Castle is one of Hofmann’s last known works, made in his mid-eighties and shown in his last exhibition, held at Kootz Gallery, February 1–26, 1966 which opened just weeks before his death. A culmination of his core principles, this reductive painting, in which the raw canvas occupies much of the composition, is energized by a contrasting zone of vibrant color planes and squiggles, which Hofmann produced by mixing pigments directly on the surface, as if a palette, and squeezing paint straight from the tube. Line, shape, color, and push and pull crescendo in the work, creating an independent pictorial reality—what Hofmann would call a “spiritual synthesis.” The exhibition was organized by and premiered at the University of California Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), which holds the world’s most extensive museum collection of Hofmann paintings. In its subsequent presentation at PEM, the exhibition follows the artist’s own journey from America’s West Coast to the Eastern seaboard. It was on the North Shore of Massachusetts that Hofmann picked up his paints and brushes again while teaching in Cape Anne’s Gloucester, and it was in Provincetown, on the tip of Cape Cod, that he founded his own art school. Provincetown’s historically influential art colony created a sense of belonging for the artist, where he found the kind of artistic community he had lost in wartime Europe and an ideal studio located atop the dunes, close to nature.  Hans Hofmann: The Nature of Abstraction, at the Peabody Essex Museum (www.pem.org) th rough January 5, 2020, offers a fresh re-consideration of the artist’s creative journey into abstraction and his deep contribution to the artistic landscape of New England. For information, visit www.pem.org or call 978.745.9500. Lucinda Barnes is guest curator of Hans Hofmann: The Nature of Abstraction and curator emerita at UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archives. Lydia Gordon is associate curator for exhibitions and research at the Peabody Essex Museum and coordinating curator of the exhibition. Hans Hofmann in the studio in Provincetown, Mass., 1959. Photograph by Marvin P. Lazarus. A work is finished when all parts involved communicate themselves, so that they don’t need me. —Hans Hofmann