Hans Hofmann (March 21, 1880, Weissenburg, Bavaria - February 17, 1966, New York) is an American artist of German descent, a representative of abstract expressionism.
In 1898 he began to study painting at a private art school in Munich. From 1904 to 1914, right up to the outbreak of the First World War, he lives in Paris, where he attends the Art Academy de la Grande Shomiere, in which Henri Matisse also studies. This was the time of origin and development of such artistic trends as Fauvism and Cubism, and the young Hoffmann was under their strong influence. At the same time he met in Paris with artists Robert Delaunay and Sonya Delaunay-Turk, making friends with them.
Returning to Germany, for health reasons, he was declared unfit for military service, and in 1915 he opened an art school in Munich, in which, among others, the future head of the Department of Arts at the University of California at Berkeley, Wort Ryder.
At the invitation of Ryder in 1930, H. Hoffmann first visited the United States, and in 1932 remained there forever. At first he teaches at the courses of the Student League of Arts, and in 1933 opens his own art school. Among others, Hoffmann studied such masters of abstract art as Ray Eames, Allan Caprou and Lee Krasner. Krasner in 1942 introduced the teacher to her husband, artist Jackson Pollock, who helped Hoffmann organize his first solo exhibition in 1944 in the Peggy Guggenheim gallery. Since 1935, in the artist's work, abstract trends are becoming increasingly clear.
In 1946, G. Hoffmann exhibited in the Mortimer-Brand Gallery. Art critic Robert Coates, who reviewed the exhibition in the journal "New Yorker" to describe what he saw, invents the term "abstract expressionism." At the same time, G. Hoffmann's works differ from those of other classics of abstract expressionism-Adolf Gottlieb, Barnett Newman or Mark Rothko, which Hoffmann found "tragic and timeless." G. Hoffmann was the "hedonist of abstract expressionism" - as he was called Irving Sandler. It is curious that Sandler also refers to "hedonist" A.Matissa, the Parisian fellow student Hoffmann.
In 1947, the artist participated - together with Theodoros Stamos, Ed Reinhardt, Mark Rothko and Clifford Still - in the group exhibition "Ideographic Picture", organized by B. Newman in the Betty Parsons gallery.
In 1948 G. Hoffmann published his theoretical work - an essay "The Search for Reality in the Visual Arts". In 1958, after more than 40 years of teaching, including at the prestigious art schools in New York and Princeton (Massachusetts), the artist leaves teaching and devotes himself entirely to painting. In 1963, the Museum of Modern Art of New York hosted a retrospective exhibition of works by Hans Hoffmann.