ART “4”
“2”-DAY 21 March
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Born on 21 March 1880:
Hans Georg Albert Hofmann,
Bavarian US Abstract
Expressionist painter, teacher, and theorist, who died on 17 February
1966. — {Were his formal clothes known as “the tails of Hofmann”?} — He moved with his family to Munich in 1886 and in 1896 left home to become assistant to the director of public works of the State of Bavaria; he distinguished himself with a number of inventions, including an electromagnetic comptometer, a radar device for ships, a sensitized light bulb and a portable freezer unit for military purposes. In spite of his parents’ strong objection and their hopes for his career as a scientist, in 1898 he enrolled in the art school run by Moritz Heymann [1870–] in Munich. Hofmann subsequently studied with a succession of teachers and was particularly influenced by Willi Schwarz [1889–], who familiarized him with French Impressionism, a style that affected his earliest known paintings, such as Self-portrait (1902). In 1903 Hofmann was introduced by Schwarz to Phillip Freudenberg, an art collector and the son of a wealthy owner of a department-store from Berlin. Freudenberg's patronage enabled Hofmann to live in Paris from 1904 to 1914, accompanied by Miz (Maria) Wolfgegg, whom he had met in 1900 and whom he married on 05 June 1924. Hofmann continued his art studies in Paris at the Académie Colarossi and at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, and he met major artists such as Picasso, Matisse, Braque, Léger, and Robert Delaunay; he also came to know the influential German art dealers Richard Goetz and Wilhelm Uhde and the US collector Leo Stein. He also maintained his contacts in Germany, which he visited each summer, participating in the Neue Sezession exhibitions in Berlin in 1908 and 1909 and holding his first one-man exhibition in 1910 at Paul Cassirer's gallery in Berlin. Almost all the work produced by Hofmann in Paris was destroyed in World War I. He was visiting Germany when war was declared and was unable to return to France, but for health reasons he was pronounced unfit for service. To support himself he opened his own art school in 1915, the Hofmann Schule für Moderne Kunst, in Schwabing, the artists' district of Munich. He had relatively few students during the war, but as his fame spread after 1918 he attracted students from all over the world; among them were a number of artists who later achieved international prominence, including Alfred Jensen, Louise Nevelson, and Wolfgang Paalen. Hofmann taught in Munich until the early 1930s and during these years drew copiously but had little time to paint. Only one painting of this time is known to have survived, a Cubist-derived still-life, Green Bottle (1921). Hofmann visited the US in the summers of 1930 and 1931 to teach at the University of California at Berkeley at the invitation of a former student, Worth Ryder. In 1932 he settled in New York, where he taught at the Art Students League and where thanks to his first-hand experience of Europe he came to personify the Ecole de Paris for those students eager to learn the fundamentals of modern art. In autumn 1933 he left the Art Students League to open his own school, the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts, which after several moves was based at 52 W. 8th Street in the Greenwich Village area of New York. In 1935 he opened a summer school in Provincetown, MA, which became the focus of the large art community on Cape Cod. It was during this period that Hofmann began painting regularly again, initially favoring portraits and figure studies, landscapes, interiors and still-lifes; the strongest influence on his works of this period, such as Japanese Girl (1935) and Table with Fruit and Coffee-pot (1936), was that of Matisse. In the 1930s and 1940s Hofmann played an increasingly prominent role in US art, particularly in transmitting modernist theories and new artistic developments. He wrote the book Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948). He taught many younger artists who later became established figures, including Lee Krasner, Helen Frankenthaler and Larry Rivers, and he continued teaching throughout the year until 1958, when he finally closed his schools and devoted all his time to painting. Hofmann's own art flowered after he closed down his school. His late paintings are characterised by the juxtaposition of strongly colored rectangles, e.g. in Pompeii (1959). These created the feeling of space because the human eye sees different colors as being at different distances from it. Hofmann termed this effect 'push and pull'. The paintings were often worked out by pinning rectangles of colored paper to the canvas. His work is a synthesis of Cubism, Fauvism, and geometric abstraction. He regularly evoked nature but was keen to respect the inherent differences between pictorial experiences and those of the natural world. He wrote: 'In nature, light creates color: in the picture, color creates light.' The degree of contact Hofmann had with European artists was rare in the contemporary US. The importance of his own art was for a long time overshadowed by his immense influence as a teacher and theorist, but by the late 1950s he was beginning to be recognized as one of the major figures of Abstract expressionism. Like other artists of his generation in the USA, in the early 1940s he became interested in procedures of automatism derived from Surrealism, in his case less as a way of using the subconscious than as a technique for creating new forms. In works such as The Wind (1942) he produced some of the earliest examples of drip painting; although the dating of these works is open to question, they may have preceded the exploitation of similar techniques by Jackson Pollock, to whom Hofmann was introduced by Lee Krasner in 1942. In spite of an initial hostility between Hofmann and Pollock, a close friendship evolved between them, which affected them both as artists. The imagery and techniques of Pollock's mythological paintings such as Moon-Woman Cuts the Circle (1942), for example, were directly reflected in paintings by Hofmann such as Idolatress I (1944). Within a few years, however, Hofmann had developed a highly distinctive form of abstraction based on patches of vivid color, vigorous gestures and textural contrasts, as in The Third Hand (1947). Although the dense surfaces and impulsive application of paint in his works of the 1950s, such as Le Gilotin (1953) and Fantasia in Blue (1954), can be associated with action painting, it soon became apparent that his work was distinguished by a rigorous concern with pictorial structure, spatial illusion and color relationships. He is most admired for his late paintings such as Magnum Opus (1962), in which he placed rectangles of single colors against more loosely painted backgrounds to establish dynamic pictorial relationships as well as a strong surface design. His influence among younger abstract artists, such as Helen Frankenthaler and the English painter John Hoyland, remained undiminished long after his death. — Hans Hofmann’s life affirms the importance of art as an essential activity of society. “Providing leadership by teachers and support of developing artists is a national duty, an insurance of spiritual solidarity,” wrote Hofmann in 1931. “What we do for art, we do for ourselves and for our children and the future.” Hofmann’s greatness lay in the consistency and uncompromising rigor of the artistic standards he devised and his aptitude for teaching those principles to a devoted and diverse body of students. Hofmann founded and taught at art schools from 1915 until 1958, and he inspired a wide range of artists, from Lee Krasner and Burgoyne Diller to Irene Rice Pereira. He is best remembered for teaching the fundamental issues of postwar abstraction: the employment of color and nonrepresentational forms, and the artist’s ability to weave sophisticated relationships between them. As one student, the painter Wolf Kahn, reports, “We were like a religious order . . . in the search for formal perfection.” For many of Hofmann’s students, this search consisted solely of formal innovation. Hofmann’s own work as a painter does not center on original discoveries; rather, it is a glowing synthesis of other movements such as Expressionism and De Stijl. This forces us to reexamine the definition of artistic “invention” and question the assumption that art must be seen in terms of discrete meaningful objects. In Hofmann’s case, art might better be judged as a model from which to teach. — The students of Hofmann included Natalie Bachrach Baker — Maurice Berezov — James Billmyer — Jane Bolmeier — Harry Bowden — Rae Eames — Marisol Escobar — Helen Frankenthaler — James Gahagan — Red Grooms — Rose Hertzberg — Yvonne Housser — Alfred Julio Jensen — Wolf Kahn — Karl Kasten — Ida Kohlmeyer — Lee Krasner — Alfred Leavitt — Allen Leepa — John Loftus — Joan Mitchell — Albert Newbill — Louise Nevelson — Stephen Pace — Joseph Plaskett — Paul Resika — Edgar Arthur Rupprecht — Elijah Silverman — Max Spoerri — Glenn Wessels — David Wurtzel — Mark Adams — Olga Albizu — Giorgio Cavallon — Franciska Clausen — Burgoyne Diller — Robert Goodnough — Alfred Lester Johnson — Allan Kaprow — Ahmet Zeki Kocamemi — Wolfgang Paalen — Larry Rivers — Richard Stankiewicz — Cemal Tollu — Nína Tryggvadóttir — Robert Henry — Selina Trieff [1934~]. — LINKS — Twilight (1957, 122x92cm; 1065x800pix, 190kb _ ZOOM to 1651x1240pix, 370kb) — Green Bottle (1921, 45x60cm; 606x800pix, 171kb _ ZOOM to 1244x1644pix, 593kb) _ The Pseudonymous John Courtguy has greatly transformed this into the colorful and intricate twin symmetrical abstractions _ Green Bought Title (2007; 724x1024pix, 274kb _ ZOOM to 1024x1448pix, 586kb _ ZOOM+ to 2636x3728pix, 4062kb) and _ Grin But Tell (2007; 724x1024pix, 274kb _ ZOOM to 1024x1448pix, 586kb _ ZOOM+ to 2636x3728pix, 4062kb) — Untitled (1944; 996x800pix _ ZOOM to 1596x1283pix, 601kb) — Embrace (1947, 60x145cm; 339x800pix, 61kb _ ZOOM to 930x2199pix, 250kb) — Integration (1944, 76x61cm ; 1002x800pix, 289kb _ ZOOM to 1600x1279pix, 648kb) — Red Flight (1953, 122x91cm) — Pompeii (1959, 214x133cm) –- The Conjurer (1946, 124x98cm; 799x625pix, 86kb _ .ZOOM to 1199x938pix, 97kb) sold for $192'000 at Sotheby's 11 May 2005 auction. _ Courtguy has greatly enhanced and transformed this into the twin symmetrical abstractions _ The Convicted Juror (2007; 724x1024pix, 284kb _ ZOOM to 1024x1448pix, 534kb _ ZOOM+ to 2636x3728pix, 2813kb) and _ The Juror Convicted (2007; 724x1024pix, 284kb _ ZOOM to 1024x1448pix, 534kb _ ZOOM+ to 2636x3728pix, 2813kb) — The Gate (1960, 191x123cm; 573x368pix, 66kb) _ This is part of a series of works loosely devoted to architectonic volumes. Hofmann used rectangles of color to reinforce the shape of his essentially unvarying easel-painting format. Although The Gate is subjectless, Hofmann insisted that, even in abstraction, students should always work from nature in some form. With determination and credulity, a viewer can see that the complex spatial relationship established by the floating planes of color begins to resemble the gate of the title. — Nulli Secundus (1964, 214x132cm) — Autumn Gold (1957; 390x449pix, 106kb) _ This is an important example of Hofmann's most familiar body of work. These images are distinguished by heavy rectangular slabs of intense, unmodulated colors that hover or superimpose themselves on the surface of the picture and are, in certain places, secured by thick, vigorous passages in a lower key. In Autumn Gold, incipient rectangles of color have been formed from the smaller dabs that Hofmann used in previous works, but here greatly enlarged. The rectangular forms first materialized in 1957, the year in which Hofmann created Autumn Gold; the following year, they would become more sharply defined, although painterly edges would continue to appear. In the words of the New York critic Clement Greenberg, Hofmann's commanding idiom was composed of a "fat, heavy, and eloquent surface" on which color is "saturated corporeally as well as optically." In his paintings, "presence" is related to "the picture's concentrated radiance, its effulgence and plenitude as an identity." — The Cathedral (1959, 189x124cm; 800x516pix, 86kb) — Song of the Nightingale (425x334pix, 38kb) — Golden Wall (1964; 300x365pix, 59kb) — book cover —(060320) |
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Died on 21 March 1864: Hippolyte-Jean
Flandrin, French Neoclassical
painter and lithographer born on 23 March 1809, son of amateur painter of
portraits Jean-Baptiste-Jacques Flandrin [1773–1838]. — Hippolyte was initially discouraged from fulfilling his early wish to become an artist by the lack of success of his brother René-Auguste Flandrin [06 May 1801 – 30 Aug 1842], but in 1821 the sculptor Denys Foyatier, an old family friend, persuaded both Hippolyte and his brother Jean-Paul Flandrin [28 May 1811 – 08 March 1902] to get trained as artists. He introduced them to the sculptor Jean-François Legendre-Héral [1796–1851] and the painter André Magnin [1794–1823], with whom they worked copying engravings and plaster casts. After Magnin’s death, Legendre-Héral took the brothers to the animal and landscape painter Jean-Antoine Duclaux [1783–1868]. Hippolyte and Paul had both learnt the techniques of lithography from Auguste at an early age, and between the ages of 14 and 19 Hippolyte produced a number of lithographs, which he sold to supplement the family income. Many reflected his passion for military subjects (e.g. Cossacks in a Bivouac, 1825). In 1826 the two brothers entered the École des Beaux-Arts in Lyon, where Hippolyte studied under Pierre Révoil. Showing a precocious talent, he was soon advised to move to Paris, and having left the École des Beaux-Arts in Lyon in 1829, he walked to the capital with his brother Paul; together they enrolled in the studio of Ingres. After several unsuccessful attempts, Hippolyte won the Grand Prix de Rome in 1832 with Theseus Recognized by his Father (1832), despite having suffered from cholera during the competition. His success was all the more spectacular given the general hostility to Ingres; Hippolyte was the first of his students to be awarded this prestigious prize. Hippolyte arrived in Rome in 1833; Paul joined him there in 1834 as his assistant. After first working on such subjects as Virgil and Dante in Hell (1836), Hippolyte developed a taste for religious works during this stay. From 1836 to 1837 he worked on Saint Clare Healing the Blind for the cathedral in Nantes, winning a first-class medal at the 1837 Salon, and in 1838 he painted Christ Blessing the Children, which was exhibited at the 1839 Salon. In 1837, fleeing a cholera epidemic in Rome, Hippolyte and Paul visited Padua, Venice, Verona, Mantua, and other places. Joined by Auguste in 1838, the three brothers visited Livorno, Milan, Pisa, and Florence. — Flandrin was born in Lyon and died in Rome. He came of a family of poor artisans and was a student of the sculptor Legendre and of Revoil. In his education, however, two elements must above all be taken into account. The first is the Lyonnais genius. Various causes, physical and historical, have combined to give the city of Lyon a character all its own. This is twofold, religious and democratic, and the laboring classes have always been an active centre of idealism. This is especially noticeable in its poets, from Maurice Scève to Lamartine. Lyon has also always been the great entrepôt for Italy, and the province was a permanent center of Roman culture. The second factor in Flandrin's development was the influence of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres [1780-1867], without which it is doubtful whether Flandrin would have achieved any fame. In 1829 Flandrin, with his brother Jean-Paul (the landscape painter), went to Paris, where he became a student of Ingres, who conceived a paternal affection for him. In Paris the young man experienced the bitterest trials. He was often without a fire, sometimes without bread, but he was sustained by a quiet but unshakable faith, and finally (1832) carried off the Grand Prix de Rome for The Recognition of Theseus by his Father. At Rome, where, after 1834, Ingres was director of the French Academy, his talents expanded and blossomed under the influence of natural beauty, a mild climate, and the noble spectacle of the works of classic and Christian antiquities. He sent thence to the French salons: Dante and Virgil (1835); Euripide (1835); Saint Clare Healing the Blind (1836); Christ Blessing the Children (1837). The serenity of his nature, his chaste sense of form and beauty, his taste for effective disposition of details, his moral elevation, and profound piety, found expression in these early efforts. On his return to Paris, in 1838, he was all intent upon producing great religious works. At this time there sprang up throughout the French School a powerful reaction against "useless pictures", against the conventional canvases exhibited since the end of the eighteenth century. There was a return to an art more expressive of life, less arbitrary, more mural and decorative. Delacroix, Chassériau, and the aged Ingres were engaged on mural paintings. It was above all, however, the walls of the churches which offered an infinite field to the decorators, to Chassériau, Victor Mottez, Couture, and Amaury Duval [1808-1885]. Within fifteen or twenty years this great pictorial movement, all too obscure, left on the walls of the public buildings and churches of Paris pictorial treasures such as had not been seen since the age of Giotto. It is possible, and even probable that the first impulse towards this movement (especially so far as religious paintings are concerned) was due to the Nazarene School. Ingres had known Overbeck [1789-1869] and Steinle at Rome; Flandrin may well have known them. In any case it is these artists whom he resembles above all in purity of sentiment and profound conviction, though he possessed a better artistic education. From 1840 his work is scarcely more than a painstaking revival of religious painting. The artist made it his mission in France to serve art more brilliantly than ever, for the glory of God, and to make beauty, as of old, a source of instruction and an instrument of edification to the great body of the faithful. He found a sort of apostolate before him. He was one of the petits prédicateurs de l'Évangile. Artistic productions in the mid-nineteenth century, as in the Middle Ages, became the Biblia Pauperum. Henceforth Flandrin's life was passed almost entirely in churches, hovering between heaven and earth on his ladders and scaffolds. His first work in Paris was in the chapel of St-Jean in the church of St-Séverin. He next decorated the sanctuary and choir of the church of St-Germain-des-Prés (1842-1848). On either side of the sanctuary he painted Christ's Entry into Jerusalem and The Journey to Calvary, besides the figures of the Apostles and the symbols of the Evangelists. All these are on a gold background with beautiful arabesques which recall the mosaic of Torriti at Santa Maria Maggiore. At St-Paul, Nîmes (1847-1849), he painted a lovely garland of virgin martyrs, a prelude to his masterpiece, the frieze in the nave of the church of Saint-Vincent-de-Paul in Paris. The last is a double procession, developing symmetrically between the two superimposed arches, without any exaggeration, a Christian Panathenæa, as it was called by Théophile Gautier. It might be shown how the ancient Greek theme is subjected, in the work of the modern painter, to a more flexible, less uniform, and more complex rhythm, how the melodic procession, without losing any of its grandeur or its continuity, is strengthened by silences, pauses, cadences. But it is more important to note the originality in the return to the most authentic sources of Christian iconography. Hitherto painters of this class hardly went back beyond the fourteenth or fifteenth century. But Flandrin turned to the first centuries of the Church, and drew his inspiration from the very fathers of religious thought. In the frieze of St-Vincent-de-Paul fifteen centuries of Christian tradition are unrolled. In 1855 the artist executed a new work in the apse of the church of Ainay near Lyons. On his return he undertook his crowning work, the decoration of the nave of St-Germain-des-Prés. He determined to illustrate the life of Christ, not from an historical, but from a theological, point of view, the point of view of eternity. He dealt less with facts than with ideas. His tendency to parallelism, to symmetry, found its element in the symbolism of the Middle Ages. He took pleasure in considering, according to this system of harmony and relations, the Old Testament as the prototype of the New, the burning bush as representing the Annunciation, and the baptism of Christ as prefiguring the crossing of the Red Sea. It was, perhaps, the first time since the frescoes of Perugino and Botticelli in the Sistine Chapel, that Christian art returned to its ancient genius. The interrupted tradition was renewed after three centuries of the Renaissance. Unhappily the form, despite its sustained beauty, possesses little originality. It is lacking in personality. The whole series, though exhibiting a high degree of learning and poise, of grace, and even of strength, lacks charm and life. The coloring is flat, crude, and dull, the design neutral, unaccented, and commonplace. It is a miracle of spiritual power that the seriousness of thought, the truth of sentiment, more harsh in the Old Testament, and more tender in the Christian, scenes, glow through this pedantic and poor style. Certain scenes, such as The Nativity, which strongly recalls the Nativity of Giotto at Padua, possess a sweetness which is quite human in their conventional reserve. Others, such as Adam and Eve after the Fall, and The Confusion of Tongues, are marked by real grandeur. This was Flandrin's last work. He was preparing a Last Judgment for the cathedral of Strasbourg, when he went to Rome, where he died. Apart from his religious work, Flandrin is the author of some very charming portraits. In this branch of painting he is far from possessing the acute and powerful sense of life of which Ingres possessed the secret. Nevertheless, pictures such as the Young Girl with a Pink, and the Young Girl Reading, of the Louvre, will always be admired. Nothing could be more maidenly and yet profound. His portraits of men are at times magnificent. Thus in the Napoléon III of the Versailles Museum the pale massive countenance of Caesar and his dream-troubled eyes reveal the impress of destiny. An admirable Study of a Man in the Museum of the Louvre, is quite "Ingresque" in its perfection, being almost equal to that master's Oedipus. What was lacking to the student in order that the artistic side of his work should equal its merits from the religious and philosophic side was the power of always painting in the style displayed in this portrait. — Flandrin's students included Jules-Élie Delaunay, Blaise Desgoffe, James Tissot. — LINKS — Madame Hippolyte Flandrin (1846, 83x66cm; 700x540pix, 125kb) épouse de l'artiste [1822-1882] — Jeune Homme Nu Assis au Bord de la Mer (1836, 98x115cm; 650x700pix, 195kb) _ Ce nu fut expédié comme "envoi" de quatrième année de Pensionnaire à l'Académie de France à Rome. Les leçons d'Ingres trouvent ici toute leur expression. Le corps s'inscrit dans un quasi cercle. Ce tableau fut exposé à l'Exposition universelle de Paris en 1855. — Jésus-Christ et les petits enfants (1838, 326x440cm; 512x745pix, 65kb) _ Le Christ, debout, vêtu d'une robe violacée et d'un manteau blanc, a les mains sur les têtes de deux enfants, nus et debout. A ses pieds, deux mères agenouillées, vues de dos, dont l'une a un manteau gris et l'autre un manteau jaune. Derrière elles, une petite fille en robe bleue, et une jeune mère debout, portant sur son bras un enfant emmailloté. Derrière le Christ, un des Apôtres. Au fond, Jérusalem et la montagne de Sion — René-Charles Dassy and His Brother Jean-Baptiste-Claude-Amédé Dassy (1850, 133x93cm) _ René-Charles and Jean-Baptiste Dassy were the last direct descendants of an old, wealthy family. Their parents' deaths when the brothers were children helped forge their close relationship. Flandrin knew the brothers well — as both were his students — and brilliantly captured their special bond in this double portrait. The sitters' clothing asserts their social status. Jean-Baptiste, the younger brother, wears a short redingote, white trousers, and gloves, and holds a riding crop or a thin walking stick. René-Charles dresses in the fashion à la grècque: embroidered black velvet jacket, loose shirt, and somewhat Oriental trousers. Their clothing, melancholy faces, and subdued elegance foreshadow the emergence of the dandy, a lifestyle unique to young 19th-century men. Although Flandrin emulated his teacher Ingres's style, Flandrin subtly introduced a greater sense of realism to his portraits. |
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