Hans Hofmann: Pushing and Pulling
The painter was a famous teacher--but should that be the capstone on his legacy?
It shouldn’t be a surprise that the books left by great artists aren’t as good as their paintings1—that’s the gig, after all—but there’s a subset of great artists who are better known for their teaching than for their painting—and those folks you’d expect to have left us some great books. You’d be wrong!
On the one hand, it’s a blessing: it left these folks free to do their crafts, rather than muttering over the typewriter with a slow-filling page and a fast-filling ashtray. But it’s also a pity that these people who were clearly gifted at communicating aesthetic insights didn’t communicate them to us. Leaving me with the frequently-asked question: Was Hans Hofmann more important as a painter or as a teacher?
II. The Best of Company.
I’m most interested in Hofmann for his role as midwife to post-war art,2 but his life spans many epochal divides. Born in 1880 in Bavaria in modest circumstances, Hofmann studied with the painter Moritz Heymann in 1899 and began his life as an international nomad in Paris by 1906. A patron supported his modernist painting and the Berlin dealer Paul Cassirer gave him shows, notably alongside the Austrian Oskar Kokoschka in 1910. Hofmann wasn’t at home in Paris when Germany declared war on France in 1914—he never recovered the paintings that he was forced to abandon there, and retreated to the only place that a penniless German national could. Retrenching in Munich, he settled into teaching.
We don’t have many examples of Hofmann’s early painting, and he seems to have devoted himself to teaching to the exclusion of his own work at the easel. In the 1920s, Hofmann taught a number of American expats—two were especially important to his escape from fascism in the next decade. Worth Ryder got Hofmann a teaching gig in California in 1930,3 and Vaclav Vytlacil would help bring Hofmann to the Art Students League of New York. No small thing: Hofmann’s wife wrote from Germany begging him to “put order into your relationship to the U.S.A. soon. Here they are drafting even the veteran reserve up to 65 years . . . and it is possible that also Germans living abroad could be drafted” in 1938.4 A terrifying thought, although Hofmann’s friends and mentors in Germany faced worse—hunted by the Nazis for Judaism, homosexuality, and modernism5—and Hofmann scrambled to gain American citizenship.
Stabilized by citizenship, his wife’s arrival from Europe, and a school he opened on West 8th Street in New York, Hofmann got down to the real work: evangelizing for the new art—and his students were serious: Lee Krasner and Clement Greenberg. With summer sessions in Gloucester and Provincetown, Hofmann held onto the practice of painting outdoors from nature. When Krasner brought Jackson Pollock around one day, Hofmann explained that observation of nature was central to even the most abstract work—Pollock famously replied, “I am nature.”
(Jackson Pollock was something else). Meanwhile, Hofmann formalized his fully abstract notion of the “push-pull.”
III. The Push-Pull.
Maybe it’s best that we have only fragmentary testimony about what Hofmann meant by “the push-pull”—Hofmann’s famous coinage.6 A painting that has depth activates the relationship with the viewer—pushing and pulling rather than leaving the picture “in” the frame. In pre-modernist painting, we look into a painting—as if at a fish tank or out a window, at something with lateral qualities. Hofmann wanted the painting to be there in the room with you—coming at you not through modeling of form but just “plastic depth.” Changing an artwork from being concerned about a picture plane perpendicular to the viewer to engaging primarily with the viewer—it’s another way of making the picture the thing, nothing but the picture plane.
This informed—perhaps directly shaped7—Clement Greenberg’s idea that each art form should dedicate itself to what it specializes in: sculpture should exploit the third dimension and not bother with a painted surface, while painting should understand itself as a flat rectangle and just focus on that.
This also accommodated the major competing theory about the New York School: Harold Rosenberg’s “Action Painting” theory—that canvas essentially preserved the mark of the great gesture of the artist. The artist addresses this canvas with a splash or a squirt or a full-arm sweep,8 and the canvas addresses the viewer.9
This aesthetic philosophy also informs just about everything in the post-war art world. We no longer look to art as an object that shows, we want an object that is. Whether you’re looking at de Kooning’s Excavation or Damien Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living—a shark in formaldehyde—the important confrontation is the artwork and you.
This was a gift that generations of post-war artists embraced and celebrated, as they produced wildly divergent visual styles. In 1952, a group of Hofmann’s students banded together to form New York’s second artist-collective gallery, alluding to their teacher in its name: The Hansa Gallery.10 Wolf Kahn could be said to resemble Hofmann’s practice, but the other members of the collective—among them the sculptor Richard Stankiewicz and the painter Jan Müller—are so different in their materials and motives, it’s hard to see the master’s hand in any of their rusting, rippling surfaces. Hofmann’s influence was clearly there, but, like his paintings, it goes deep.
That may be the true mark of a great teacher. Hofmann didn’t make his artists look like him; he made generations of artists and art-lovers look differently.
III. Curtain Call.
And then Hofmann had what Americans are not supposed to get and painters are never supposed to be paid for: a second act. In Hofmann’s case, it was a delirious, magisterial—and commercially successful late bloom. From 1958 to his death in 1966, he produced a body of paintings to exceed in impact all of his teaching: explosive, beautiful, and big, these late canvases encompassed all that he’d taught and much of what he must have learned from his students and colleagues. They sold well in his lifetime, and even better lately: the top of Hofmann’s market in this century, there are 35 pictures that have sold for north of a million dollars—only four of those were made before 1958 (and not long before: Orchestral Dominance in Green brought $2.5M in 2014, and Studio No. II in Blue, for $1.9M—were both painted in 1954; Swamp Series IV—Sunburst and Early Dawn, bringing $4M and $2M respectively, were painted in 1957).
This was the first way I encountered Hofmann—in the stunning Rhapsody at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Painted a year before his death, it’s so fresh that it doesn’t suggest it was painted by an 85-year-old born before the unification of modern Germany. It has geometry, but nothing could be further from pre-war geometric abstraction. The color, the composition, the smash with which the paint lands on the canvas: I see the passion of Rothko and de Kooning, premonitions of Wolf Kahn and Alma Thomas; a daring courting of ugliness that only Robert Rauschenberg did better.
But we’d be better served by taking these monuments to snarling, powerful painting as the great record of this man’s insights and pedagogy. Almost none of his early paintings exist; those of his middle period offer a window into what the earlier work might have been. He wrote here and there—but instead of musing over cryptic remarks11 and out-of-context reminiscences from his legion of students,12 we have these late works to crown and memorialize one of the great careers of the twentieth century—as educator through a visual medium.
Thanks for reading,
Jonathan
jonathan@jonathanmillerspies.com
While not every artist writes, everyone who writes about art, it seems, paints, or at least painted. Not even fair to judge Ruskin, Clement Greenberg, etc., on the crummy watercolors they left behind; there are only a few really good writers on art that also made really good paintings: Fairfield Porter being my favorite, but I’m sure my inbox will be full with other candidates by the end of the day.
For an overview on the changes around World War II, see our article here.
Though the California expressionists Richard Diebenkorn, David Parks, and Elmer Bischoff were too young to take Hofmann’s classes at summer sessions in Berkeley in the early 1930s, when they began their studies it was in a community still in Hofmann’s thrall. At least superficially, the Bay Area Figurative Movement was one of Hofmann’s immediate legacies.
As quoted in Hans Hofmann: A Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings (2012).
Cassirer and Heymann killed themselves; Kokoschka fled to Prague and then to London.
Not that he didn’t write about it—he did, but it’s rough sledding: “The picture plane reacts automatically in the opposite direction to the stimulus received; thus action continues as long as it receives stimulus in the creative process. Push answers with pull and pull with push.” I mean, that’s only reasonable, right?
Greenberg was uncharacteristically generous with Hofmann, saying that Hofmann had “grasped the issues at stake better than did Roger Fry and better than Mondrian, Kandinsky, Lhote, Ozenfant, and all the others who have tried to ‘explicate’ the recent revolution in painting.”
The “full-arm sweep” was another Rosenberg-ism, devoted to Willem de Kooning, first-coined in “Reviews and Previews: Willem de Kooning,” Art News, May, 1959, p. 13.
The Hansa Gallery was relatively short-lived, but see our article on the artist’s cooperatives of the Village here.
The earliest published use of the push/pull expression comes in 1948 with Hofmann’s essay, delightfully entitled “Search for the Real”!
Robert Henri’s The Art Spirit is one such baffling spirit-board compiled by students.