Hans Hofmann is buried near my house at Snow Cemetery in Truro Center. I visit his grave fairly often. I suppose it’s something of a memento mori. Hofmann died a month and four days after I was born. While we shared this world for just thirty-four days, his thinking and work have shaped my life as an artist. I feel a parallel to his life, too, having put teaching ahead of my own art making early in my career, And his memorialized presence in my neighborhood reminds that no matter how big an influence we may have, life is fleeting and finite. Best to make every day count.

Hofmann’s stated goal was to translate the visual and spiritual experience of nature. I’ve written elsewhere about his theories of art making, as expressed through his teachings, so I won’t rehash those thoughts here. But last week I ran across this quotation, which helps me think about my own project as an artist: “Art must not imitate physical life, art must have a life of its own — a spiritual life. A painter must create pictorial life … which demands that he must be able to activate the picture surface with the means at his disposal to create that life” (Hans Hofmann: The Nature of Abstraction). I’ve recently confessed in my workshops that I’m feeling a little constrained by an impulse toward depiction, so this is a good reminder to crack things open again.

I was trained by a generation of teachers whose worldview was shaped by the web of students who worked with Hofmann in the 30s, 40s, and 50s. One of Hofmann’s greatest contributions to the teaching of painting was his push/pull theory of spatial relations. He believed that contrasts of colors, forms, and textures created tensions in our perception that had to be balanced in a picture. While my teachers may not have been his students directly, his influence was such that, by the 1980s when I was a student, his ideas radiated through American art schools. And, with the exception of one teacher late in my undergraduate career, his influence went largely uncredited. 

His invisibility from the discussion when I was in art school might be a testament to the common sense of his teaching. But it also has something to do with the way his work generally withdrew from the conversation. Buried next to him are his two wives — Maria, with who he spent most of his life, and Renate, who he married a year before he died. Renate’s life after Hofmann’s death is fairly tragic, and her court-appointed guardians bilked the Hofmann Estate for a decade while also keeping his work from wider scholarship. After her death The Renate, Hans and Maria Hofmann Trust was established. The Trust has done much to bring Hofmann’s contributions forward again. 

_{Hans Hofmann}

_{Hans Hofmann, Watercolor on paper, 1946. Private Collection}

_{Hans Hofmann, Provincetown Number One, 1937. Collection Oklahoma City Museum of Art}

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