Hans Hofmann

Hans Hofman – Early interest in modern art and science

Hans Hofman was born on 21 March 1880 in Bavarian Weißenburg. At the age of six, he moved with his family to Munich where he began drawing early on, favouring motifs from nature, to which he felt closely tied. From 1898 he attended various art schools and earned a living as teaching assistant at the state building authority in Bavaria. This gave Hofmann the occasion to demonstrate not only his artistic talent but also great technical skill and he designed both a radar device for ships and a calculating machine. His teachers included Moritz Heymann and Willy Schwarz, the latter introducing Hofmann to the idea of Impressionism and encouraging a study trip to Paris. The financial support of the German businessman Philipp Freudenberg eventually enabled Hans Hofmann to make the longed-for journey to France. 

First solo exhibition in Berlin, his own art school in Munich

In Paris, Hans Hofmann attended the Académie Colarossi and the Académie de la grande chaumière, was a regular guest at the artist meeting place, Café du Dôme, on Montparnasse, and became acquainted with Cubism. He met Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso and became friends with the couple Robert Delauney and Sonia Delauney-Terk. In 1909, Hofmann took part in the exhibition of the Berlin Secession with his Cubist style pictures, and one year later held his first solo exhibition at Galerie Paul Cassirer. The outbreak of the First World War caught Hofmann unawares during a convalescence on Corsica – he was spared military service due to a lung condition, but as a German citizen was henceforth denied entry to Paris and was forced to settle in Munich. Here he opened one of the first schools for modern art which flourished particularly in the inter-war period as it offered foreign students better conditions than most other German universities. The excellent reputation as a teacher that Hofmann earned during these years, not least in the USA, was soon to pay off in view of the imminent takeover by the National Socialists. 

Success with his own reading of Abstract Expressionism

Following increased contact with the American art scene since the 1920s through the American painters Ernest Thurn and Vaclav Vytlacil and having spent several summers lecturing in the USA, Hans Hofmann finally moved to New York in 1932. In his German homeland, his art was considered degenerate, making it impossible for him to continue working as a painter and teacher. He founded his second art school in Manhattan in 1933 and proved himself again as a proficient teacher. He celebrated his first exhibition in 1944, at the age of 64, in the Galerie Art of This Century, run by Peggy Guggenheim. There followed exhibition after exhibition, but despite growing success, Hofmann was 78 when he could finally afford to give up teaching and work purely as an artist. With his own individual interpretation of American Abstract Expressionism, he took part in Documenta II in Kassel and represented his adopted country of USA at the Venice Biennale in 1960. 

Hans Hofmann died in New York on 17 February 1966.