Hofmann Anniversary Piece
A retrospective marking Hans Hofmann’s March 21 birth (1880) revisits his role teaching figure drawing as the foundation of Abstract Expressionism — the article framed the moment as 146 years since his birth and traced his influence on modern abstraction (nudeartla.com). It’s a neat primer if you’re tracking the lineage from academic drawing to contemporary abstraction (nudeartla.com).
After summer sessions at UC Berkeley in 1930 and 1931, Hofmann settled in New York in September 1932 and taught a six‑week evening drawing class at the Art Students League. (hanshofmann.org) He moved from private classes at 444 Madison Avenue in late 1932–33 to formally re‑open the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts at 137 East 57th Street in 1934, with the school later operating from addresses including 52 West 8th Street by 1938. (pbs.org) Hofmann launched a summer school in Provincetown in the mid‑1930s (sources cite 1934–35), and that Provincetown/New York school system remained active until he closed both in 1958 so he could concentrate on his own painting. (theartstory.org) Students who studied under him included Lee Krasner (who enrolled in Hofmann classes in the 1930s), Helen Frankenthaler, Larry Rivers and designer Ray Kaiser (Ray Eames), and Hofmann maintained a close professional link with Jackson Pollock while critic Clement Greenberg attended his lectures and later promoted his work. (en.wikipedia.org) Hofmann codified the "push‑pull" theory of spatial dynamics and argued for abstraction’s roots in nature, and his own experiments—such as the 1940 work Spring—prefigure paint‑drip techniques later associated with Pollock. (britannica.com) He became a U.S. citizen in 1941, mounted his first New York solo exhibition at Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century in 1944, formally disbanded his schools in 1958, and died in New York on February 17, 1966. (guggenheim-venice.it)
