Spotlight Review - Massachusetts

Hans Hofmann: Circa 1950
The Rose Art Museum @ Brandeis University • Waltham, MA • www.brandeis.edu/rose

Hans Hofmann: Circa 1950, curated by scholar Catherine Morris and Rose Art Museum Director Michael Rush, provides an intellectually generous, visually stunning cross-section of paintings and drawings from a pivotal year in Hofmann’s long career as teacher, writer, and artist. As a young man, the German-born Hofmann participated in the twentieth century’s formative aesthetic dialogues, including fauvism, cubism, and futurism; after he migrated to the United States in 1932, his work and teaching helped develop the distinctly American style, abstract expressionism. In 1950, at age seventy, Hofmann was at the peak of his imaginative and creative powers. In this one year, Hofmann created more than fifty paintings; wrote two important explorations of his work and practice; and contributed to growing recognition of abstract expressionism through the 1950 “Irascibles” letter of protest to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in addition to an influential symposium and key exhibitions.

Hofmann eschewed characteristic style, and his diversity—de-Kooning-like energy, Miróesque form, Matissean color—resonates throughout the exhibition, most emphatically in its core and inspiration: the Chimbote paintings, nine large studies for murals commissioned (but unexecuted) for an urban-renewal project by architect Josep Luis Sert. The panels’ non-planar, three-dimensional installation down the center of the gallery compellingly evokes their architectural origins, inviting viewers into their virtual space while making fully available Hofmann’s profuse, interconnected choices of color, form, and texture.

The Chimbote panels summon multiple natural, cultural, and spiritual associations. In panel one, a birdlike form evokes both an insubstantial spirit and a physical being; a glowing disk conjures physical heat and emotional passion. Panel four’s hollowed cross hovers between palpability and immateriality as it kicks outward from the surface, yet remains tethered by a blazing sun, an earthlike orb of verdant green, and lapped planes that are proportioned to suggest a human form. Thematic pairs—vegetal, anthropoid, experiential—heighten drama and underscore conceptual unity. Geometric, spatial compositions suggest the stability of the built environment; freeform and planar compositions inscribe the sensual flux of the natural one. Panels five and six, for example, return to the cross motif and juxtapose luminous geometry with emotionally darker gestures.

Abstract expressionism can be viewed as inwardly focused, a retreat from its era’s disruptions of exile, war, holocaust, and threatening nuclear annihilation. Hofmann, however, embracing art as refuge, had the strength and experience to maintain perspective beyond the personal. Throughout this exhibit, small-scale works incorporate contrasting visions and techniques, sharing the Chimbote panels’ surface responsiveness and vitality, gestural spontaneity, color sensitivity and daring, and structural versatility and integrity. In Push and Pull II, stylistic and textural variations—transparency and opacity, thickening and scoring, clarity and obscurity—record both the artist’s expressive challenges and his artistic resources. Exuberant joie de vivre and technical virtuosity balance the milky blues of Midsummer Night, the embracing swirls of Pink Phantasie—intimate worlds of shared experience. 

Hans Hofmann is an ideal subject for what, sadly, may be the Rose’s valedictory exhibition. As teacher, writer, and artist, Hofmann devoted his life to bridging academic and artistic, iconic and fresh, theoretical and real—as has the Rose throughout its too-brief history—without losing sight of art’s true purpose: beauty, enlargement of spirit, pleasure. Aligned fully with this tradition, Circa 1950 offers a reassuring balm for chills greater and longer-lasting than those of a winter’s day.

—Susan Boulanger

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