Search For the Real: Hans Hofmann and His Students brings together more than thirty drawings by several of Provincetown’s most celebrated contemporary artists. This exhibition features fifteen drawings by renowned Abstract Expressionist Hans Hofmann, loaned to PAAM by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Twenty prefatory drawings by notable Hofmann students Fritz Bultman, Giorgio Cavallon, William Freed, Lee Krasner, Myrna Harrison, Robert DeNiro, Sr., Robert Henry, Selina Trieff, Haynes Ownby and Robert Fisher, among others will also be on view.
Hans Hofmann was a German-born American abstract expressionist painter who immigrated to the United States in 1932. Through his own artwork and his instruction of emerging artists, Hofmann became a primary influence on the Abstract Expressionist movement in America. He famously stated that, “the ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.” Hofmann’s school of art played a major role in solidifying the abstract expressionist movement in the Provincetown Art Colony, having a significant impact on PAAM and its growing collection of American art.
A selection of student drawings included in the exhibition feature annotations by Hofmann – revealing elements of his classroom guidance and the rigorous concern for pictorial structure and his push/pull spatial theory that characterize his school.
Hans Hofmann (1880-1966) was an influential figure in the abstract expressionist movement. Born in Bavaria in 1880, Hofmann began his studies in Munich. By 1904, he moved to Paris where he was influenced by the likes of Kandinsky. In 1915, Hofmann founded his own art school in Munich; taught summer sessions in Bavaria, Yugoslavia, Italy and France; and later founded schools in New York and Provincetown where he influenced students such as Helen Frankenthaler, Red Grooms, Alfred Jensen, Wolf Kahn, Lee Krasner, Louise Nevelson and Frank Stella.
Hofmann was also a prominent writer on modern art, authoring the iinfluential Search for the Real, in which he discusses his philosophy of art, the spiritual value of creative production, and the relationships of line, color and composition.
Hans Hofmann’s works are in the permanent collections of major national and international museums, including the University of California Berkeley Art Museum, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Seattle Art Museum, the Dayton Art Institute, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Honolulu Academy of Arts, the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus (Munich), the Museu d’Art Contemporani, (Barcelona), and the Tate Gallery (London). He has also designed a mural located outside the entrance of the High School of Graphic Communication Arts located in the Hells Kitchen neighborhood, NYC.
This exhibition is sponsored by the Inn at the Moors,
and Underwritten by Partners in Art
PAAM, 460 Commercial Street
Provincetown, MA 02657
(508) 487-1750 Fax: (508) 487-4372
www.paam.org
Image: Blanche Lazzell, Untitled drawing with Hofmann annotations, marked “summer 1937” (1937). Charcoal on paper,25 x 19”. West Virginia University Art Collection, 1995.002.038
