Hans Hofmann Quotes

• The whole world, as we experience it visually, comes to us through the mystic realm of color.

  Hans Hofmann

  Topics in Art

• Painters must speak through paint, not through words.

  Hans Hofmann

  Topics in Uncategorized

• The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.

  Hans Hofmann

  Topics in Confusion

  Tags in Simplicity

• When the impulses which stir us to profound emotion are integrated with the medium of expression, every interview of the soul may become art. This is contingent upon mastery of the medium.

  Hans Hofmann

• What goes on in abstract art is the proclaiming of aesthetic principles… It is in our own time that we have become aware of pure aesthetic considerations. Art never can be imitation.

  Hans Hofmann

• To worship the product and ignore its development leads to dilettantism and reaction.

  Hans Hofmann

• Through a painting we can see the whole world.

  Hans Hofmann

• The art of pictorial creation is so complicated – it is so astronomical in its possibilities of relation and combination that it would take an act of super-human concentration to explain the final realization.

  Hans Hofmann

• My aim in painting is to create pulsating, luminous, and open surfaces that emanate a mystic light, in accordance with my deepest insight into the experience of life and nature.

  Hans Hofmann

• It makes no difference whether a work is naturalistic or abstract; every visual expression follows the same fundamental laws.

  Hans Hofmann

• It is not the form that dictates the color, but the color that brings out the form.

  Hans Hofmann

• In nature, light creates the color. In the picture, color creates the light.

  Hans Hofmann

• Every art expression is rooted fundamentally in the personality and temperament of the artist.

  Hans Hofmann

• Creation is dominated by three absolutely different factors: First, nature, which works upon us by its laws; second, the artist, who creates a spiritual contact with nature and his materials; third, the medium of expression through which the artist translates his inner world.

  Hans Hofmann

• Colors must fit together as pieces in a puzzle or cogs in a wheel.

  Hans Hofmann

• Color is a plastic means of creating intervals… color harmonics produced by special relationships, or tensions. We differentiate now between formal tensions and color tensions, just as we differentiate in music between counterpoint and harmony.

  Hans Hofmann

• Being inexhaustible, life and nature are a constant stimulus for a creative mind.

  Hans Hofmann

• Art is to me the glorification of the human spirit, and as such it is the cultural documentation of the time in which it is produced.

  Hans Hofmann

• Art is magic… But how is it magic? In its metaphysical development? Or does some final transformation culminate in a magic reality? In truth, the latter is impossible without the former. If creation is not magic, the outcome cannot be magic.

  Hans Hofmann

• Art cannot result from sophisticated, frivolous, or superficial effects.

  Hans Hofmann

Hans Hofmann (22)

Birth:	21st March, 1880
Death:	17th February, 1966
Nationality:	American, German
Profession:	Painter

About

Hans Hofmann was born in Weißenburg, Bavaria, Germany. He was a German-American abstract expressionist painter. His art work is distinguished by a rigorous concern with pictorial structure, spatial illusion, and color relationships. He believed that abstract art was a way to get at the important reality. He opened his first school of painting in Munich in 1915. In 1930 he moved to the United States, where he taught at the Art Students League in New York City and later opened his own Hans Hofmann School of Fine Art, which soon became one of the most prestigious art schools in the country.

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