Hans Hofmann is the grand master of the New York School. This is clear from the kind of interpretive writing his work elicits from the citadels of even the safest tastes: “Every scrap of Hofmann’s painting, and every premise of his theory, points toward a timeless art, transcendent and monumental.” (William Seitz, “Hans Hofmann,” Museum of Modern Art, 1963.) It is clear from the reverential tone of the crowds filing in and out of the Kootz Gallery to see his latest paintings. Most importantly it is clear from the canvases themselves. They are productions by a master, not only in the sense in which they project an understanding of the issues which confront painting at a given moment and intend to demonstrate a resolution or synthesis of formally opposed positions, but also in the way that the demonstration itself always points back to the traditional conventions of the medium: in this case back to easel painting. It is a testimony to Hofmann’s gifts that he can continue to extend the boundaries of the easel convention to include experiences which are still vigorous and compelling. It is also a symptom of Hofmann’s position as “Maitre” that to viewers attuned to pictures which involve a more stringent and critical exploration of the possibilities open to painting, his didactic procedure may seem neither entirely relevant nor immediately moving.
Ora Pronobis centers a vivid yellow rectangle in a rectangular picture field, establishing on one level the paradigmatic central-point-perspective relationship between the shape of the foreground space (limited by the picture frame) and its echo in a similar frame (in representational art often a window or door) far off in the distance. This spatial metaphor is given body by the daring landscape connotations of the ground itself—a dark, richly painted field that breaks, as if at a horizon line, slightly above the harsh, yellow oblong, into a soft, voluptuous ground of lighter yellow—and by the illusionistically evocative paint-handling of this entire background. At the same time, the central motif reads aggressively in front of, and even away from, the surface of the canvas because of its violence of hue, its precise, almost excised contours, and its placement “over” another unmodulated square of color, this one cobalt blue. Further, the heavy impasto of the paint application seems to lock all the areas into the same surface skin of pigment, thereby promoting the work’s self-aware integration of searing, clear color with a full range of tonal nuances, poignantly deep space with a stringent control of the surface, painterly freedom with structural deliberateness.
But insofar as Hofmann’s structure is resolutely based on an alternately receding and projecting box space he aligns himself with an artist like Albers, a painter of Hofmann’s own generation. Both Albers and Hofmann, for all their individual sensitivity to color and exceedingly diverse sensibilities with regard to paint-handling, generate the meaning of their art from the forward and backward extensions of a closed, delimited space, the limiting factor in both directions identified in the self-same slab of color, the delectation of the painting dependent on the poignance of the matter existing in the impossible illusion of space between the two.
Even in a work like Frolicking, where Hofmann explores the tension between stain-like, impalpable mists of color and the physical mounds of pigment from which they seem to have been bled, the organization is not established by the action of color itself. Instead, unity is conferred on the picture by the superimposition of geometric shapes which seem to gravitate toward the center of the picture space, or at least to relate to one another through some sort of relation through depth to that center. Hofmann’s show seemed uneven, but where the works succeeded, as in the two cases mentioned above, they possessed an astonishing strength and rigor.
—Rosalind Krauss
