Hans Hofmann
BASTIAN
Shown in the United Kingdom for the first time, the nine works collected in “Fury: Painting after The War” serve as a dark corrective to Hans Hofmann’s perceived image: the colorist whose Tetris-like blocks of melting intensity heralded him as a key figure of Abstract Expressionism. (His drip paintings prefigured Jackson Pollock’s.)
Here, Hofmann emerges as an artist of unreconciled energies. Born in Germany in 1880, he studied art in Munich before moving in 1904 to Paris, where he lived for the next decade. In the 1930s, Hofmann landed in New York, via the vitamin-infused climes of California.