UNDERSTANDING HANS HOFMANN

Description

First hand account of legendary painter and teacher Hans Hofmann written by Sam Feinstein, a close contemporary colleague of Hofmann, and edited by Sascha Feinstein, poet and professor.

An excerpt from the book:
Hofmann tried to approach livingness from inside, pushing outward, rather than approaching it from outside, cutting it apart the way a dissector would do it. It’s similar to the way I feel about the best Cubist paintings. Those are not just dissections; rather, they become something far more expansive—just as you can’t say that a great Bach fugue is “a dis-section” of different notes. Something else is built-up by it, some charismatic, transcendent projection that then affects the viewer as if it existed in painting—not on the canvas but between the canvas and the viewer. It should charge the air—the supposed empty space between the canvas surface and the viewer—so that this presence becomes something palpable. That’s what I mean by the canvas projecting or giving out: making something out of the canvas rather than something on the canvas. It’s the difference between a person who restricts himself by holding on to himself, and one who is so free with what he gives out that he charges a room with his personality.