Question:
Tell me when you started studying with Hans Hofmann. How did it happen that you studied with him?

Irvin Kershner:
I had come out of three and a half years of being in Europe in the 8th Air Force and came back to Philadelphia, my hometown. And like so many of us, I was lost. Do I take the GI Bill and become a doctor, a lawyer, a chicken plucker? I didn’t know what to do. And I have a very close friend from high school, Seymour Reminick who was – always has been- an artist. At school he was always drawing and painting. Seymour went to New York to study with Hans Hofmann. I didn’t know who Hans Hofmann was. So at the end of the two terms I decided, ‘this is kind of boring.’ And I went to New York and he said, ‘Look, come down to 8th Street, second floor- Hans Hofmann’s atelier- and paint.’ So I did a little research on Hans Hofmann and decided he was really important. I wouldn’t be wasting my time. We moved in together in a cold water flat. We ate terrible junk food. Two-day old bread and things like that.

And we grew beards, long beards and we painted. Then the next summer, Hans Hofmann went to Provincetown, Massachusetts where he had his school. And so I had an old car, a terrible old Dodge. We packed up our stuff in there and went to Provincetown. We hired a fisherman’s cabin- no running water, no toilet, nothing. Moved in. And we became painters, you see. And that’s where we met some of the fascinating people that were there. There were Trotskyites, there were Leninists, there were Marxists, there were every group.

There were poets, there were painters- it was quite an interesting time. And the whole summer we painted, and that’s where I got to know Hans Hofmann. I didn’t know him as well on 8th Street but in Provincetown it was a different atmosphere.

First of all, at the end of the day he loved to go into the ocean. So we’d all follow him into the ocean. Here would be this big man jumping around in the waves. He had a real joy of life. That was as important as anything I learned about painting.

I mean, he just loved to go into the water- it was cold Atlantic water- and jump and slosh around. That was good. Then we watched him paint a few times. In fact, he had a smock on, he was nude- he just had a flimsy little smock on. And he was doing these paint panels. He’d sand down wooden panels with white gesso and then keep putting gesso, gesso, and sanding until it was a very fine surface. And then he would make these beautiful, beautiful panels of color. His sense of color was unique, I felt. But one day I walked into his kitchen the first time. I was amazed. The kitchen looked like one of his paintings. He had a yellow chair, the table was purple. Another chair was a beautiful cerulean blue. The walls were some kind of peach. I mean, everything was painted up. I was in middle of a Hans Hofmann painting. And I realized he was living color. Color to him was what he saw. Color became form. It wasn’t so much the drawing. The drawing was determined by the color. And of course then he began slowly to lecture to us. Push and pull. Space. All he talked about was space. And how do you get space? You don’t get it by perspective. Get it by color. Superimposition and color. Light colors, dark colors, blues, yellow, warm colors as opposed to cold colors. And he just would talk as he was playing with our paintings. And he never sat down and lectured us. But in going around from painting to painting, he would talk about his theory of paint.

Then he’d throw in remarks about what Picasso said or what Matisse said or what Derain said to him. I mean, it was really amazing for us. To begin to hear someone talk about the people as if there were living creatures and not in the past, dead. He knew these people when he was young. It was an exciting time.

But the thing that I recall was paint- use paint. Don’t hide the fact that it’s a painting. Don’t try to cover it up with textures that are so-called realistic or naturalistic. Not important. It’s paint. He also discouraged us from just standing in front of a canvas and doing a painting from our navel. No, he said. You must use nature. Nature is the key. And he set up these little still lifes.

Some colored celluloid, an apple, an old white fish, a chicken- I mean, odd things. Combinations like you’ve never seen. If there was nothing around, he would take a big piece of paper, crumple it up, throw it in front of the window and study it. He’d say, ‘Look how the light bends, look at the form. Look what creates a three-dimensional form.’ And this would be enough inspiration to begin a whole painting. He wanted us to paint from nature. Not to make it up. That to me was the most important thing that I learned. Because I learned that naturalism is a very primitive thing that you start with. You think that you’re going to recreate nature- and then you throw that away. You begin to find the form. I don’t mean triangulation or Cubism. You find the forms in nature. And then you realize that there are no lines in nature. There are only the dissection points of two planes.

A line is where two planes come together. That’s what is important- to see the planes. Hofmann, in effect, opened my eyes to looking at nature. He also loved Cezanne. At the time, I didn’t appreciate Cezanne, but I began to look very closely in the museums at Cezanne’s paintings and I gradually began to see the beauty, the economy of means of a Cezanne still life or landscape.

Question:
How did Hofmann affect you?

IK:
Well, what do you get out of a teacher? Do you get technique? Not really. I mean, any technique you learn from a teacher, you’re gonna change and make it your own anyway. How did he affect me? By walking into his kitchen and seeing the colors of his furniture. By looking at him paint, splattering paint everywhere. I mean, his gown was open- he was nude, the paint was all over him. He was just enjoying it so much. At the Tyler School of Fine Arts, oh, we learned a lot about technique. And we learned how to make our own paints and rub the pigment between glass and mix colors and put the linseed oil on and prepare the canvas- it was all technique. But opening my eyes, that’s it. That meant something. And I really thank Hans Hofmann for that.