Question:
How did you happen to come to the Hofmann School?

Paul Resika:
Let’s see… I had a friend named Pennerton West who had studied with Hofmann. She was a friend of Lee Krasner and of Pollock and that world. She was a very good painter whose work disappeared entirely. Marvelous painter, completely forgotten. She lived in one of those old, grand sort of Victorian houses that you used to see a little ways up. It was like the Midwest as soon as you went up twenty miles from New York in those days.

At any rate, she gave me her barn to paint in and I would paint landscapes and various things because I was even a painter at a very young age. At one point she said, “Well, now you have to go to Hofmann. That’s obvious.” I must have been 16 years old or something.

So I went down to see him, and I knew that was the new art. The way you know when you’re a kid, you know? And so I began going. I was still in high school, but I would go every evening to the night school. That was about 1945. There were about six, seven people in the school, that’s all. Maybe eight. And these people were perennial Hofmann students. They’d been there 10 years, and they explained it all to me, so I became a Hofmann acolyte. But I was a very young kid. I have a whole portfolio of drawings that I did at that time.



The next year I wrote Hofmann a letter asking if I could be his monitor for the next year, and go day and night, all day and all night. And that was my real training with Hofmann. He wrote me back, saying, yes, show up, this and this, in that beautiful hand of his, which you know from his signatures. I wish I had that letter. Beautiful letter saying: You come at this and this hour, whatever it was, you’ll be the monitor, and signed “Beste wishes.” And the “best” was B-E-S-T-E. This I remember very well. It made a great impression on me. I was just a kid, after all.



Anyhow, so then I was with Hofmann that whole winter and spring all day and night. I left after that. So I was really a student of Hofmann one year at night and one year all day and night and then I quit.

Question:
You quit, you said, because you wanted academic training?

PR:
Yes, yes. I was too young to think I was so perfect without knowing anything. Meaning the stupid things. The ordinary things. Anatomy, etc. Hofmann, probably rightly, thought that was an impossible situation. You probably had to learn that when you were 12. I probably was too old; I was 17, 18- he was probably right.

On the other hand, Hofmann himself had had quite a powerful academic training, I think. Judging from the way he drew, he drew like someone who knows anatomy very, very well. All his lines hooked in around muscles in the way the old-time anatomist used to draw.



Not that he ever used anatomy or anything like that. That was anathema, and rightly so, because it made you see things instead of relationships. Hofmann was not interested in drawing things, but drawing relationships in things.

Question:
Tell us about the models Hofmann used.

PR:
The models posed for the whole week. Didn’t pose in any short poses. We set the model on Monday, they’d pose right through till Friday. One pose in the morning, one in the afternoon, one pose in the evening.

Question:
Now, would the model be chosen as somebody beautiful, or-?

PR:
Not necessarily. Sometimes they were beautiful. They could be men or women. They were, to me, older women then. Maybe they were in their thirties. I didn’t know quite their relation to Hofmann- I know they worshipped him.

When Hofmann would come through in the morning, the afternoon and the evening, he’d go right through the class, stopping to criticize maybe one in four, five students. And most of us would follow him and see his criticism, which had drawing in it, since his English was so bad it didn’t matter.

He was full of life, though. And we would follow him. Those who didn’t follow him didn’t understand. They were not real acolytes.

Question:
Even after you stopped as a student, you went to Provincetown and painted his house. Why?

PR:
Yes, yes. Well, he needed the house painted. So three or four of us went up. It was a great honor. What do you mean? We weren’t like assistants now who get paid- it was a fantastic honor. Miz would make us lunch, and we’d drink beer and have Hofmann talk to us. My God, what an honor! It was a very different world in this respect. So, yes, I went to Provincetown. I lived there four months or so, and I painted. But I still considered myself part of the Hofmann world. I wasn’t against him, as I became a little later. I mean, against what he stood for.

Question:
What do you mean?

PR:
Well, I was growing up then- I can’t really say why. I was interested in classical art. I was a young American barbarian. I didn’t know anything. Hofmann was a European with the greatest background in the world. I was 17, and just missed the draft. Because most of the people there had been four or five years in the army, they’d seen Europe, they’d had another vision. There was Nick Corone, who’d one the Prix de Rome. There was Remenek, who became a great landscape painter, who’d been in Paris. In other words, I needed to do all these other things. And Hofmann didn’t fill it in for me.

Question:
You said that Hofmann talked about Rembrandt and Michelangelo. Was this when you were a student?

PR:
Michelangelo. He always talked about Michelangelo, yes, and Rembrandt quite a bit. Sometimes Renoir. Picasso a lot.

Question:
What would he say?

PR:
Well, that was the explanation for the ideas of plasticity. They were very clear. He taught you to get volume, like the drawings of Michelangelo. It wasn’t color, it was volume. Volume. And composition. He taught you to make things react against each other and have relationships.

It was a very great message. I realized it a little later, how important it was. It marked all of us who studied with him.

Question:
You started painting in a more realistic way when you left school.

PR:
After a couple of years, yes. Then I went abroad. I went to France, then to Italy- exactly 50 years ago.

Question:
You say that you’re doing more work like Hofmann today than you did then?

PR:
Oh, yes. I’m with him. I’ve been with him for many years. He’s been in here. I don’t see him anymore, but he’s been here.



There’s a great life-force in Hofmann. It was rare that Hofmann’s work was contemplative or subtle. He didn’t have everything, you know. He was no Renoir. He was no Cezanne. He was a wonderful painter, but it was always with force. Almost always. There are rare pictures that give another quality, either a metaphysical or a gentler quality. Rare, rare. I’m sure he had it, but- well, anyhow. He’s terrific, but not everybody has everything. Hofmann influenced me a great deal throughout my life. And sometimes his work looks a little too much like a brass band to me. It’s too powerful. Too much like a German band playing in the square. And sometimes it looks like the life-force itself. So it depends how you take it. He’s certainly an artist.

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