 |
1874
Claude Monet’s painting “Impression: Sunrise,” derided by critics at an exhibition in Paris, provides the moniker for the Impressionist movement which flourishes through the 1890s.
1880
Hans Hofmann is born in Weissburg, Bavaria, Germany on March 21st, the son of Theodor and Franziska Hofmann.
1886
The family moves to Munich where Theodor Hofmann becomes a government official. At the Gymnasium, Hans develops special interests in mathematics, science, and music. He plays the violin, piano, and organ and begins to draw.
1896
With his father’s help, young Hans takes a position as assistant to the director of Public Works of the State of Bavaria. He develops his technical knowledge of mathematics, and invents an electromagnetic comptometer.
1898
Hofmann studies painting at Moritz Heymann’s art school in Munich. He is introduced to Impressionism.
1900
Hofmann meets Maria (Miz) Wolfegg, his future wife. Early works, such as the 1902 portrait of Miz shown at right demonstrate the influence Impressionism had on the young artist.
1903
Through his instructor Willi Schwarz, Hofmann meets Phillip Freudenberg, who becomes his patron from 1904 to 1914, enabling him to live in Paris.
1904 - 1910
Hofmann frequents the Café du Dome, a haunt of artists and writers. Miz joins him in Paris. He attends evening sketch class at the Ecole de la Grand Chaumiere and the Academie Colarossi. Meets Picasso, Braque, and Matisse.
1908
Hofmann exhibits with the New Secession in Berlin, and again in 1909. Miz designs scarves with Sonia Delaunay (then Sonia Uhde).
1910
Hofmann’s first solo exhibition is held in Berlin. He becomes friends with Robert Delaunay, who influences his exploration of color, as does his study of Wassily Kandinsky’s pioneering ideas on color, spirituality, and pure abstraction. Hofmann designs patterns for Sonia Delaunay’s Cubist fashions.
1913
The Armory Show in New York brings modern art to a wide audience, altering the direction of American painting despite public outrage. A critic describes Marcel Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2” as “…an explosion in a shingle factory.” Art students in Chicago burn effigies of Matisse and Brancusi in protest.
1914
Hans and Miz leave Paris for Corsica to regain his health during a bout of tuberculosis. They were then called to Germany by the illness of Hans’ sister. The outbreak of World War I prevents their return to Paris.
1914 - 1918
Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, is assassinated in Sarajevo, effectively leading to the beginning of WWI.
1915
Disqualified from the army due to his lung condition, and with the assistance of Freudenberg terminated by the war, Hofmann decides to teach to earn a living. In the spring, he opens the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts at 40 Georgenstrasse, Munich, which gains widespread recognition and attracts American artists such as Worth Ryder, Glen Wessels, Louise Nevelson, Carl Holty, Vaclav Vytlacil, Alfred Jensen and others.
1916
Dada artists, including Marcel Duchamp, Jean Arp, and Max Ernst, react against the chaos and destruction of the War, which they see as a failure of civilization and rationality. They experiment with accident and chance creating work that is simultaneously playful, absurd and confrontational.
1920
The U.S. Constitution is amended to allow women to vote.
1922 - 1929
Hofmann holds summer sessions at Tergensee, Bavaria (1922) Ragusa (1924), Capri (1925-27), St. Tropez (1928-1929). Makes frequent trips to Paris. He has little time to paint but draws continually.
1924
Hofmann marries Miz Wolfegg on June 5.
1924
Inspired by Freud’s psychoanalytical theories, French poet Andre Breton issues the “Manifesto of Surrealism,” in which he advocates art that focuses on dreams, sexuality and the unconscious.
1929
The U.S. stock-market crash triggers an international economic crisis and the Great Depression.
1930
Hofmann teaches a summer session at the University of California at Berkeley.
1930s
In America, a style known as “American Scene Painting,” becomes one of the first national art movements, though it was never an official, cohesive movement. An outgrowth of the “Ashcan School,” the American Scene was a conservative reaction against the modernist European style and often depicted scenes of typical American life painted in a naturalistic vein.
1931
In the spring, Hofmann teaches at the Chouinard School of Art in Los Angeles and again at Berkeley in the Summer. His first show in the U.S. is an exhibit of drawings at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco.
1931
Louise Nevelson studies Cubism and abstraction with Hofmann in Munich in 1931. Her sculpture entitled Dawn Shadows is pictured at right.
1932
Hofmann returns to the Chouinard School in the summer. He is advised by Miz not to return to Munich due to the rise of Nazism and growing hostility towards intellectuals. He settles in New York, where Vaclav Vytlacil helps arrange a teaching position for him at the Art Students League.
1932
Franklin Delano Roosevelt is elected the 32nd President of the United States.
1933
Hofmann spends the summer as guest instructor at the Thurn School of Art in Gloucester, Massachusetts. In the fall the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts opens in New York. With encouragement from Mercedes Matter, he begins to paint again with after a prolonged period of drawing.
1933
Adolf Hitler becomes Chancellor of Germany.
1933
Nazis close the Berlin Bauhaus, the revolutionary school of art and architecture. Faculty include Walter Gropius, Josef Albers, Lazlo Moholy-Nagy and Mies van der Rohe, all of whom emigrate to the U.S. As teachers at Black Mountain College, Yale, Harvard and the New School for Social Research, they widely disseminate the tenets of Modernism. Sixty thousand artists, including writers, painters and musicians, emigrate to the U.S. during the 1930s.
1934
Upon the expiration of his visa, Hofmann travels to Bermuda to return with a permanent visa. He opens a summer school in Provincetown, Massachusetts. The Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts opens at 137 East 57th Street in New York. Lee Krasner studies with Hofmann.
1935
Works Progress Administration (WPA) established in the U.S. provides work for artists including Philip Guston, Moses Soyer, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Jacob Lawrence, Mark Tobey and hundreds of other writers and musicians.
1936 - 1938
The Hofmann School moves to 52 West 9th Street, then to 52 West 8th Street in 1938. A planned “European Summer Session” (traveling to Paris, the Cote D’Azure, Italy and Capri) is called off after Hitler moves into Austria in the spring. Hofmann delivers a lecture series once a month at the school in the winter of 1938-39, attended by such figures as Arshile Gorky and the critic Clement Greenberg.
1937
After “cleansing” German museums of 16,000 works of art, Hitler opens the exhibition Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) to condemn and defame Modernist artists. He proclaims, “Anybody who paints and sees a sky green and pastures blue ought to be sterilized.”.
1939
Germany invades Poland. Britain and France declare war on Germany. World War II begins.
1939
Miz Hofmann arrives in America. After a stay in New Orleans, she joins her husband in Provincetown. They spend five months each summer in Provincetown and the rest of the year in New York.
1940
Hofmann creates his historic painting “Spring” by dribbling, splashing and pouring paint directly onto his canvas. Some critics later attribute Pollock’s signature drip technique (1947-51) to Hofmann’s influence.
1941
Hofmann becomes an American citizen. He delivers an address at the annual meeting of the American Abstract Artists at the Riverside Museum. Solo exhibition at the Isaac Delgado Museum of Art, New Orleans.
1942
Hofmann’s former student Lee Krasner introduces him to Jackson Pollock. Despite initial hostility, the artists develop a mutual admiration. Hofmann later buys two of Pollock’s paintings. At left, Hofmann's 1942 drip painting, “The Wind”.
1944
Following the War, FDR signs the GI Bill of Rights which enables veterans to attend college. Art schools are flooded with returning G.Is, including, Robert Irwin, Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Rauschenberg, Wayne Thiebaud, and James Gahagan (pictured at right).
1944
Hofmann’s first exhibition in New York opens at The Art of This Century Gallery, arranged by Peggy Guggenheim. “Hans Hofmann, Paintings 1941-1944” opens at The Arts Club in Chicago and travels to The Milwaukee Art Institute in December. He is also included in “Abstract and Surrealist Art in America” at the Motimer Brandt Gallery, arranged by Sidney Janis in conjunction with the release his book of the same title.
1945
Psychologist Carl Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious becomes a touchstone for Abstract Expressionists like Hofmann, Franz Kline, Lee Krasner, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still. Through the spontaneous act of gestural painting, they seek to tap into the collective human experience. Though derided by the general public, Abstract Expressionism takes hold in New York, declaring independence from European traditions and becoming the first U.S. art movement with international impact.
1945
Germany and Japan surrender to Allied forces, bringing World War II to an end.
1947
Exhibitions open in New York, Pittsburgh, and Dallas. Hofmann begins to exhibit with the Kootz Gallery in New York where there is a solo show of Hofmann’s work each year until his death (except 1948 and 1956). Larry Rivers attends the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts.
1948
A Retrospective exhibition of Hofmann’s work opens at the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, Massachusetts, in conjunction with publication of his book, Search for the Real and Other Essays
1949
Hofmann travels to Paris to attend the opening of his exhibition at the Galerie Maeght and visits the studios of Picasso, Braque, Brancusi, and Miro. Helps organize Forum 49, a summer series of lectures, panels and exhibitions at Gallery 200 in Provincetown.
1950
Hofmann joins the “Irascibles,” a group of Abstract Expressionist, in an open letter protesting the exclusion of the avant-garde from an upcoming exhibition of American art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
1954
Solo exhibition held at the Baltimore Museum of Art
1955
Art critic Clement Greenberg organizes a small Hofmann retrospective exhibition.
1956
Hofmann designs mosaic murals for the lobby of the new William Kaufmann Building in New York. A retrospective is held at the Art Alliance in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
1957
A retrospective exhibition is held at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, which then travels across the U.S.
1958
Hofmann stops teaching to devote himself full-time to painting. He moves his studio into the New York and Provincetown schools, and completes a mosaic mural for the exterior of the New York School of Printing at 439 West 49th Street.
1958
Pop Art, with its irony and playfulness, emerges as a reaction to the subjectivity and heroicism of Abstract Expressionism and as a critique of post-war consumerism.
1960
John F. Kennedy is elected as the thirty-fifth President of the United States.
1960
Hofmann, along with Philip Guston, Franz Kline and Theodore Roszac, represents the United States at the XXX Venice Biennale.
1961
Fluxus artists revive the premise of Dada, challenging bourgeois attitudes through the presentation of spontaneous and provocative art performances and “happenings.” For the Museum of Modern Art's traveling show "Hans Hofmann and His Students", Allan Kaprow creates “Push and Pull: A Furniture Comedy for Hans Hofmann,” in which visitors are invited to rearrange the furniture in two rooms.
1962
A Hofmann retrospective opens in Germany. The artist is awarded an Honorary Membership in the Akademie der Bildenden Kunste in Nuremberg and an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree by Dartmouth College in New Hampshire.
1963
Miz Hofmann dies. A retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York travels throughout the U.S, Europe, and South America. Hofmann signs an historic agreement to donate 45 paintings to the University of California at Berkeley. The University later constructs a gallery in his honor at their new museum, then in the planning stages. The exhibition Hans Hofmann and his Students, organized by the MoMA, circulates in the U.S. and Canada.
1964
Hofmann is awarded an honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts degree from the University of California at Berkeley and the Solomon Guggenheim International Award. He becomes a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, New York. Renate Schmitz inspires “The Renate Series”.
1965
Hofmann is awarded an honorary Doctor Fine Arts degree by Pratt Institute, New York. He marries Renate Schmitz.
1966
Hans Hofmann dies on February 17 in New York.
|
|