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Lot Essay
This work will be included in the forthcoming Hans Hofmann Catalogue Raisonné, sponsored by the Renate, Hans and Maria Hofmann Trust.
Painted in 1946, Hans Hofmann's Amphibious Beast perfectly encapsulates the adventurous style and constant experimentation that characterized his work of the decade. Having begun to paint classic Abstract Expressionist works in primary colors well before his contemporaries in the early 1940s, Hoffman returns to using line reminiscent of Picasso's Cubism as well as Joan Mir and the great master of line, Henri Matisse. Amidst the heavy impasto of rapidly drawn deep blue brush strokes that fill the background, a beast comes to life in geometric shapes-rectangles, circles and triangles, revealing the evolution of Hoffman's own unique iconography and the emergence of the rectangle which would come to dominate his later work. This work is crammed with color and dates from a period of triumphant return for Hofmann, who had painted little during the previous decade and a half. Hoffman's work and his teachings were influential to generations of artists in the United States from the 1930s onwards when he established the Hans Hofmann School of Art in New York City. It was in 1935, at the age of fifty-five, an age when many artists have already exhausted their inspiration, that Hofmann began his career as a painter. It is at this stage in the evolution of his already significant oeuvre that Hoffman's art becomes painterly in the extreme. As in Amphibious Beast, many of his best paintings of the decade are jammed to the edges with thick, bright pigment, heavily applied in rapid brushstrokes and emphasizing the paint as that which it is, not subordinating the medium to the depiction of any object. The black lines that form the "beast," do not so much enclose the color as enliven it, emerging out of the blue depths below. Though Hofmann's works of the 40s and beyond celebrate the surface of the canvas with liberally applied, heavily textured, and brightly colored paint, paintings such as Amphibious Beast still emanate, project, and radiate in the perfect explosion of energy that Hofmann creates.
Hofmann sought the mythic, the fundamental and the symphonic is his paintings, conveying these qualities through line and color and heightening them by the vitality of the brushstrokes and impasto so evident in every part of Amphibious Beast. In order to bring nature and life into his works, Hofmann spilled himself into synthesizing color, shape and line, taking advantage of lessons learned courtesy of Wassily Kandinsky's color theories as well as the Surrealists use of automatism. The Surrealist introduction of chance, of forces from the world outside the canvas, was intended less as a means of adding autobiographical content to his paintings than as a way of allowing the picture to come into existence through an almost organic means. It allowed new, spontaneous forms such as the amorphous shapes of the Amphibious Beast to burst into existence. At the same time, it revealed his continued ability to absorb new influences. Hofmann was constantly roving, growing and learning while he simultaneously influenced the artists around him.
Painted in 1946, Hans Hofmann's Amphibious Beast perfectly encapsulates the adventurous style and constant experimentation that characterized his work of the decade. Having begun to paint classic Abstract Expressionist works in primary colors well before his contemporaries in the early 1940s, Hoffman returns to using line reminiscent of Picasso's Cubism as well as Joan Mir and the great master of line, Henri Matisse. Amidst the heavy impasto of rapidly drawn deep blue brush strokes that fill the background, a beast comes to life in geometric shapes-rectangles, circles and triangles, revealing the evolution of Hoffman's own unique iconography and the emergence of the rectangle which would come to dominate his later work. This work is crammed with color and dates from a period of triumphant return for Hofmann, who had painted little during the previous decade and a half. Hoffman's work and his teachings were influential to generations of artists in the United States from the 1930s onwards when he established the Hans Hofmann School of Art in New York City. It was in 1935, at the age of fifty-five, an age when many artists have already exhausted their inspiration, that Hofmann began his career as a painter. It is at this stage in the evolution of his already significant oeuvre that Hoffman's art becomes painterly in the extreme. As in Amphibious Beast, many of his best paintings of the decade are jammed to the edges with thick, bright pigment, heavily applied in rapid brushstrokes and emphasizing the paint as that which it is, not subordinating the medium to the depiction of any object. The black lines that form the "beast," do not so much enclose the color as enliven it, emerging out of the blue depths below. Though Hofmann's works of the 40s and beyond celebrate the surface of the canvas with liberally applied, heavily textured, and brightly colored paint, paintings such as Amphibious Beast still emanate, project, and radiate in the perfect explosion of energy that Hofmann creates.
Hofmann sought the mythic, the fundamental and the symphonic is his paintings, conveying these qualities through line and color and heightening them by the vitality of the brushstrokes and impasto so evident in every part of Amphibious Beast. In order to bring nature and life into his works, Hofmann spilled himself into synthesizing color, shape and line, taking advantage of lessons learned courtesy of Wassily Kandinsky's color theories as well as the Surrealists use of automatism. The Surrealist introduction of chance, of forces from the world outside the canvas, was intended less as a means of adding autobiographical content to his paintings than as a way of allowing the picture to come into existence through an almost organic means. It allowed new, spontaneous forms such as the amorphous shapes of the Amphibious Beast to burst into existence. At the same time, it revealed his continued ability to absorb new influences. Hofmann was constantly roving, growing and learning while he simultaneously influenced the artists around him.