Displaying items by tag: hans hofmann

On Saturday the Bruce Museum opens up to “Walls of Color – The Murals of  Hans Hofmann,” marking the first exhibition to focus on the artist’s varied and under-appreciated public mural projects.

Hans Hofmann is famed for his dynamic approach to color,” says the show’s curator Dr. Kenneth Silver, New York University Professor of Modern Art as well as an Adjunct Curator of Art at the Bruce Museum. “He was a towering figure among New York School painters. He was also the most important teacher and theoretician of the Abstract Expressionist movement.”

Who doesn’t love trying something new? In the mid-1900s a number of modern artists experimented with new types of commercial paint using it as a base layer for their paintings. Now, decades later, their paint choices are turning out to have some negative consequences.

Abstract Expressionist painters Hans Hofmann, Jackson Pollock and others took advantage of an explosion of new paints, including zinc oxide and commercial white house paints, that became available in the years following the first and second world wars.

"New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940 – 1970" was the Met’s most exciting exhibition to date under the auspices of director Thomas Hoving, who turned Henry Geldzahler loose to prick the art world to alertness. Paul Kasmin Gallery announces "The New York School, 1969: Henry Geldzahler at the Metropolitan Museum of Art," on view at 293 Tenth Avenue from January 13 – March 14, 2015. Curated by Stewart Waltzer, this comprehensive group show reprises Geldzahler’s seminal exhibition and includes exemplary works by Josef Albers, Alexander Calder, John Chamberlain, Joseph Cornell, Mark di Suvero, Dan Flavin, Helen Frankenthaler, Adolph Gottlieb, Hans Hofmann, Donald Judd, Ellsworth Kelly, Roy Lichtenstein, Morris Louis, Robert Motherwell, Isamu Noguchi, Kenneth Noland, Claes Oldenberg, Jules Olitski, Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist, Frank Stella and Andy Warhol, featuring works from the original exhibition.

An installation of several paintings by Hans Hofmann, one of the most influential painters of the 20th century, is now on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Drawn from the Museum’s substantial holdings of the artist’s work, "Hans Hofmann: Selected Paintings" commemorates the recent publication of the Hans Hofmann Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings, a comprehensive three-volume compendium.

Known as one of the abstract painters of the New York School, Hofmann (American, 1880-1966) shaped three generations of artists, first in Europe and later in the United States. The list of his illustrious students includes Joan Mitchell, Lee Krasner, Larry Rivers, Allan Kaprow, and Marisol (whose large installation "Self-Portrait Looking at The Last Supper" is on view at the Met through April 5, 2015 in Gallery 909).

On Sunday, December 21, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAM/PFA) in Berkeley, California, will say goodbye to its Brutalist home of forty-four years. Founded in 1963 following a major donation from the Abstract Expressionist painter Hans Hofmann, the BAM/PFA announced an architectural competition to design the new museum building in 1964. The jury named the San Francisco-based architect Mario Ciampi and his associates Richard L. Jorasch and Ronald E. Wagner the winners of the competition, saying, “The richness of this building will arise from the sculptural beauty of its rugged major forms and will not require costly materials or elaborate details. We believe this design...can become one of the outstanding contributions to museum design in our time.”

One of the largest university art museums in the United States, the BAM/PFA opened the doors of its distinctive Modernist building on the UC Berkeley campus in 1970. Executed in the Brutalist style, an architectural movement that flourished from the 1950s to the mid-1970s, the BAM/PFA’s building is a behemoth cast concrete structure.

A new exhibition at the Princeton University Art Museum in New Jersey charts the developments in abstract painting that took place between 1950 and 1990. The show examines how postwar artists such as Josef Albers, Willem de Kooning, Richard Diebenkorn, Jean Dubuffet, Helen Frankenthaler, Hans Hofmann, Franz Kline, Morris Louis, Robert Motherwell, Robert Rauschenberg, Gerhard Richter, Mark Rothko, and Frank Stella ushered in advancements in abstraction thanks to their individual approaches to line, color, and form.

“Rothko to Richter: Mark-Making in Abstract Painting” presents nearly thirty paintings on loan from the collection of Preston H. Haskell III, a Princeton University alumnus and a longstanding Museum benefactor. The exhibition touches on a number of monumental movements, including Abstract Expressionism, Color Field painting, Minimalism, Op art, and Postmodernism.

After bursting on the art scene in the late 1940s, Abstract Expressionism dominated American art, criticism, and commentary throughout the 1950s. Artists of the revolutionary Abstract Expressionist School rejected the widely accepted values that ruled post-war America and looked to emotion, rebellion, spontaneity, and movement for inspiration.

AB-EX / RE-CON: Abstract Expressionism Reconsidered, which is now on view at the Nassau County Museum of Art in Roslyn, New York on Long Island, explores both the best-known and less familiar artists of the Abstract Expressionist movement. Organized by the museum’s director, Karl Emil Willers, AB-EX features over 80 works by 50 artists including those readily associated with Abstract Expressionism such as Richard Diebenkorn (1922-1933), Hans Hofmann (1880-1966), Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011), Franz Kline (1910-1962), Robert Motherwell (1915-1991), Willem de Kooning (1904-1997), and Mark Rothko (1903-1970).

However, it is the inclusion of the lesser-known Abstract Expressionists that sets AB-EX apart. The exhibition features the works of Jon Schueler (1916-1992), a student of Diebenkorn who explored landscapes through the lens of abstraction; Fritz Bultman (1919-1985), who studied under Hofmann and favored bold, gestural forms; and often overlooked female Abstract Expressionists such a Grace Hartigan (1922-2008), Perle Fine (1908-1988), and Judith Godwin (b. 1930). The comprehensive exhibition illustrates the breadth and diversity of a single movement that is often reduced to a handful of artists and stylistic approaches.

AB-EX / RE-CON: Abstract Expressionism Reconsidered is on view through June 16, 2013.