“Hofmann will go down as a great painter in the class of Pollock, Matisse and Picasso on the strength of his best pictures, such as Lava”
A triumph of spectacular hue and gestural force, Lava from 1960 is a masterwork of Hans Hofmann’s revered and enduringly influential oeuvre. Dating to the apogee of his lifetime critical success, two years after retiring from his influential teaching career and devoting himself exclusively to painting, the present work manifests Hofmann’s genius as both a pioneering colorist and preeminent abstractionist. Lava bears an illustrious exhibition history reflecting its significance within the artist’s output, chosen for the cover of the catalogue for his seminal 1963 survey at the Museum of Modern Art (see fig. 1) and later appearing in several of the artist’s most important retrospective exhibitions organized by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and the Tate Gallery, London.
Widely acknowledged as the crucial bridge between the School of Paris and Abstract Expressionism, Hofmann was directly connected to the most heralded schools of artistic thought of the twentieth century. Arriving in Paris in 1904, the artist began his career frequenting the storied Café du Dôme in the company of artists such as Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Fernand Léger, and Juan Gris. Foremost among Hofmann’s influences was Henri Matisse; Lava bears the legacy of the Fauvist penchant for vivid, concentrated and dissonant tones (see figs. 2 and 3). The present work equally invokes the Cubist construction of space, simultaneously asserting the primacy of the flat picture plane and creating an illusion of three-dimensionality.
Fig. 3 Georges Braque, L'Estaque, 1906. Statens Museum fur Kunst, Copenhagen © 2024 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris
Hofmann moved to New York in 1932, at the cusp of the city’s emergence as the new center of the art world. Throughout his storied four-decade American teaching career, he exposed titans such as Helen Frankenthaler, Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell and many others to the unparalleled wisdom of the European avant-garde, later absorbing the gestural spontaneity and unbridled self-expression of the Abstract Expressionists into his practice (see figs. 4-5). As artist Frank Stella declared, “We revere Hofmann…for proving that the straightforward manipulation of pigment can create exalted art. To put it simply, Hofmann’s ability to handle paint, to fuse the action of painting and drawing into a single, immediate gesture, carried colored pigment into the viewer’s presence with the force of a bomb. The power of this visual explosion catalyzed the bond of European and American art, cementing the first half of twentieth-century art inseparably to the second half” (quoted in James Yohe, ed., Hans Hofmann, New York, 2002, p. 308).
Fig. 5 Franz Kline, Red Brass, 1955. Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Image: Museum of Fine Arts, Houston / Bequest of Caroline Wiess Law / Bridgeman Images. ART © 2024 THE FRANZ KLINE ESTATE / ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK
Lava erupts in a cacophony of chromatic vibrancy and dynamic movement. Explosive bursts of vermillion, emerald, azure and white ascend from a sweeping golden ground to an upper register where flashes of myriad colors emerge from the strata of impasto. Invoking the title of the present work, thick pulls of paint melt into one another to form crags and crests that accumulate across the surface. Sam Salz declares, “[In] Lava, the treatment shifts to an organically boiling and breathing impasto, a maelstrom into which a hundred or more tubes of paint can be squeezed” (Exh. Cat., New York, The Museum of Modern Art, Hans Hofmann, p. 46).
Hofmann here reveals a loosening of the rigid geometries that defined his earlier oeuvre with an amalgam of seemingly improvised brushwork: the geometric organization of space appears more fluid and lyrical, with the entire composition evoking an unfettered sensation of movement and energy. As, Jed Perl underscores, the present work “[announces] a new kind of free-flowing pictorial experience. The rapid-fire play of color and shape and texture incites wild metaphoric imaginings, until you hardly know where the ecstatically melodramatic experiences end and the beguiling sensuous ones begin” (Jed Perl, New Art City, New York, 2005, p. 6). The present work thus typifies the artist’s distinctive “push-pull technique” in which contrasting elements such as color, light, and form, create a sense of space and depth without impinging upon the flatness of the canvas’ surface. As the artist details,“Push and pull is a colloquial expression applied for movement experienced in nature or created on the picture surface to detect the counterplay of movement in and out of depth. Depth perception in nature and depth creation on the picture-surface is the crucial problem in pictorial creation” (Exh. Cat., New York, The Whitney Museum of American Art, Hans Hofmann, 1990, p. 177). Unifying a lifetime of experience within a tableau of dazzling vitality, Lava reverals Hans Hofmann at the absolute apex of his creative energies and affirms his standing among the most influential artistic icons of the Post-War period.
A Selection of Hans Hofmann's 1960 Works in Museum Collections
