Hans Hofmann

There are 26 Hofmann drawings on view in this exhibition, mostly from the 1930s. Hofmann made his first trip to the United States in 1930, where he was a guest professor for a summer session at the University of California at Berkeley. This is where he produced many of his early drawings.

Barbara Rose writes, “As Hofmann aligned himself more closely with the American interpretation of Surrealist automatism as a pretext for doodling, his drawings became an important stimulus for improvisation; for he seems to have felt freer and less inhibited as a sketcher than he did when preparing anything so permanent and deliberately composed as a painting,” in an essay accompanying the André Emmerich Gallery’s publication, Hans Hofmann Drawings: 1930—1944.

Hofmann, a German-born American painter, is renowned as both an artist and teacher. His career spanned two generations and two continents and is considered to have both preceded and influenced Abstract Expressionism.