“A work of art is a world in itself reflecting senses and emotions of the artist's world.”-Hans Hofmann, 1948 The Making of a Modernist: Hans Hofmann brings together a nearly thirty-year span of paintings reflecting the enormous scope of works in the Berkeley Art Museum Collection, the world's most extensive museum collection of works by the German-born painter (1880–1966). In 1963 Hofmann gave the University forty-seven paintings, along with a significant cash contribution toward the completion of a new museum building. The artist made this extraordinary gift in recognition of the University's important role in his early career: Hofmann had been invited by Worth Ryder, then chair of the Department of Art, to come from Germany to teach in 1930 and again in the summer of 1931, when his work was shown on campus in Haviland Hall and at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco-his first exhibitions in the United States. From Berkeley Hofmann went on to New York City, where he established a new art school in 1933. Over the next twenty-five years, at his schools in New York and Provincetown, Massachusetts, he influenced an astounding array of young artists; among his students were the painters Burgoyne Diller, Helen Frankenthaler, Lee Krasner, and Larry Rivers. The critic Clement Greenberg referred to Hofmann's Greenwich Village school as a vortex of influence in the burgeoning art scene of the 1930s and 1940s, “a major fountainhead of style and ideas for the ‘new' American painting.” By 1958, when Hofmann closed his schools to devote himself full-time to his own work, he had achieved international recognition as a painter, in addition to wide respect as a teacher and theorist. The Whitney Museum of American Art mounted a nationally touring retrospective in 1957, and six years later The Museum of Modern Art in New York organized another major exhibition that toured internationally. In the last decade of his life Hofmann produced a staggering body of vital works, many of which are now part of the Berkeley Art Museum collection. This exhibition follows the steady development of Hofmann's distinctive and highly influential artistic vocabulary, from representation to nonobjectivity. In the later works we see his signature bold color blocks emerge from and recede into energetic surfaces of intersecting and overlapping shapes, echoing the spatial structure of his still lifes of the mid-1930s. As if unleashed from objective time and place and on the verge of independent life, color, plane, light, and space “push and pull” to the surface.
