Hans Hofmann - Editions & Works on Paper New York Tuesday, April 18, 2023 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Private Collection, New York

  • Catalogue Essay

    ...started with Fauvish landscapes and large still-life interiors that he began painting shortly after 1935. The interiors amalgamate Matisse with Cubism in a fully personal way, but are if anything a little too brilliantly wrought. The landscapes, however, especially the darker ones, open up a vision that Nolde alone had had a previous glimpse of, and Hofmann opens it up from a different direction. Their billowing, broadly brushed surfaces declare depth and volume with a new, post-Matissean, and a post-Monetian intensity of color, establishing unities in which both Fauvism and Impressionism acquire new relevance. Although there are already a few Hofmanns from 1939 in which no point of departure in nature can be recognized, the effective transition to abstract art takes place in the first years of the forties. Figures, landscapes, and still-lifes become more and more schematically rendered, and finally vanish. What appear to be allusions to Kandinsky's near-abstract manner of 1910-1911 constitute no real debt in my opinion; Hofmann would have arrived at the same place had Kandinsky never painted (though perhaps not if Mirô, himself in debt to Kandinsky, had not). Rather than being influenced by Kandinsky, Hofmann seems to have converged with him at several points on the way to abstraction - a way that in his case was much broader, since it ran through the whole of Matisse and the whole of Cubism.

    Clement Greenberg, Hofmann, Editions Georges Fall, Paris, 1961, pp. 14-16

84

Provincetown Landscape

1941
Wax crayon and ink drawing, on wove paper.
11 x 14 in. (27.9 x 35.6 cm)
Signed with initials, annotated and dated '26.41' in black ink, framed.

Estimate
$8,000 - 12,000 

Sold for $12,700

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Editions & Works on Paper

New York Auction 18 - 20 April 2023