Hans Hoffman

Hans Hofmann (March 21, 1880 – February 17, 1966) was a German-born American painter.

Hofmann was born in Weissenburg, Bavaria, in 1880. He started to study art around 1898. He moved to Paris in 1905.^[1][2]

In 1910 the Paul Cassirer Galerie in Berlin shows his paintings together with paintings by Oskar Kokoschka. In 1914 he and his partner, Maria Wolfegg, had to stay in Germany as World War I began. They lived in Munich. He soon started an art school and was able to avoid serving in the military.^[3]

Hofmann went to the U. S. A. in 1930 to teach painting at the University of California at Berkeley during the summer. He did this for two more summers. In 1932 he decided to stay in America. He moved to New York City and went on teaching painting. One of his students was artist Lee Krasner. She introduced him to painter Jackson Pollock and art critic Clement Greenberg.^[4]

In 1941 he became a U. S. citizen. In 1944 he had his individual first painting show in New York. It had good reviews.^[5]

From 1950 on, Hofmann was closely connected to artists who are known for their abstract art and the abstract expressionist movement in painting. Some of these artists were Willem de Kooning, Adolph Gottlieb, Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt, and David Smith.^[6]

In 1964, Hofmann was honored in several ways. He was a Juror for the Guggenheim International Award. He was elected a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. And he is given an honorary degree of Doctor of Fine Arts at the University of California, Berkeley.^[7]

When he was 85 in 1966, Hofmann died of a heart attack.^[7]

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