KAREN WILKIN
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lifetime's probing ofwhat art could be.
Even the earlier works, loosely-painted landscapes and a wonderful
series of stilllifes, free-wheeling works on paper and drawings that carried
the burden of his energy when he had little time to paint, make Hofmann's
individuality manifest. He had a heavy hand, for the most part. Paint goes
down in generous dollops over large expanses (except when he thins it out to
transparent washes or delicate squiggles). Color is always brilliant, saturated,
and, usually, abrasive. Hofmann is better when he doesn't include the full
spectrum in a single painting, but even when he limits his color, he insists on
outrageous chromatic oppositions - gritty orange and acid green, or magenta
and lemon yellow; when he gets away with it, it's superb. When he doesn't,
the pictures still often have an edgy power (Hofmann's slightly sour color
and thickly-loaded surfaces seem notably unlike Matisse, despite his well–
documented admiration for the French painter. There's something aggres–
sively uningratiating and rather Germanic about Hofmann's color, which the
proximity of the various Matisses in New York, at the time of the
retrospective, helped to underline.)
Hofmann emerges, too, as a wildly uneven painter, but a great one
when he hits. His pictures can suffer because of his well-known fondness for
polarities - of color, of edge, of shape, of surface - which he often tried to
fully encompass in a single painting. Sometimes, he simply overcooked or
overembellished a picture, adding too many little opposing strokes, too many
small incidents and refinements. But when he gets it right, the result is stun–
ning. The raw materials of painting become intensely compelling. Blocks and
strokes of heated color become the protagonists of tense dramas. Hofmann,
at his best, pries his color planes apart, pulls some towards us, banishes others
to the back; in one superb canvas, a smooth yellow block, placed dead center,
holds a near-chaotic smudge of reds and greens at bay and implies a whole
universe of space between them, while in another, a densely brushed "cloud"
of near-black strokes tears itself free of its rosy surroundings and spatters the
canvas with odd grays and gray-greens. It's theatrical, it's self-conscious, and
it's wonderful.
Reading the dates on these pictures is astonishing. The octogenarian
Hofmann exudes energy, vigor, appetite for discovery. They are youthful
pictures made by an old pro. It's a combination that today's young painters
still can learn from,just as many of their teachers did from Hofmann himse\£
