Wolf Kahn describes the Hofmann School
"Hofmann's Mixed Messages" article from the October, 1990 Art in America
Hofmann’s Mixed Messages by Wolf Kahn
A former student remembers Hans Hofmann’s famous teaching method as a paradoxical combination of formalist exercises and personalized “struggle” that produced a startling diversity of individual accomplishment.
Sometime in the 1950s a cartoon appeared in the New Yorker that showed a class of art students surrounding a curvaceous model. What made the scene funny was that the students were all working on identical drawings showing a number of straight lines going from the top of the page to the bottom. The cartoonist had clearly been looking in at the Hofmann School. To the uninitiated the school in fact made little sense, and its output may have presented a distressing look of uniformity and regimentation. How then to explain that out of the Hofmann School there have emerged as widely diverse and original a group of artists as any art school ever produced, a number of whom became leaders in subsequent artistic generations? These innovators include the abstract painters Lee Krasner, Alfred Jensen, Helen Frankenthaler and Robert Goodnough; the representationalists Larry Rivers, Jane Freilicher, Red Grooms, Paul Resika and George McNeil; and the sculptor Louise Nevelson, the Happenings artist Allan Kaprow and the architect Ward Bennett.!
The emergence of diversity out of uniformity, like many paradoxes, is not easily explained.
Part of the shift is implied in the very substance of Hofmann’s teaching, in Hofmann’s contradictory message. Some of it derives from the example of Hofmann’s personality. He provided a center and a structure for the school, which generated a unique kind of esprit de corps among the students, who learned to feel a salutary sense of “us against them”- them being the established art world of the historical moment when all these esthetic developments took place.
At the time a narrow provincialism reigned, and the students needed only to go up the block to the Whitney on 8th Street to see Karfiol, Curry, Ratter and Kuniyoshi enthroned in the front halls while de Kooning, Kline and Hofmann himself were relegated to the rear, if they were there at all. The core of Hofmann’s teaching was composed of ideas which, while well known in Paris, were news to young American art students-and good news. The good news was that art was a high calling reaching beyond the pale documentary critique of American regionalism or the polite semiabstraction which was the current approximation of modernism then being celebrated at the Whitney Annuals. We who studied with Hofmann felt ourselves to be the bearers of a more profound message, one better suited to give content and weight to the calling of “artist.” We felt we were learning the essence of modernism, art stripped of everything extraneous. What remained was its esthetic/philosophical foundation, its raison d’être.
Hofmann’s teaching could be divided into two parts, an art-historical message and a practical one. Central to the art-historical analysis was the idea of mainstream art, a straight unbroken line running from Cimabue to the Abstract Expressionists. Artists, schools or movements might diverge momentarily from the central concerns of the mainstream, but only to indicate to a subsequent generation that something was missing, after which art was always restored to its proper tasks. The practical side of Hofmann’s teaching was directed toward the attainment of the “perfect painting.” Tying these two strands together was a strategy for progressing as an artist. You progressed by studying crucial works of mainstream art so as to gain a stronger and eventually a personal command of the central issues governing the pictures of the mainstream.
These issues were, of course, the formal issues.
Formal issues might have to be redefined from work to work, but their presence in a picture was discernible almost at first glance, though needing deep study to be analyzed fully. The quality of a painting and the strength of its claim to “main-stream” status were proportional to the clarity with which its formal issues were stated and the elegance and economy with which they were resolved. It was not surprising that Hofmann pointed to Mondrian as a model. Moreover, we were encouraged to explore the Cubist analysis of space, which was the ground on which Mondrian, as well as other modern masters, had built.
By focusing his critique almost exclusively on formal values, Hofmann was able to devise a language and a set of procedures which enabled his students to see what was really going on in their pictures. As a painting unfolded, its demands became more urgent, and it was the student’s job to respond to these emerging potentialities with as much sensitivity and alertness as his or her ability at that stage allowed. The teacher, having a wider knowledge of available possibilities, could provide a sorely needed “extra pair of eyes.” His critique was most effective when it was impersonal and pragmatic, dealing with underlying concepts as well as their use in specific instances of painting.
Although there was always a colorful still-life setup or two to work from, most of the day-to-day activity at the school centered around drawing from the nude model. Here Hofmann’s instructions were explicit. We were told to draw not merely the model but “the space.” “Form exists through space and space through form.” A simple drawing became an analysis not of elbows or kneecaps but of the space in front of the model, at the sides, and behind -even, finally, the space occupied by the figure. A term still widely used-“negative space”-described the unoccupied areas we were to give attention equal to that we gave the model. Having never even considered them before, we gave them greater attention than we did the model.
This approach led us into the museums, where we studied Analytical Cubism, because even to a beginner it was clear that here an unbroken continuity existed between the planes of the figure (or still life and those describing the surrounding space. The attention we gave to an analysis of our field of vision (which our daily confrontation with the model fostered) influenced our way of viewing everything. We anxiously demanded that every work of art should submit to Hofmann’s terms. We were better able to see and enjoy Vermeer, Velázquez, Rembrandt (Hofmann said “the beauty is in the empty spaces”), Titian and de Hooch, because we could understand quite clearly their structural under-pinnings. In sculpture we were sensitive to contrapposto (though perhaps we asked too much of formalist theory when we wanted it to explain an African fetish). Those of us who liked to use nature as a jumping-off point Hofmann trained to look at landscape analytically, to see the space as a whole. We tended to think that a tree was relevant only if it defined the edge of a plane, and the sky only insofar as it was a volume and exerted weight.
The best known of Hofmann’s didactic formulations is the theory of “push and pull.” The space of a picture, so this theory goes, has to be a coherent volume, equally penetrable in all its parts. The thrust of a form into deep space must he reciprocated by a countermovement out of deep space back to the picture plane. It is important that these thrusts, which in toto define the volume of the picture, must never become one way, else the eye would remain “stuck” in one area rather than able to move freely throughout all parts of the picture. In painting practice this dictate means that any area, while pushing into space must also be pulled back in relation to some other area. Each part of the picture pushes at the same time as it pulls, carrying out an essential double duty.
Twice a week Hofmann came into the school, put on his smock and proceeded on his rounds. Most of the students would suspend their own work to hear what he had to say. Hofmann would ask to occupy the exact location from which the student was working and, taking in hand a piece of charcoal and a chamois, would make his points directly on the student’s drawing. Sometimes he really got into it-a drawing would undergo a storm of corrections, each one carefully explained; the result of such a session was a complete Hofmann drawing.
Hofmann’s physical energy in these exercises was impressive: the charcoal would explode, the chamois would be used in wide swaths over the whole of the sheet to indicate large dvnamics. To explain his point about the necessity for “shift” of the planes. Hofmann often asked a student’s permission to tear up the drawing into six or eight parts which he would reassemble with tape or thumbtacks, justifying each move by referring to what was going on “outside”-as he called the natural element upon which the picture was based. “You must learn to see the space” was Hofmann’s admonition to beginners, who would peer hopefully at the model, expecting sudden illumination, which usually remained elusive.
Hofmann encouraged us to “struggle”-his favorite exhortation. “Struggle” seemed to be the worthiest activity at the Hofmann School. Students would submit a piece of defenseless charcoal paper to such a barrage of changes over the five-day length of a model’s pose that at the end all that was left was a limp gray rag with holes in it, upon which Hofmann might gaze sympathetically, nodding yes, it was important to struggle. The attitude he fostered was that art was not a question of learning skills but one of penetrating to the heart of a mvstery by learning to see “in painterly terms” and “in plastic terms.” We were prevented from giving much importance to the end product, the picture itself. It was valuable only as the accumulated history of a process, as a sign of energetic action and reaction. (Before Harold Rosenberg invented the term, Hofmann encouraged his students to become “action painters.”)
If Hofmann saw something to admire in a student’s work, he said so and gave reasons. He fostered the careful attention with which we regarded each other’s work. Over a period of time there emerged among the students a cast of characters, each of whom embodied a set of problems. We became adept at predicting what Hofmann would say about each picture. When Hofmann admired the progress of the student, the admiration became general. If, on the other hand. he seemed to be bearing down too heavily on someone, a fellow student might venture to disagree, if only to give the afflicted colleague a sense of community support. Hofmann, a great expert at dealing with such encounters, would most likely turn aside the possibility of confrontation with a good-natured evasion.
If a student worked in a purely descriptive or illustrational mode (Hofmann included most Surrealism and, interestingly, German Expressionism in this category), Hofmann would simply tell that student that he or she was “going in the wrong direction”. But Hofmann could be, and probably wished to be, unpredictable. For the rare student whose work showed a quirky, personal quality Hofmann reserved a special regard. One of the students attending the school at the time I was there was Jean Follet, whose drawings always had a large fish eye in them. While we could respond to the eccentricity in her drawings, Hofmann sensed the potential which eventually led Jean Follet to be one of the inventors of assemblage. A number of her characteristically strange works were included in the Museum of Modern Art’s seminal “Assemblage” show of 1961.
Certainly Hofmann was aware (as were all the better students) of the constant danger that his pedagogical concepts could, if applied in too orthodox a fashion, give rise to an academy. Running counter to his fully formulated concepts was a discourse regarding the need for spontaneity, the value of automatism and the impossibility of intellectual control of the artistic enterprise.’ He quoted admiringly Klee’s dictum that “the artist knows how to take advantage of accident.” Leaving aside Hofmann’s broad Bavarian accent and his cavalier mode of inventing words or changing their meaning, one never knew exactly what his feelings were regarding art terminology. Certain terms were used with care less disregard as to meaning. The word “expressionist” could be used as a term of opprobrium one day and of praise the next. The same could be said about “decoration.” But Hofmann always approved of influences. Robert Goodnough, when he attended the summer school in Provincetown in 1948, brought in a dozen paintings to one of the weekly “crits.” Each one was painted in a different identifiable style. It took Hofmann a while to take in that all were done by the same student. Then he beamed his approval: “That is very good-Goodnough is recapitulating the history of modern art!” In his own work Hofmann had never worried about being derivative. He cared that his students, rather than assimilating the look of any particular well-known work would grapple with the formal concepts which organized its content--which, in Hofmann’s view, were its principal content. “Anyway,” he often said, “the first 500 paintings you will have to throw away.
Hotmann encouraged us to see the new work being shown on New York’s 57th Street and in the museums. We were told to go and see Clyfford Still’s show, although Hofmann felt quite certain that most of us were as yet incapable of sharing his admiration for the work. At times Hofmann did share with us his recurring misgivings about the whole modernist enterprise. “Modern art lacks human content,” he said. He also said that this lack would be corrected with time. He might be disappointed to find that the “correction” arrived at by subsequent generations is derived from the Mickey Mouse elements in American life. But he would not have been surprised. “After my students leave the school,” he said, “they often go in the wrong direction.”
Thinking back on the Hofmann School, I am convinced that part of Hofmann’s success as a teacher can be ascribed to his uncanny ability to make his students anxious. The mystery was always temptingly placed within reach-if only we knew how to stretch. He would say to us, “Years later you will understand what I tell you today, after you have discovered it in your own work “ But we wanted to shorten the wait. We worked like beavers, consulted and collected art books, laid siege to museums, read philosophical texts. We were like a religious order united by the same demanding vows in the search for formal perfection.
It may be that the Hofmann School and its ideas belong to a unique moment in time. On the other hand, no other vocabulary which has been offered since then comes anywhere near giving young artists as useful a guide for developing as artists. The proof is that whenever I raise Hofmann-type issues with today’s students they eagerly respond to them. For they have truly been starved for specific, practical, unsentimental discourse regarding the culture of painting. This discourse, for Hofmann and for those of his students for whom his ideas continue to be relevant, goes beyond strategies for making pictures. It is an analogue-perhaps the only analogue available today for a visual artist-for an ideal of perfectibility in the world at large. It provides the only transcendence, the nearest thing to a metaphysic, to which we can aspire.
Hofmann was therefore a great deal more than an art teacher. He became for his students an example of how far one can go as an artist. It is not surprising that Hofmann’s students, emerging from a shared discipline, developed into such a diverse group later on. Becoming an artist turned out to be a heavier load than we had bargained for, and our pictures aimed to be far more than a reflection of the times. They aimed to be, as Robert Henri stated a bit earlier, “evidence of a higher state of being.”
Footnotes
A partial list of artists who studied at the school at various times includes, beside the author and those artists already mentioned, Nell Blaine, Al Kresch, Robert de Niro, Sr., Judith Rothschild, John Haley, Fritz Bultman. Vaclav Vytlacil, Cameron Booth, Erle Loran, Worth Ryder, Glenn Wessels, Mercedes Matter, James Gahagan, Paul Georges, John Little, Nicolas Carone, Peter Kahn, Miles Forst, Carl Holty, Ludwig Sander, Josef Binder, Robert Richenburg, Giorgio cavalion, Lillian Orlovsky Freed, Myron Stout, Albert Swinden, Wil liam Freed, Eleanor Lockspeiser, Ida Fischer.
Hofmann did not approve of one-on-one critiques. He felt they were a waste, since all students were working on related problems and could therefore profit equally from discussions raised in particular critiques.
Larry Rivers, while a student, once attempted to challenge Hofmann’s dictum that the basis of a composition is the four sides of the surface. He brought in a reproduction of a three-sided fragment of a Leonardo drawing. “Mr. Hofmann, is this a work of art?” he asked. “Ah, Rivers, it is always good to ask questions was all the answer he got.
I shared this Wolf Kahn article because when I first read it, sitting in Sam Francis’s studio in Palo Alto, California in October, 1990, I realized that the Parsons graduate painting program I had just completed in New York was in fact the second coming of the Hofmann School. Paul Resika had us drawing from a model or still-life five days a week. Our crits were very similar to Hofmann’s with Leland Bell or Resika drawing on our drawings, sometimes even tearing our figure drawings to make a point about space and the plastic life of a drawing or painting. I don’t know to what extent Resika knew he recreating the Hofmann School. He never acknowlegded the degree to which we were experiencing the same teaching that he had experienced. But all of the Parsons visiting artists: Nell Blaine, Jane Freilicher, De Niro, Al Kresch, I later learned were related by their studies with Hofmann. In 1992 I was able to study with Wolf Kahn in New Mexico. My Hofmann experience came full circle.
What a real treat to read this, from inside the world of HH. And to think what WK did afterwards in his own work. Thanks for posting this.