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Hans Hofmann Quotes
1880–1966 Germany
Hans Hofmann (21 March 1880 – 17 February 1966) was one of the older abstract expressionist painters working in New York. Hofmann originally came from Germany where he experienced the new art and so he connected European with modern American abstract art.
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Creation is dominated by three absolutely different factors: First, nature, which works upon us by its laws; second, the artist, who creates a spiritual contact with nature and his materials; third, the medium of expression through which the artist translates his inner world. Of those three components only one, the medium, is material.
Hans Hofmann (1963)
This two-way transformation proceeds from metaphysical perceptions, for metaphysics is the search for the essential nature of reality. And so artistic creation is the metamorphosis of the external physical aspects of a thing into a self-sustaining spiritual reality. Such is the magic act which takes place continuously in the development of a work of art. On this and only on this is creation based.
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)
A teacher affects eternity: he can never tell where his influence stops.
Misattributed
"Now I have lost all fear, and begin to draw on the black surface'" (Arp). Only love — for painting, in this instance — is able to cover the fearful void.
Misattributed
Sometimes I wonder, laying in a great black stripe on a canvas, what animal bones (or horns) are making the furrows of my picture ... black grows deeper and deeper, darker and darker before me. It menaces me like a black gullet. I can bear it no longer. It is monstrous. It is unfathomable. As the thought comes to me to exorcise and transform this black with a white drawing, it has already become a surface.
Misattributed
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