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Since light is best expressed through differences in color quality, color should not be handled as a tonal gradation, to produce the effect of light.

— Hans Hofmann Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)

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Art

More quotes by Hans Hofmann

Every art expression is rooted fundamentally in the personality and temperament of the artist.

To sense the invisible and to be able to create it — that is art.

In nature, light creates the color; in the picture, color creates light. Every color shade emanates a very characteristic light — no substitute is possible.

Art is something absolute, something positive, which gives power just as food gives power.
While creative science is a mental food, art is the satisfaction of the soul.

Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)

It makes no difference whether a work is naturalistic or abstract; every visual expression follows the same fundamental laws.

Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)

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All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom.

Albert Einstein Moral Decay (1937)

The great artists are the ones who dare to entitle to beauty things so natural that when they're seen afterward, people say: Why did I never realize before that this too was beautiful?

André Gide The Immoralist (1902)

A genuine work of art must mean many things; the truer its art, the more things it will mean.

George MacDonald The Fantastic Imagination (1893)

Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness.

José Ortega y Gasset The Dehumanization of Art and Ideas about the Novel (1925)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Hans Hofmann (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.