Hans Hofmann

Hans Hofmann (1880-1966), American painter and teacher, often called the dean of Abstract Expressionism. Born in Weissenberg, Bavaria, he studied painting in Munich and Paris, and was influenced by Fauvism and Cubism, and by German Expressionism. In 1915 Hofmann opened a school of modern art in Munich. In 1932 he emigrated to the United States and in 1933 opened a school in New York. After 1940 his own style, in which Cubist planes are heightened by brilliant Fauvist colour, as in Fantasia in Blue (1954, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York), began to approach gestural painting. Over the years, many Abstract Expressionist painters attended his lectures and absorbed his principles of nonrepresentational art. In 1958 Hofmann gave up teaching to devote himself to painting, for which he eventually achieved international recognition.