Hans Hofmann Quotes
The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.
Art is to me the glorification of the human spirit, and as such it is the cultural documentation of the time in which it is produced.
A work of art is a world in itself reflecting senses and emotions of the artist's world.
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.
My aim in painting is to create pulsating, luminous, and open surfaces that emanate a mystic light, in accordance with my deepest insight into the experience of life and nature.
A work of art is finished, from the point of view of the artist, when feeling and perception have resulted in a spiritual synthesis.
The whole world, as we experience it visually, comes to us through the mystic realm of color.
Every art expression is rooted fundamentally in the personality and temperament of the artist.
And so artistic creation is the metamorphosis of the external physical aspects of a thing into a self-sustaining spiritual reality .
What goes on in abstract art is the proclaiming of aesthetic principles... It is in our own time that we have become aware of pure aesthetic considerations. Art never can be imitation.
It makes no difference whether a work is naturalistic or abstract; every visual expression follows the same fundamental laws
The product of movement and counter-movement is tension. When tension working strength is expressed, it endows the work of art with the living effect of coordinated, though opposing, forces.
An idea can only be materialized with the help of a medium of expression, the inherent qualities of which must be surely sensed and understood in order to become the carrier of an idea
I can't understand how anyone is able to paint without optimism. Despite the general pessimistic attitude in the world today, I am nothing but an optimist.
There is in reality no such thing as modern art. Art is carried on up and down in immense cycles through centuries and civilizations.
You must break all the rules of painting, but you must also convince me you've had a reason to do so.
To experience visually, and to transform our visual experience into plastic terms, requires the faculty of empathy.
Art and science create a balance to material life and enlarge the world of living experience. Art leads to a more profound concept of life, because art itself is a profound expression of feeling.
When the impulses which stir us to profound emotion are integrated with the medium of expression, every interview of the soul may become art. This is contingent upon mastery of the medium.
People say 'Hofmann has different styles'. I have not. I have different moods; I am not two days the same man.
We are connected with our own age if we recognize ourselves in relation to outside events; and we have grasped its spirit when we influence the future.
It isn't necessary to make things large to make them monumental; a head by Giacometti one inch high would be able to vitalize this whole space.
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.
As a teacher I approach my students purely with the human desire to free them from all scholarly inhibitions, and I tell them, "Painters must speak through paint not through words."
Genius is gifted with a vitality which is expended in the enrichment of life through the discovery of new worlds of feeling.
