Our Art World 2020
We seem to have come through an era of criticality – maybe 20-30 year’s worth – that is slowly exhausting itself, with art that is laughing at itself, with a chorus joining in.
It is almost difficult to become serious now – because we don’t know how to. What is it like to be serious and not stodgy, understand more deeply without becoming maudlin? This is challenging, because we don’t know the form.
It looks like the only viable option though, because sticking with the old is going to become odious, and ignoring what has happened over the years ridiculous.
I think it will be painful, but exhilarating.
Gilded Owl, 2016
Like most artists, I look to the past – to see how it was done, for inspiration, and for guidance.
Increasingly, in recent years I have looked to the early Renaissance – probably kicked back further than I was looking before by the acquisition of the Duccio Madonna by the Metropolitan Museum some years ago. This simple tiny picture of the Madonna and Child – of which there are many – especially struck home because of the tiny gesture of the child’s raising its finger – a simple gesture, yet a departure, in expression, and a most moving one. How very much feeling there is in Duccio! Even the simplest compositions, like the depiction of Jesus and the fisherman in the National Gallery in Washington, are full of simple, and honest, emotion.
This is belief, and it is found, similarly, in the Books of Hours and Breviaries of the Middle Ages, in the simple color plates of adorations and other depictions in these Psalters, made by humble artists, and meant for clergy and lay alike – so honest, so simple…
Was there another time when such feeling triumphed in art?
I think the Annunciations, in particular, found their way, compositionally, into my work: this is why there is duality in many of my pictures, a right and left side. In thinking about it, it struck me that the improbable meeting of the Heavenly and the Human must have seemed to the artists of the time something so inexplicable as to be almost undepictable. And yet, they tried, in their way, to show these otherworldly creatures coming to the awestruck woman (can we even imagine such an encounter?) who is, for the most part, dumbstruck.
I love the Greeks, and all times, in art, where the form, in its highest development and true feeling merge into one. But in an overly mechanistic and technological age, it seems right to be drawn to those periods in art richest in feeling. And all that I have learned in life about human emotion seems to me to be the richest source, now, for us, in art.
George Hofmann
Gestural Abstraction
Abstract Critical, July 2014
Gesture in painting has to be authentic to be any good (it goes without saying that all painting has to be authentic to be good) and that means felt by the artist, and this feeling conveyed to the viewer. And, to be authentic, it must come from inmost sources, whatever the depth.
The most recent overtly gestural painting in our history, Abstract Expressionism, did not “die”, as many think – it withered, or more accurately, was strangled, by superficiality: a superabundance of empty and meaningless moves on canvas swamped the art consciousness of the time, the result of incomplete understanding, superficial interpretation and lack of feeling: the real, deep, crude and unmanageable overtaken by the banal. This proved, really, how difficult it was to make this kind of art, not how unsubstantial its source was.
Other trends in art intervened, but human feeling does not go away: what we are seeing now in contemporary painting (and in the very little actual sculpture now being made) is often the result of feeling struggling to higher visibility again, confounding those who predicted all painting’s demise, and AbEx’s total death in particular. Some artists, like Amy Sillman, are tentative in their approach, while others, such as Ben Dowell, reveal how difficult the authentic is to achieve (real feeling is not always accessible feeling).
The significant problem we are facing is the want of real emotional understanding: we are not versed in this in society, and not schooled in its precepts in art; sadly, nothing much today prepares us to perceive in depth – except, perhaps, at moments of true horror in life, when we face the inexplicable and the unfathomable – in art not at all.
Perhaps those at the margins of society, and art practice as we know it today, have a lot to teach us; perhaps people in the Thirties and Forties were more used to want, to immediate and long-range threats, to despair and heartache, to overpowering joy at merely surviving (as many refugees did); and perhaps, today our society needs a real and widespread understanding of heartache, of joy, and of want, in order to learn to understand again.
Art had nowhere else to go, really, to be authentic in the 1930s and ‘40s than to abstraction and expressionism: in painting, the paths of Realism (as in Reginald Marsh) and Neo-Plasticism on close examination petered out, for want of strength. At that time a magical confluence of creativity emerged from disparate sources – Mexican, European, American – to produce new, and unprecedented, art, such as Jackson Pollock’s.
We can’t have the same confluence again, but maybe present-day conditions can bring about deeper understanding: in art, we have had the benefit of the crucibles of other movements, conditions in society are unstable, and, in painting, and in some sculpture, the search for authenticity seems to be on.
So the present is messy, but promising; our education remains to be deepened. As artists, this is our terrain – we have an obligation to lead.
George Hofmann
A Painting Life
Henri Art Magazine, April 2011
This must start a ways back: I was introduced to the great world of art in high school in the middle to late 1950’s: at the High School of Music and Art in New York, we had teachers who actually were practicing artists in New York, and they expected us to be conversant with what was going on – so seeing what was happening at the 10th St. galleries was a given. A lot of bad Abstract Expressionist work is mostly my memory. I knew it even then.
Then, in a removal, I went to art school in Germany, starting in 1959. It was a shock in many ways to go from a sophisticated art environment to a desert – everyone of consequence and importance to art had fled Germany, or been killed, and what remained was provincial and arid. In school I was regarded as a freak – my teacher thought my approach was “amusing”. All around me, people were just beginning to see Picasso – I had to remember, often, that it was for the first time – but, on the other hand, there was a pristine quality to the first viewers, and of course, there was History, in a big way, all around.
A German artist pointed out an Olitski painting which had just won the Carnegie International, and, by sheer chance, when I came back to the US, I was hired by Olitski to teach at C. W. Post College on Long Island. I liked Olitski, I liked his work, and we became friends; when he went off to Bennington College to teach, I often visited him and his family there, driving up from New York with huge cans of Magna paint from Bocour in the back seat of my VW, and Clement Greenberg in the front seat.
This was indeed the great world – but it seemed like a natural one to me, although I was certainly aware of the stature of those around me. I met Ken Noland, at whose house I stayed, I met David Smith, I met Paul Feeley and Vincent Longo and a host of other painters and sculptors – eventually, Anthony Caro, and Isaac Witkin and Phillip King – the whole of the Color Field school and related artists.
Professionalism then was everything. It signified commitment and passion in those artists, and this is the world I wanted to live in.
As it happened tho, fired by a new administration at C. W. Post, I eventually ended up getting a job teaching at Hunter College, which was then the seat of Minimalism, where Tony Smith reigned over a coterie of ex-helpers and like minded artists, and Gene Goossen was the genial chair. This was the enemy, in a way – the art world as I knew it was split between the Color Field and the Minimalist painters and sculptors. The rest were downtown somewhere, doing something insignificant. And I was an odd man out at Hunter, being suspect, because of my associations.
Still, I was true to my beliefs, but it was a shock when, after my first big show at French and Co. in 1970 (a terrible show), Nancy Hoffman, who was then director there, left to open her own gallery, and began to showing more commercially oriented work. That was my first realization that something was seriously wrong in the art world; looking back, that all probably had its origins in the early 1960s, but I was removed from it at the time, and anyway, it didn’t count for much, even later, in terms of what I thought was important in art.
Altho a lot was being rattled in the 1960s, to pay strict attention to art, this was a period of dislocation for me as an artist; I was friendly with Robert Moskowitz, who had glued a window shade to a canvas and who had shown at Castelli (this was far removed from what I knew) and even Bob was confused by what was arising in the art world, but being part of the downtown scene, he fit in much better than I did then.
Circumstances led me to do some good work in the 1970s, despite personal difficulties, and by the time of the ‘80s I was doing work that sold, and was admired. I was asked by a real estate developer, Francis Greenburger, to head a new foundation for under-recognized artists, and I worked hard to establish his credentials in the art world and to put the foundation on a footing that represented the highest levels of the art world: Clement Greenberg and Robert Motherwell were among the judges that first year out (1986), and there was some comfort for me in the fact that recognition, of a sort, of real value in art, was still alive.
Meanwhile, of course, Pop art dominated the scene, and many other movements, however minor, became prominent for a season at a time. I felt more and more an iconoclast as a painter however, and after a horrendous outing as director of Triangle Workshop (Tony Caro’s summer camp for art) in 1988, I withdrew to the country. I still taught at Hunter (and that place was demoralized after Tony Smith died), but I felt more and more isolated as an artist in the beliefs that I still held – especially as my roots were in Abstract Expressionism, which, I felt more and more, was under-recognized as the seminal movement of our times, but more importantly, one not completed.
Isolation was a blessing in disguise, as it forced me to face what I really believed in, and what my deepest convictions were. Therapy helped a lot: confronting fears and weird beliefs in life helped me to face fears and weird beliefs in art, and the two eventually became intertwined, in the sense that the one taught me the other.
I came to see Abstract Expressionism as a natural phenomenon – one that, as in nature, could be felled by a lightning strike, or from incomplete growth within. I still believe this. AE emerged from the hard confrontations of people who had been born before electric light – theirs was a pioneering effort, and one that required such a tremendous effort and took such a tremendous toll that, perhaps, it was unsustainable. Real feeling, which was the aim, was very, very hard, and still is. Real honesty was very hard, and still is.
It was easy to see how Pop could take over – smart-assness can trump real emotion publicly with éclat, and it was much easier to digest for the newly rich who bought paintings not to have to do the hard work of understanding what painters were trying to do.
And: many artists lost their way, or retreated.
At the same time, the great educational effort in the arts produced a certain intellectualism in artists – the artists now were more and more academically trained, and less the “seat of the pants” types (in Bill Rubin’s phrase) who were the mainstays before.
Is it any wonder that these influences conflated, to produce what we have now?
The wonder is that it has lasted so long.
But again, real feeling is difficult - hard for artists and public alike. We have no religion to base it all in, we are swamped by commercialism, and the lack of candor generally itself breeds contempt.
My own position as an artist can therefore said to be that of a Romantic – if by Romantic is meant the Nearly Obliterated, yearning for light; that yearning seems to me the hallmark of those who “emphasize the imagination and emotions”, who value “sensibility and the use of autobiographical material”, who “exalt in the primitive and the common man”, who “appreciate external nature”, and who have an interest in “the remote”. According to Webster’s.
Count me in.
Postscript, 3.3.2011
I didn’t say much about my studio practice:
For a very long time, I worked “despite” in the studio. I mean that I felt hemmed in by the constraints imposed (or self-imposed) on me by the discipline, as I saw it, of the field. I took this very, very personally and it was a long, long struggle.
It had its moments: I realized, early on, that the painters I admired – Olitski, Noland, Louis and others – had opened the Field – that was what Color Field meant to me – and that it was opened for me. I wasn’t conceited about this, it simply felt very real, and a good thing. And I related this openness to the great works of the past which I had seen in Europe when I was a student. My father was born in Wurzburg, Germany, and when I was there, where my relatives still lived, I saw, and loved the Tiepolo frescos in the Treppenhaus in the palace there. That space deeply stayed with me, and I thought, every time I saw Olitski’s early Color Field paintings that this field that had been opened for me related directly to that extreme of pictorial space in Tiepolo.
But I took the self-criticizing that was built in to the rigor of professionalism to a point where, finally, my partner, Patty Kerr Ross, a woman with a great eye and great judgment told me that I had to get Clement Greenberg out of my studio.
George Hofmann
Fractured Space No Hassle at the Castle, Nov 21, 2010
Some thoughts on space in abstract (and other) painting...
A few years ago, the painters Tom Barron, Arthur Yanoff and I began to think about what has changed, spatially, in painting, wondering if this is a result of a change in seeing itself over the last thirty years.
In the shift to visual information in society, millions are looking - a lot - at constantly changing images on their TVs, computers and hand-held devices. The world is awash in visual information - unedited and torrential, pixellated, flickering, backlit, and instantaneous; this hasn’t necessarily resulted in greater pictorial literacy, but it probably has affected the way we look at art, and the making of art. In painting it probably accelerated what was already happening: more and more fractured, shifting, unexpected and surprising pictorial space.
Frontality persisted in painting – in Pop, in Minimalism, in Color Field, even in Conceptual art - the dominance of the picture plane has ruled since Manet, since Cubism, common to all schools. Color difference and scale alone made for spatiality – so it was mostly thru splitting that space could be alluded to; fracturing led to differentiation itself - the breaking-up of space in a shallow field - as subject.
Eventually, the combination of frontality and fracture, the mix of virtual and real, the juxtapositions of subjects, and the speed that characterize media began to underlie, more and more, the feeling of almost all paintings. The reverse, of course, is also true: collage and fracturing are now everywhere in media; Cubism probably made Windows possible.
Yanoff notes that newer abstract painting presents a subtle difference from the classical abstraction of previous generations – that there was a sense of wholeness in the relationships in paintings which is no longer part of our experience. The elements in our paintings don’t “lock” now - there is a somewhat disjointed distribution of pictorial elements - a “piling on of history, experience and emotion set the stage for fractured space”.
Barron wonders if ‘fractured space” now is more about our way of responding to what we see, or if it refers to the fractured nature of reality. “Probably, it is both”. “Our ‘fractured space’ is inextricably connected with time – in this case, ‘fractured’ time – the rhythm of our dynamic reality: the steady, linear continuum of time and space as we perceived it and on which we once comfortably depended has given way to the reality of infinite simultaneous happenings almost instantly perceived everywhere. We ‘multi-task’, jumping back and forth between reality and virtual (other) reality, we are plugged in to infinite impulses” – as people, and, it is important to remember - as painters.
Now, it seems, the confrontational/then fractured space we’ve known in painting is giving way to paintings that hint at depth, subtly suggesting it, opening pictures and giving us surfaces that invite us in: in Barron’s words, ‘we have kept open the cracks, the spaces, the passageways between realities. We don’t cover up or smooth over the seams – we keep the relationships between spaces and forms, the visible and invisible open-ended, malleable, porous and breathing – like life”.
Perhaps we are just tired of in-your-face, we want to enter pictures, but it seems more likely that this is a natural change – something that has grown, and then comes to an end – and a new beginning. It may be stating the obvious, but for a big change, not much is being said about it, but that also suggests that it is a natural development. For those who are thinking about it, it is exhilarating, and it is exciting to think of all the unforeseen possibilities open to us, in art.
I am forwarding something I wrote to Arthur Yanoff, who was asked by Ken Moffett why Fractured Space was different than Cubism. And I got kick started by Mark Stone's Courbet article, which I thought was really excellent!
I think the main thing about what has changed is the centrality of Cubism – the point of view of the artist, and ergo, the viewer - versus the diffusion and increasingly all-over, up and down, in and out quality of FS. Clearly, to me, Pollock was the precursor here, as were Newman and others, and clearly, again to me, why Jules Olitski and Ken Noland especially were so important in the development of this.
The other point is a more elusive one: the prettiness that was a legacy of 19th century painting still echoes in painting today - the desire for harmony in composition (Renaissance) and even the appeal, through the everyday-ness of the subject in Impressionism, still hangs on as a guiding idea and an unspoken foundation of art. People still make paintings that appeal, that are composed to balance, to be attractive, etc. We all do!
But to shift the base of composition away from this is difficult, because it involves going against a long tide of what we believe to be right. I still find that wish resonating within me, and know that it is so ingrained as to be almost unerasable.
I think the Cubists still had the old idea about Appeal (only the Expressionists and a few others didn't quite) but, because this idea is so deeply ingrained, it is a very hard one to shake, and we only see it loosening, somewhat, in FS, in part because of the diffusion in images - and this is all to the good.
But it takes a fundamental, psychological shift, I think, to really change - and as I also said to Arthur, I think we are seeing a lot of shifting point-of-view in Installation, because it is a kind of proving ground for art. The much more serious painting and sculpture are bedrock, and slower to change, because when they do it is seismic. I think it is in the nature of sculpture and painting - the two mainstays of art - to seek great themes or subjects; after all, what befits bedrock?
A good example of a seismic shift was the development of genre painting in the Netherlands. What brought this about is a bit of a mystery. Was it just competition, or the desire to bring in a new theme, or was it the result of different experiences – not the high-flown Italian experience of the religious deeply embedded in the historical. Add to this the new-found wealth and power in the North. Who knows what alchemy was at work? But it brought about something new in painting, an intensity and a focus, and a physical sensuality quite different from that of the Italians.
These things take a long time to cook up - decades, at least. But I think there is sufficient generation for real momentum in society now. I am seeing the recent past much more historically myself, and see, increasingly, how very different now is from then. You have only to look at a Noland to know it is not possible now.
© George Hofmann 2020