Post War and Contemporary Art

After nearly forty years of teaching, in 1958 Hofmann closed his New York and Provincetown schools. Hofmann’s new freedom allowed him to fully concentrate on his art and bring to fruition the “push pull” treatise in his paintings. In what has become perhaps his most famous dictum, the artist remarked, "Depth, in a pictorial, plastic sense, is not created by the arrangement of objects one after another toward a vanishing point, in the sense of Renaissance perspective, but on the contrary...by the creation of forces in the sense of push and pull" (quoted in S. Hunter, Hans Hofmann, New York, 1963, p. 14). Initially a student of science, the artist drew a parallel between painting and atomic physics, in which the reaction that transforms matter into energy can occur only if proper components are brought together in absolutely correct amounts. As Hofmann explained to his students in the early 1920s, static elements within the painterly composition could be animated through “…a balanced state of expansion and contraction…a positive produces a negative—a high, a low, a right, a left—a push a pull and vice versa.” (P. Morrin, “The Education of Hans Hofmann,” in Hans Hofmann: Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings, 2014, p. 33)

To achieve this “push pull” and the sense of three-dimensional space on the two-dimensional surface of canvas, Hofmann manipulated color contrasts to create light and movement. Mutation in Transition is an exuberant example of this experimentation. The hot, bright red and yellow pigments on the right give way to a scumbled, tumultuous orange and pink-tinged teal in the center, to pure blue and green in the left of the canvas. Everywhere the hand of the artist is seen, whether in the vigorous brushstrokes, the peaks and valleys of the dramatic impasto, or the aggressive ridges within the teal, likely created by the handle of a paintbrush. The encrusted surface is a sculptural record of Hofmann’s expressive force—energy transformed into matter.  

The negative space of the white gesso that borders the pugnacious color blocks likewise accentuates the expanding and contracting forces within the composition. To Hoffman, the plane was the primary pictorial element of painting and he was heavily influenced by the orderly compositions of the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian. Hoffman’s application of thick paint stands out from the surface and emphasizes the planar nature of the canvas. Like Mondrian’s fixed planes of color, Mutation in Transition relies on the spatial relationship of varying shapes to construct a hierarchy of forms. Compared to Mondrian’s more static works, however, Hoffman’s bold colors emerge from and recede into energetic surfaces of intersecting and overlapping shapes that reflect his abstract expressionist values of color and line.

Through the gesture and action of painting, Hofmann sought a translation of the visual and spiritual experience of the forces of nature. He described a true work of art as an organism capable of a life of its own. The title, Mutation in Transition, itself hints toward this inner life, as if the colors are metamorphosing before our eyes. Birthed by the artist, it does not need to resemble or reproduce the outside world, but is a self-sufficient system with its own laws, harmony, and balance. Hofmann has formulated a new kind of painterly expression, one in which he incorporates gestural abstraction, independent planes to reveal depth and surface, and the audacious use of color and tonal contrasts to conjure pure and unbridled energy.