Schoolmaster of the Abstract

A few days before he died last week of a heart attack, Bavarian-born Hans Hofmann, 85, stopped by at Manhattan's Kootz Gallery to see his current exhibition, 21 large oils, all but two painted within the last year. A pretty, 13-year-old schoolgirl, feasting her eyes on the bright rectangles aswim in impastes of Christmas-color oils, turned to the great, grey, shambling man and asked timidly, "Aren't you Mr. Hofmann?" With a beam, he nodded, replied, "And of course you paint yourself." For him there was no higher activity and he meant it as a return compliment.

And if someone did not paint, he could take care of that too, for Hofmann was a born teacher. His knowledge of the convulsions of 20th century art was firsthand. He had known Picasso, worked alongside Matisse in sketch classes in Paris. Synthesizing such high-key colorism with cubism, he practiced and preached an intuitive, joyous abstract expressionism. His doctrine of "push and pull," by which he tried to reintroduce the tensions once created by depth perspective into the picture plane, flattened by modern artists, became the byword of abstract expressionism, and he himself became the movement's prime mentor. In his Red Trickle of 1939, he pioneered the drip technique that his friend Jackson Pollock was to make his most famous format.

Pupils poured from his classes in New York and Provincetown, including Louise Nevelson, Larry Rivers, Richard Stankiewicz. But he openly confessed, "As an artist, I know that art cannot be taught. All you can do is try to bring out in the individual whatever you think can be brought out." But he was most emphatic that art be seen as the realm of endless possibilities, where one can do anything and express anything. Said he: "Art must not imitate physical life. Art must have a life of its own--a spiritual life."

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