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Hans Hofmann: Beginning Again

Hans Hofmann (1880 - 1966)

Action Painting restores art to an ethic beyond mass ideals and taste.  The dialectics of Hofmann's morality balances on his struggle against the given, the struggle for the "creative" (his favorite word) as the sole reality - it involves putting into practice his fixed romantic assumption that painting must be  constantly prevented from becoming the means by which the artist repeats himself.  Beginning again is not only the rule for each new canvas; it is the inner process which gives meaning to the picture.

- The Anxious Object, Art Today and Its Audience
   by Harold Rosenberg
   From Hans Hofmann 2. Nature Into Action

Hans Hofmann, The Vanquished, 1959, 36 x 48 in.


A print of the portrait of Hofmann, above, is available here from Granger Art on Demand.

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