Hans Hofmann Quotes
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The art of pictorial creation is so complicated - it is so astronomical in its possibilities of relation and combination that it would take an act of super-human concentration to explain the final realization.
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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.
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Color is a plastic means of creating intervals... color harmonics produced by special relationships, or tensions. We differentiate now between formal tensions and color tensions, just as we differentiate in music between counterpoint and harmony.
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Every art expression is rooted fundamentally in the personality and temperament of the artist.
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visiting Jackson Pollock’s studio: You do not work from nature. This is no good, you will repeat yourself. You work by heart, not from nature. Pollock reacted: 'I am nature
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It is the greatest injustice done to Mondrian that people who are plastically blind see only decorative design instead of the plastic perfection which characterizes his work. The whole De Stijl group from which Mondrian's art was derived must be considered a protest against such blindness.
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It makes no difference whether a work is naturalistic or abstract; every visual expression follows the same fundamental laws.
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It is not the form that dictates the color, but the color that brings out the form.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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To worship the product and ignore its development leads to dilettantism and reaction.
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Through a painting we can see the whole world.
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Then speaking of his loosely figurative work of the 1930's, in Germany I was still under nature, not that I was imitating it; now 1957 I am above nature. But everything comes from nature, I too am part of nature; my memory comes from nature, too.
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Art cannot result from sophisticated, frivolous, or superficial effects.
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A work based only on a line concept is scarcely more than a illustration; it fails to achieve pictorial structure. Pictorial structure is based on a plane concept. The line originates in the meeting of two planes ... we can lose ourselves in a multitude of lines, if through them we lose our senses for the planes.
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Just as counterpoint and harmony follow their own laws, and differ in rhythm and movement, both formal tensions and color tensions have a development of their own in accordance with the inherent laws from which they are separately derived. Both, however, aim toward the realization of the same image. And both deal with the depth problem.
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Painters must speak through paint, not through words.
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The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.
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Basically I hate categorical labels. As a young artist I already was very clear about this - that 'objectification' is not the final aim of art. For there are greater things than the object. The greatest thing is the human mind.
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Art is magic... But how is it magic? In its metaphysical development? Or does some final transformation culminate in a magic reality? In truth, the latter is impossible without the former. If creation is not magic, the outcome cannot be magic.
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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.
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Being inexhaustible, life and nature are a constant stimulus for a creative mind.
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Nature's purpose in relation to the visual arts is to provide stimulus - not imitation.. .From its ceaseless urge to create springs all Life - all movement and rhythm - time and light, color and mood - in short, all reality in Form and Thought.