Hans Hofmann: Magnum Opus

Magnum Opus," an exhibition of works by Hans Hofmann, will open in Germany at the Museum Pfalzgalerie Kaiserslautern on 8 March and will remain on view through 16 June 2013.

Hans Hofmann trained in Munich and Paris, where he met artists such as Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Juan Gris and George Rouault. The German-born Hofmann fully established himself as an artist in the United States in the 1930s. In 1930, Hofmann traveled to the United States, and until 1932 he taught at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles. Hofmann moved to New York in 1932 and taught at the Art Students League before opening the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts in 1933.

With highly successful art schools in New York and Provincetown, he exerted a lasting impact on an entire generation of American artists of the postwar period. Hofmann was the catalyst of the Abstract Expressionists and influenced painters such as Jackson Pollock, Helen Frankenthaler, Lee Krasner, Philip Guston, Robert Motherwell and Barnett Newman.

During his lifetime, Hofmann’s work was the subject of exhibitions at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, his first exhibition in the United States (1931); the Art of This Century Gallery (1944); the Whitney Museum of American Art (1957); the XXX Venice Biennale (1960); and The Museum of Modern Art (1963).

Hofmann's work may be found in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Musée de Grenoble, France; the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; the Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany; the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel; and the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich.

www.mpk.de