Hans Hofmann Quotes - Page 3

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• To experience visually, and to transform our visual experience into plastic terms, requires the faculty of empathy.

  Hans Hofmann

  Empathy, Emotion, Faculty

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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.

  Hans Hofmann

  Illustration, Two, Lines

  Hans Hofmann, Sara T. Weeks, Bartlett H. Hayes (1967). “Search for the Real: And Other Essays”, p.65, MIT Press

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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.

  Hans Hofmann

  Art, Finals, Realization

  "Hawthorne — The Painter; An Appreciation". Essay by Hans Hofmann, 1952.

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• The width of a line may present the idea of infinity. An epigram may contain a world. In the same way, a small picture format may be much more living, much more leavening, stirring, awakening, than square yards of wall space.

  Hans Hofmann

  Wall, Ideas, Space

  Hans Hofmann, Sara T. Weeks, Bartlett H. Hayes (1967). “Search for the Real: And Other Essays”, p.60, MIT Press

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• Since light is best expressed through differences in color quality, color should not be handled as a tonal gradation, to produce the effect of light.

  Hans Hofmann

  Light, Color, Differences

  Hans Hofmann, Sara T. Weeks, Bartlett H. Hayes (1967). “Search for the Real: And Other Essays”, p.68, MIT Press

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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.

  Hans Hofmann

  Space, Would Be, Able

  "Can Painting be Taught" by Dorothy Seckler, Art News, No. 50, p. 64, March 1951.

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• To worship the product and ignore its development leads to dilettantism and reaction.

  Hans Hofmann

  Development, Worship, Reactions

  Hans Hofmann, Sara T. Weeks, Bartlett H. Hayes (1967). “Search for the Real: And Other Essays”, p.40, MIT Press

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• As a teacher I approach my students purely with the human desire to free them from all scholarly inhibitions, and I tell them, "Painters must speak through paint not through words."

  Hans Hofmann

  Teacher, Desire, Students

  It ls magazine, Winter-Spring 1959.

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• 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 the Renaissance perspective, but on the contrary (and in absolute denial of this doctrine) by the creation of forces in the sense of push and pull . Nor is depth created by tonal gradation (another doctrine of the academician which, at its culmination, degraded the use of color to a mere function of expressing dark and light).

  Hans Hofmann

  Dark, Color, Light

  Lowery Stokes Sims, Hans Hofmann, Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, N.Y.) (1999). “Hans Hofmann in the Metropolitan Museum of Art”, Metropolitan Museum of Art

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• Genius is gifted with a vitality which is expended in the enrichment of life through the discovery of new worlds of feeling.

  Hans Hofmann

  Discovery, Feelings, Vitality

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• A thought functions only as a fragmentary part in the formulation of an idea.

  Hans Hofmann

  Ideas, Function

  Hans Hofmann, Sara T. Weeks, Bartlett H. Hayes (1967). “Search for the Real: And Other Essays”, p.40, MIT Press

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• Art cannot result from sophisticated, frivolous, or superficial effects.

  Hans Hofmann

  Art, Sophisticated, Superficial

  Hans Hofmann, Sara T. Weeks, Bartlett H. Hayes (1967). “Search for the Real: And Other Essays”, p.40, MIT Press

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