Hans Hofmann Quotes

The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.

In nature, light creates the color. In the picture, color creates the light.

To sense the invisible and to be able to create it, that is art.

Our entire being is nourished by color.

A work of art is a world in itself reflecting senses and emotions of the artist's world.

Space expands or contracts in the tensions and functions through which it exists. Space is not a static, inert thing. Space is alive; space is dynamic; space is imbued with movement expressed by forces and counterforces; space vibrates and resounds with color, light and form in the rhythm of life.

Art is the expression of the artist´s overflowing soul.

Painters must speak through paint, not through words.

It is not the form that dictates the color, but the color that brings out the form.

The whole world, as we experience it visually, comes to us through the mystic realm of color.

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.

People say 'Hofmann has different styles'. I have not. I have different moods; I am not two days the same man.

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.

Art leads to a more profound concept of life, because art itself is a profound expression of feeling. The artist is born, and art is the expression of his overflowing soul. Because his soul is rich, he cares comparatively little about the superficial necessities of the material world; he sublimates the pressure of material affairs in an artistic experience.

My aim in painting is to create pulsating, luminous, and open surfaces that emanate a mystic light, in accordance with my deepest insight into the experience of life and nature.

A thing in itself never expresses anything. It is the relation between things that gives meaning to them and that formulates a thought. A thought functions only as a fragmentary part in the formulation of an idea.

A work of art is finished, from the point of view of the artist, when feeling and perception have resulted in a spiritual synthesis.

Through a painting, we can see the whole world.

Every art expression is rooted fundamentally in the personality and temperament of the artist.

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.

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.

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.

Creation is dominated by three absolutely different factors: First, nature, which works upon us by its laws; second, the artist, who creates a spiritual contact with nature and his materials; third, the medium of expression through which the artist translates his inner world.

The truly monumental can only come about by means of the most exact and refined relation between parts. Since each thing carries both a meaning of its own and an associated meaning in relation to something else - its essential value is relative. We speak of the mood we experience when looking at a landscape. This mood results from the relation of certain things rather than from their separate actualities. This is because objects do not in themselves possess the total effect they give when interrelated.

What goes on in abstract art is the proclaiming of aesthetic principles... It is in our own time that we have become aware of pure aesthetic considerations. Art never can be imitation.