Courtesy the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Hans Hofmann,"Magenta and Blue" (1950). Oil on canvas, 48 x 58 in.

March 2009 Reviews

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Creamsicle orange and cotton candy pink, lime green and electric blue; thin washes and chunky crusts, tight-lipped edges and garrulous lines, swirling eddies and still pools. A friend in whose company I saw this exhibition likened the strident simultaneity of Hofmann’s Technicolor styles to an orchestra tuning up before a concert. This struck me as a rather generous euphemism for what Yve-Alain Bois once called the artist’s "crassness." The size and scale of the nine oil paintings that loomed at the gallery’s center — collectively called the Chimbote Studies, and exhibited here with numerous other works from the period for the first time on US soil — certainly amplified the unabashed multiplicity of Hofmann’s ambition. But even in its protean and often shrill dissonance, his art aimed toward a striking singularity of purpose — even, as evinced in this carefully conceived show, a practical application that might help transform the tedium of modernity’s public spaces.

One such space was the small Peruvian municipality of Chimbote — planned and built by the architect Josep Lluís Sert between 1948 and 1950. Hofmann’s paintings were to be incorporated as mosaics into various structures — including a bell tower, a plaza, and a large concrete slab — in the city’s civic center. The Hofmann-Sert collaboration, initiated by the New York gallerist Samuel Koontz as part of the exhibition "The Muralist and the Modern Architect," announced itself as an auspicious one. Sert bore a distinguished history of incorporating murals into his designs (it was in his rationalist pavilion for Republican Spain at Paris’s 1937 Exposition des Arts et Techniques that Picasso first mounted Guernica). Conversely, the spatial substratum of Hofmann’s canvases, with their frequent incorporation of his "push-pull" principle, recommended itself as fundamentally sympathetic to Sert’s architecture and its shared origins in the Cubist revolution.

The collaboration never came to pass; the murals remained uncompleted. Still, the Rose’s installation of the nine painting studies — each suspended several feet off the ground on a latticed panel, each angled at a slight oblique — felicitously lifted the canvases out of two dimensional inertia, adumbrating something of the presence they might have borne when integrated into a multi-planed structure. Also on view are the scaled crayon, gouache, and oil sketches in which Hofmann projected the incorporation of his Chimbote studies onto mural facades. As schematic as they are quixotic, these sketches stir up some various questions. How would Hofmann have realized his plan for a "mosaic cross" — how would he have disciplined the scribbled divagations and palimpsestic layering of his oils into the reticulated tessellations of a mosaic? (His later work for the New York School of Printing and Trades offers an interesting, if disappointing, indication.) What, more broadly, would have reconciled Hofmann’s turbulent surfaces to the cool composure of Sert’s rationalism? Would that tension have been tamed or inflamed? The Rose’s exhibition revivifies not only this unrealized collaboration, but its fading whiff of utopian synthesis, a significant chapter in the annals of high modernism — the noble, but vexed, attempt at reconciling the intractable eccentricity of abstraction with the self-possession and public function of urban planning.

But even in their own right, the Chimbote paintings themselves, as Rose director Michael Rush notes in his catalogue essay, synthesize Hofmann’s concerns at the time. The exhibition’s voluntary limitation to 1950 aimed not solely to highlight the Chimbote project, but to illuminate what was for Hofmann, at the age of seventy, an annus mirabilis, marked by unprecedented creativity and wide-ranging activity. One is hard-pressed to imagine two abstract paintings more disparate than Chimbote Mural and Chimbote Mural, Fragment of Part I: the former a frenzied evocation of a vaguely solar glow, in which line appears only as a subtractive gesture, excised from the painted surface; the latter, an imperturbable overlapping of crisp planes, reminiscent of Malevich’s Suprematism but locked inexorably into place. A different Chimbote panel resembles a spindly hallucination by Wilfredo Lam, while another evokes the freewheeling, sidereal acrobatics of a late Kandinsky. One finds in the Hans Hofmann of 1950 a standoff between hard-edged, tectonic geometry and an almost automatist deployment of line and color, fast and loose.