Hans Hofmann
The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.Collection: Communication
Every art expression is rooted fundamentally in the personality and temperament of the artist.Collection: Art
A work of art is a world in itself reflecting senses and emotions of the artist's world.Collection: Work
Through a painting we can see the whole world.Collection: Art
In nature, light creates the color. In the picture, color creates the light.Collection: Nature
Colors must fit together as pieces in a puzzle or cogs in a wheel.
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.
Being inexhaustible, life and nature are a constant stimulus for a creative mind.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The whole world, as we experience it visually, comes to us through the mystic realm of color.
It is not the form that dictates the color, but the color that brings out the form.
Art cannot result from sophisticated, frivolous, or superficial effects.
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.
To worship the product and ignore its development leads to dilettantism and reaction.
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.
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.
Painters must speak through paint, not through words.
It makes no difference whether a work is naturalistic or abstract; every visual expression follows the same fundamental laws.
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.
To sense the invisible and to be able to create it, that is art.Collection: Art
Our entire being is nourished by color.Collection: Color
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.Collection: Light
Art is the expression of the artist´s overflowing soul.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Art
People say 'Hofmann has different styles'. I have not. I have different moods; I am not two days the same man.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Ideas
Through a painting, we can see the whole world.Collection: World
A work of art is finished, from the point of view of the artist, when feeling and perception have resulted in a spiritual synthesis.Collection: Spiritual
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.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Mean
I can't understand how anyone is able to paint without optimism.Collection: Passion
I can't understand how anyone is able to paint without optimism. Despite the general pessimistic attitude in the world today, I am nothing but an optimist.Collection: Attitude
The general misunderstanding of a work of art is often due to the fact that the key to its spiritual content and technical means is missed. Unless the observer is trained to a certain degree in the artistic idiom, he is apt to search for things which have little to do with the aesthetic content of a picture. He is likely to look for pure representational values when the emphasis is really upon music-like relationships.Collection: Spiritual
To experience visually, and to transform our visual experience into plastic terms, requires the faculty of empathy.Collection: Empathy
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.Collection: Illustration
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.Collection: Wall
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.Collection: Light
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.Collection: Space
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."Collection: Teacher
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).Collection: Dark
Genius is gifted with a vitality which is expended in the enrichment of life through the discovery of new worlds of feeling.Collection: Discovery
A thought functions only as a fragmentary part in the formulation of an idea.Collection: Ideas
The child is really an artist, and the artist should be like a child, but he should not stay a child. He must become an artist. That means he cannot permit himself to become sentimental or something like that. He must know what he is doingCollection: Art
The impulse of nature, fused through the personality of the artist by laws arising from the particular nature of the medium, produces the rhythm and the personal expression of a work. Then the life of the composition becomes a spiritual unity.Collection: Spiritual
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 ideaCollection: Expression
The plastic artist may or may not be concerned with presenting a superficial appearance of reality, but he is always concerned with the presentation - if not the representation - of the plastic values of reality.Collection: Artist