Paintings
Hofmann's art work is distinguished by a rigorous concern with pictorial structure, spatial illusion, and color relationships.
His completely abstract works date from the 1940s. Hofmann believed that abstract art was a way to get at the important reality. He famously stated that "the ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak".
Read more about this topic: Hans Hofmann
Famous quotes containing the word paintings:
“The invention of photography provided a radically new picture-making process—a process based not on synthesis but on selection. The difference was a basic one. Paintings were made—constructed from a storehouse of traditional schemes and skills and attitudes—but photographs, as the man on the street put, were taken.”
—Jean Szarkowski (b. 1925)
“When I began to have a fire at evening, before I plastered my house, the chimney carried smoke particularly well, because of the numerous chinks between the boards.... Should not every apartment in which man dwells be lofty enough to create some obscurity overhead, where flickering shadows may play at evening about the rafters? These forms are more agreeable to the fancy and imagination than fresco paintings or other the most expensive furniture.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“the great orange bed where we lie
like two frozen paintings in a field of poppies.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)