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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.

Hans Hofmann

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Hans Hofmann
Age: 85 †
Born: 1880
Born: January 1
Died: 1966
Died: January 1
Architect
Artist
Drawer
Painter
Weißenburg/Bayern
Hans Georg Albert Hofmann
Johann Georg Albert Hofmann
Johann Hofmann
Hans Hoffman
Hans. Hofmann
Hans Hofmann (1880-1966)
Hofmann
Plastic
Appearance
Concerned
Values
Artist
Presenting
Reality
Presentation
May
Representation
Always
Superficial

More quotes by Hans Hofmann

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It takes intelligence and training, self-discipline and fine-sensibility, to gain renewed life through leisure occupation. America now suffers spiritual poverty, and art must become more fully American life before her leisure can become culture.
Hans Hofmann
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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.
Hans Hofmann
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Art cannot result from sophisticated, frivolous, or superficial effects.
Hans Hofmann
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Painters must speak through paint, not through words.
Hans Hofmann
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The product of movement and counter-movement is tension. When tension working strength is expressed, it endows the work of art with the living effect of coordinated, though opposing, forces.
Hans Hofmann
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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
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The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.
Hans Hofmann
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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.
Hans Hofmann
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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.
Hans Hofmann
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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.
Hans Hofmann
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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.
Hans Hofmann
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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.
Hans Hofmann
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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.
Hans Hofmann
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It is not the form that dictates the color, but the color that brings out the form.
Hans Hofmann
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Colors must fit together as pieces in a puzzle or cogs in a wheel.
Hans Hofmann
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A work of art is a world in itself reflecting senses and emotions of the artist's world. Just as a flower, by virtue of its existence as a complete organism is both ornamental and self-sufficient as to color, form, and texture, so art, because of its singular existence is more than mere ornament.
Hans Hofmann
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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.
Hans Hofmann
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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.
Hans Hofmann
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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 doing
Hans Hofmann
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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.
Hans Hofmann