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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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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
Work
Effects
Counter
Strength
Opposing
Movement
Expressed
Though
Tension
Working
Product
Force
Forces
Living
Effect
Endows
Art
Products
Coordinated

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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.
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In nature, light creates the color. In the picture, color creates the light.
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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.
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Painters must speak through paint, not through words.
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Art cannot result from sophisticated, frivolous, or superficial effects.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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There is in reality no such thing as modern art. Art is carried on up and down in immense cycles through centuries and civilizations.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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To experience visually, and to transform our visual experience into plastic terms, requires the faculty of empathy.
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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.
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The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.
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Genius is gifted with a vitality which is expended in the enrichment of life through the discovery of new worlds of feeling.
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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.
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