Hans Hofmann
Munich, Paris, and the Routes of Abstraction

: Munich, Germany

american contemporary art GALLERY is pleased to present Munich, Paris, and the Routes of Abstraction, its eleventh exhibition of the work of Hans Hofmann. It shows seventeen works, all painted in America between 1942 and 1965: three oils and five works on paper of the 1940s, seven small oils of 1960 to 1965, and two hand-painted posters. They are shown first in Munich, where Hofmann trained and ran his own school, and then in Paris (during Art Basel), where he had learned modern painting in the decade before the First World War.

Munich came first. Hofmann's family moved there in 1886; in 1915 he opened his Schule für Bildende Kunst in a small garden house at Georgenstraße 40 and taught there until 1932, with summer sessions in Bavaria and later in Ragusa, Capri and Saint-Tropez. The school came after Paris.

Supported by the Berlin collector Philipp Freudenberg from 1904 to 1914, Hofmann lived there through the decade of Fauvism and Cubism. He knew Matisse, Picasso, Braque and the Delaunays, and in 1911 registered for permission to paint in the Jardin du Luxembourg.

Then both cities closed to him. Caught in Bavaria by the outbreak of war in 1914, he never returned to the Paris apartment, and what was left there was never recovered; most of what remained in Munich was destroyed in the Second World War. A former Munich student, Worth Ryder, brought him to Berkeley in 1930; he left Munich for the last time in 1932 and opened the school again in New York, where he taught until 1958 — Gorky and Greenberg at his lectures, Lee Krasner introducing him to Pollock, Frankenthaler, Rivers, Kaprow and Grooms in the classes. In 1957 Life called him a master teacher who had influenced three decades of American art.

An exhibition of Hofmann in Europe is therefore necessarily an exhibition of American paintings. What Munich and Paris gave him survives inside them — and that is the subject of Catherine Millet's essay for the catalogue.

The exhibition holds two moments, thirteen years apart. Three oils on panel and board of 1942 to 1947 — Landscape No. 11, Black, Grey and Brown and Dark Transition — stand with five sheets of 1944 and 1945, among them Sommernachtträume and White on Black, worked in gouache, ink and crayon in a restricted palette of black, grey and ochre, with red in the sheet of 1944 and orange in one of 1945. Against them, seven small oils of 1960 to 1965 on board, panel and cardboard, in which color carries the whole construction.

Between the two moments lie the posters. In December 1962 a retrospective that had traveled from Nuremberg through Cologne and Berlin opened at the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus in Munich, closing on January 13, 1963. Three months later, on April 23, Galerie Anderson-Mayer opened Hans Hofmann: peintures 1962 in Paris. The two sheets shown here — a study and the finished poster — were painted for that exhibition: Hofmann's name, the gallery and the city set down in gouache, painted rather than printed. This exhibition follows that route again — Munich first, then Paris.

american contemporary art GALLERY has shown Hofmann in Munich for two decades, representing the Renate, Hans and Maria Hofmann Trust, and has helped bring his work to museums on both sides of the Atlantic:

Hans Hofmann — Magnum Opus, Museum Pfalzgalerie Kaiserslautern, 2013

Hans Hofmann: The Nature of Abstraction, BAMPFA, Berkeley, and Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, 2019–20

Hans Hofmann — Chimbote 1950, Museum Pfalzgalerie Kaiserslautern, and Museum Lothar-Fischer, Neumarkt, 2022–23

and to group exhibitions including Das Gedächtnis der Malerei, Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau, 2000; Da Kandinsky a Pollock, Museo Cantonale d'Arte, Lugano, 2001–02; Action Painting, Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Modena, 2004–05; École de New York, MAMAC, Nice, 2005–06; New York, New York. Fifty Years of Art, Grimaldi Forum Monaco, 2006; Le Grand Geste, Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf, 2010; Das Geistige in der Kunst, Museum Wiesbaden, 2010–11; and Abstraction Américaine, Fondation Fernet-Branca, Saint-Louis, 2013.

This exhibition continues that work in the city where the school stood. It then travels to Galerie Dina Vierny, Paris, from October 15 to November 14, 2026, and is on view there throughout Art Basel Paris, October 23 to 25.

A fully illustrated catalogue with a new essay by Catherine Millet, founder and editor of art press, is published by the gallery on the occasion of the exhibition.