Color Creates Light: Studies with Hans Hofmann

by Tina Dickey

Color Creates Studies with Hans Hofmann brings together the man, the schools, the painting, the ideas, and the teaching. Jed Perl of The New Republic calls this book "enormously important... nothing less than the missing chapter in the history of the period," for Hofmann's decade of painting in Paris prior to World War I, combined with his observations of the masters of all cultures, enabled him to explain Cubism to the avant-garde and catalyzed the later Abstract Expressionism. In the ateliers of German emigrant Hans Hofmann (1880-1966) in Munich, New York and Provincetown, talented students later to become some of the most significant artists and educators of the time rubbed shoulders with critics, collectors, and curators, who in turn transmitted and transmuted Hofmann s ideas across Europe, America, Canada, and beyond. From how Hofmann taught to what he taught, artists talk shop about the inner workings of the visual language, required reading for those engaged in creative composition, whether visual, verbal, musical, architectural, cinematic, or choreographic.

Genres: Art

424 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 2010

Reviews

[Angela · Rating 5 out of 5]

A must have for my art library. I have quotes taken from this book pinned on my walls. So much information, Han's teachings mixed with biography. I feel I got to know Hans Hofmann as a person. I also feel like I just touched the tip of the iceberg of his teachings while reading this book. So many treasures in this book.

[Ric Dragon · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is such an important book for both painters and teachers of art alike. Dickey did an amazing piece of deep work; Hofmann's legacy is no simple matter, and embedded in its time, yet still relevant in our time. A treasure.

[Tina]

"An artist who 'ate color not with a teaspoon but with a shovel,' Hofmann brought European modernism and abstraction to art students of mid-century America with the same Kraft (power, life force) that imbued his own work. With sensitivity, style, and exemplary use of sources, Tina Dickey recreates the man, his work, his teaching, and the lost ambience of that idealistic era when art changed lives, before there was a mass media or international art market, and before cynicism and irony saturated the art world. In an era that regards sincerity and integrity as old-fashioned, irrelevant, and even embarrassing, Hofmann's belief that art can generate 'forces of creation equivalent to forces in the physical world' (from Harold Rosenberg’s eulogy) makes clear what is lost when the importance of art is reflected in its cost rather than its value."

- Ellen Dissanayake

[Tina]

This edition was never published. See ISBN 9780986651106.

[Mona · Rating 5 out of 5]

Best book on Hans Hoffmann, best research, best writing