Hans Hofmann Quotes

Through a painting, we can see the whole world.

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.

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.

Art and science create a balance to material life and enlarge the world of living experience. Art leads to a more profound concept of life, because art itself is a profound expression of feeling.

A thing in itself never expresses anything. It is the relation between things that gives meaning to them and that formulates a thought. A thought functions only as a fragmentary part in the formulation of an idea.

The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.

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.

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.

Painters must speak through paint, not through words.

Every art expression is rooted fundamentally in the personality and temperament of the artist.

We are connected with our own age if we recognize ourselves in relation to outside events; and we have grasped its spirit when we influence the future.

To experience visually, and to transform our visual experience into plastic terms, requires the faculty of empathy.

Art is the expression of the artist´s overflowing soul.

A work of art is finished, from the point of view of the artist, when feeling and perception have resulted in a spiritual synthesis.

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.

I can't understand how anyone is able to paint without optimism.

An idea can only be materialized with the help of a medium of expression, the inherent qualities of which must be surely sensed and understood in order to become the carrier of an idea

It makes no difference whether a work is naturalistic or abstract; every visual expression follows the same fundamental laws

What goes on in abstract art is the proclaiming of aesthetic principles... It is in our own time that we have become aware of pure aesthetic considerations. Art never can be imitation.

It is not the form that dictates the color, but the color that brings out the form.

The whole world, as we experience it visually, comes to us through the mystic realm of color. Our entire being is nourished by it. This mystic quality of color should likewise find expression in a work of art.

To worship the product and ignore its development leads to dilettantism and reaction.

To sense the invisible and to be able to create it, that is art.

People say 'Hofmann has different styles'. I have not. I have different moods; I am not two days the same man.

In nature, light creates the color. In the picture, color creates the light.

Genius is gifted with a vitality which is expended in the enrichment of life through the discovery of new worlds of feeling.

Our entire being is nourished by color.

You must break all the rules of painting, but you must also convince me you've had a reason to do so.

A work of art is a world in itself reflecting senses and emotions of the artist's world.

A thought functions only as a fragmentary part in the formulation of an idea.

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.

Colors must fit together as pieces in a puzzle or cogs in a wheel.

To me, art is the glorification of the human spirit.

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.

Being inexhaustible, life and nature are a constant stimulus for a creative mind.

The whole world, as we experience it visually, comes to us through the mystic realm of color.

The truly monumental can only come about by means of the most exact and refined relation between parts. Since each thing carries both a meaning of its own and an associated meaning in relation to something else - its essential value is relative. We speak of the mood we experience when looking at a landscape. This mood results from the relation of certain things rather than from their separate actualities. This is because objects do not in themselves possess the total effect they give when interrelated.

Art cannot result from sophisticated, frivolous, or superficial effects.

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.

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