Hans Hofmann: The California Exhibitions, 1931

Drawing upon extensive archival research and new scholarship, this publication offers an unprecedented examination of Hans Hofmann’s first American exhibitions, mounted in 1931 at San Francisco’s Palace of the Legion of Honor and the University of California, Berkeley’s Haviland Hall—a pivotal moment that preceded his permanent immigration to the United States and subsequent emergence as a central figure in Abstract Expressionism. Through careful analysis of thirty drawings spanning portraits and landscapes executed in Munich, Saint-Tropez, and California, the catalogue illuminates a lesser-known but crucial period in Hofmann’s artistic development when drawing, not painting, served as his primary mode of expression and pedagogical tool in his influential Munich school. During this time, he shaped a generation of American artists including Worth Ryder, who would later facilitate these California exhibitions.

The publication’s scholarly contribution offers critical insight into how Hofmann’s drawings from this period—characterized by Ryder as containing “the greatest achievements of modern art in solution”—anticipate the theoretical frameworks and formal innovations that would later define his mature painterly practice and teaching career in New York. Through essays developed by Hunter College’s Hofmann Research Fellows under the guidance of Howard Singerman, the catalogue positions these early works as crucial documents for understanding both Hofmann’s artistic evolution and the broader transatlantic exchanges that shaped American modernism’s development, particularly through his synthesis of European avant-garde principles with direct observation of the California landscape, whose distinctive spatial and atmospheric qualities would influence his emerging theories about pictorial dynamics and color relationships.

Published by Hunter College Art Galleries, New York, 2019

Essays by Howard Singerman, Chika Jenkins, Mindy Lawson Friedman, and Anna Tome

Designed by Natalie Wedeking

Edited by SNAP Editions

Fully illustrated, 88 pages

_{© Estate of Hans Hofmann / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York}