Accession Number
1973/2.2

Title
Untitled (Double-sided drawing)

Artist(s)
Hans Hofmann

Object Creation Date
circa 1952

Medium & Support
india ink on paper

Dimensions
13 ⅞ in x 10 15/16 in (35.24 cm x 27.78 cm);22 ⅛ in x 18 ⅛ in (56.2 cm x 46.04 cm)

Credit Line
Museum Purchase made possible by the Friends of the Museum of Art

Label copy
The career of Hans Hofmann was marked by great stylistic diversity and innovation. His early roots were in the School of Paris, and he later was influenced by German Expressionism and American Abstract Expressionism. Although Hofmann is associated with a highly colorful art, he struggled repeatedly with the dynamics of black and white, as in this untitled drawing.
For Hofmann, as with many painters, drawing was a means of exploring new pictorial problems and performing graphic exercises. Even between the years 1915 and 1938, when Hofmann virtually abandoned painting to devote his energies to teaching, he continued to draw regularly. Throughout his career, he remained preoccupied with the picture plane, a concern he repeatedly voiced in his classes and theoretical writings. Another concern expressed throughout his career was his attachment to nature. He often took the natural world as the point of departure for even non-representational works.
In this double-sided drawing of 1952, one of many executed that year, the starkly contrasted black and white arrangement encourages multiple readings, with both black and white appearing sometimes as the object and sometimes as the background. It is possible that this work was more than an abstract exercise; it may have been inspired by Hofmann's surroundings. It has been suggested by one of Hofmann's students that this sketch makes reference to an oscillating fan in the artist's own studio, whose blades may be seen roughly approximated in this composition.
Sean M. Ulmer, University Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, on the occasion of the exhibition The New York School: Abstract Expressionism and Beyond, July 20, 2002 – January 19, 2003

Primary Object Classification
Drawing

Collection Area
Modern and Contemporary

Rights
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Keywords
abstraction
modern and contemporary art