Quotes from Hans Hofmann

Through a painting we can see the whole world.

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

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

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.

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

Art is something absolute, something positive, which gives power just as food gives power. While creative science is a mental food, art is the satisfaction of the soul.

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.

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

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 product of movement and counter-movement is tension. When tension working strength is expressed, it endows the work of art with the living effect of coordinated, though opposing, forces.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

Painters must speak through paint, not through words.

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.

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

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.

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