"Hofmann’s late work continued a seamless evolution from previous lines of development… His earlier involvement with color, shape, composition and meaning now found new vehicles of expression, but did not change course. Instead, these new elements now attained an even more irresistible synthesis."
S tunning in its intensity of hue and mastery of stroke, Hans Hofmann’s Smiling Pastrure is a prismatic example of the painterly genius that established the artist as one of the most influential icons of the post-war period. Set on an impressive scale, the present work offers a composition of dazzling chromatic vitality, assembled from saturated slabs of color in thick impasto, producing a dynamic surface that is rich in both visual and textural details. Painted in 1964, only two years before the artist’s death, this work embodies the coloristic values at the heart of Hofmann’s prodigious life's work. The present work boasts impressive provenance, as it formed part of the permanent collects ion of the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Imbued with an atmospheric intensity in deceptively simplified forms, Smiling Pasture's saturated chromatic slabs strike the canvas in bursts of thick impasto. Illusionistic space and representational imagery are abandoned in favor of a dramatic graphic arrangement of saturated marks within both structured geometric planes and free painterly strokes, which come together with claritys and originality. Achieving a spectacular outburst of dynamism within contained geometric compartments, Smiling Pasture stands as an exemplar of the artist’s late paintings. Exemplified in the present work, Hofmann developed his singular style, in part, during his long and deeply influential teaching career, during which he counted Helen Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell, Lee Krasner and Louise Nevelson among his students. Irving Sandler had suggested that “Hofmann may have derived the idea of using rectangles in his painting from one of his teaching techniques: attaching pieces of construction paper to the canvases of his students” (Irving Sandler, The Triumph of American Painting: A History of Abstract Expressionism, New York, 1970, p. 147, note 5). In these last years of his life, Hofmann’s distinguished oeuvre arrives at a harmonious summation of his unique artistic vision, with works like Golden Glow emerging as a test.mes nt to his brilliance.
Executed during this mature period of Hofmann’s oeuvre, Smiling Pasture exemplifies the artist’s signature “push-pull” synthesis, a theory he initially developed in the 1950’s. Within the present work, a starkly geometric yet luminous green plane intersects a sea of dazzling red and deeper browns, drawing the viewer in with the entrancing interplay of form and color.. Explaining the nature of this phenomenon in 1963 Hofmann explained: "push and pull is a colloquial expression applied for movement experienced in nature or created on the picture surface to detect the counterplay of movement in and out of the depth. Depth perception in nature and depth creation on the picture-surface is the crucial problem in pictorial creation." (Hans Hofmann quoted in: Exh. Cat., New York, Whitney Museum of American Art (and traveling), Hans Hofmann, 1990, p. 177) Drawing on his skills as an expert colorist, Hofmann’s compositions utilize varying hues to incite movement and create immense visual depth.
"Push and pull is a colloquial expression applied for movement experienced in nature or created on the picture surface to detect the counterplay of movement in and out of the depth. Depth perception in nature and depth creation on the picture-surface is the crucial problem in pictorial creation."
