Hans Hofmann: The Nature of Abstraction
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,History & Criticism
Hans Hofmann: The Nature of Abstraction Details
About the Author Lucinda Barnes serves as Curator Emerita at the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, after many years as Chief Curator and Director of Programs and Collections. At BAMPFA Barnes has curated and co-curated more than forty exhibitions, including Measure of Time (2006), Human/Nature: Artists Respond to a Changing Planet (2009), American Wonder: Folk Art from the Collection (2014), and Creation in Form and Color: Hans Hofmann (European tour, 2016–17). Prior to coming to Berkeley, Barnes was executive director of the Boise Art Museum, Idaho. She also has held senior curatorial posts at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College, and the Newport Harbor Art Museum (now the Orange County Museum of Art). Ellen G. Landau is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor Emerita in the Humanities, Department of Art History and Art, at Case Western Reserve University. She is the author of Jackson Pollock; Lee Krasner: A Catalogue Raisonné; Reading Abstract Expressionism: Context and Critique; and Mexico and American Modernism, supported by NEH and Terra Foundation grants. She is the recipient of numerous prestigious fellowships and awards, including the Cleveland Arts Prize for Jackson Pollock. She has co-curated a joint retrospective of Pollock and Krasner (Kunstmuseum Bern, 1989) and guest-curated Pollock Matters (McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, 2010), both of which traveled. Landau has also published numerous essays. Michael Schreyach is Associate Professor of Art History at Trinity University in San Antonio and has held a Terra Foundation Visiting Professorship at the JFK Institute for North American Studies at the Freie Universität in Berlin. He is the author of Pollock's Modernism. Read more
Reviews
This book is hefty, and I’m sure the essays are a great contribution to art historical scholarship on Hoffman. However, the color plates in this book are way off. The colors are not accurate and in fact not all the works in the exhibit are represented in the catalog. Many are by other artists given as comparison, in a small sidebar.Myself, speaking as an artist and as a painter, it’s the masterful use of color and light that Hoffman employs that I find the most compelling, and if I were to buy a book in his work I’d insist the colors be accurate.As such, I passed on buying this book at the actual museum store. It’s good perhaps only for the scholar, so I give two stars, but printing is off so it’s not a good buy for a visual artist.