Walls of Color: The Murals of Hans Hofmann

Walls of Color: The Murals of Hans Hofmann
May 2, 2015 - September 6, 2015
The Museum will be awash in the vibrant hues of Abstract Expressionist Hans Hofmann in this first-ever exhibition to focus on the artist’s varied and under-appreciated public mural projects.
The centerpiece of Walls of Color: The Murals of Hans Hofmann will be nine oil studies by Hofmann, each seven feet tall, for the redesign of the Peruvian city of Chimbote. This was Hofmann’s extraordinary collaboration, in 1950, with Catalan architect José Luis Sert - the man who designed the Spanish Pavilion at the Paris World’s Fair in 1937, for which Picasso’s great mural Guernica was conceived. Although never realized, this visionary project was to include a huge mosaic wall - a freestanding bell tower in the town center - designed by Hofmann, which would incorporate not only his own highly evolved notions of Abstract Expressionist visual dynamics, but also forms symbolic of traditional Peruvian culture, religion and history.
Although now nearly forgotten, Hofmann also created two huge public murals in Manhattan. In 1956, for the developer William Kaufman, and in collaboration with the noted pioneer modernist architect William Lescaze, Hofmann created an astonishing, brilliantly colored mosaic mural, wrapped around the elevator bank in the main entrance hall of the office building at 711 Third Avenue. Two years later, in 1958, commissioned by the New York City Board of Education, Hofmann created a 64-foot long and 11-foot tall mosaic-tile mural for the High School of Printing (now the High School of Graphic Arts Communication) on West 49th Street.
Studies, mosaic maquettes, photos, and ephemera - as well as studies for a mural for an unrealized New York apartment house of the same period - show not only Hofmann’s working methods, but also just how significant these murals were to the development of his art in general.
Several key later paintings demonstrate the crucial influence of the mural projects on Hofmann’s final and brilliant flowering as an easel painter.
A scholarly catalogue for the exhibition includes a foreword from the Renate, Hans and Maria Hofmann Trust and essays by Bruce Museum Adjunct Curator and New York University Professor of Modern Art Kenneth Silver and Mary McLeod, Professor at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Columbia University.

[@mayormc]

Great to see those mosaic murals which I have never seen before. I wonder if they still exist?

[@TheBruceMuseum]

Yes these murals are still there in NYC - 711 Third Avenue, inside the lobby, and 439 West 49th Street.

[@dannistor7294]

...the man was influential, and might have been a fascinating figure for many... still, his painting is second-rate, either assessed contextually or in the absolute...

[@DazzledBanana]

I don’t see them as fully formed paintings. But calling him second rate isn’t quite right. You can see many of the forces of ab ex painting beginning to break out in his work. I see Gorky in the same light. As transitional painters, setting a foundation for the work of those to come.