Existing comment:
Hans Hofmann, 1880-1966
While best known for his vibrant, painterly abstractions, portraiture and self-portraiture also played a critical role in Hans Hofmann's intellectual and artistic development. This undated self-portrait drawing appears to be related to a series of paint- ings that Hofmann made of himself in 1942. In those compositions, as here, Hofmann conceives of his physiognomy as a vocabulary of shapes: triangles, squares, circles, and ovals. Yet it was not simply his own form that concerned the artist but also the inte- gration of his body with the space that surrounded it, as indicated by the use of energetic diagonal lines in this area of the composition. Hofmann's decision to tilt his head to the left intensifies this interaction between planes. His drawing thus reveals, in the artist's words, likeness in "a plastic sense, not in a photographic one," obtaining an independent reality.
1942 |