Page 22 - Studio International - January 1973

Pollock painted his first all-over drip paintings,
and the year after Still's one-man show at Art
of this Century, that Gorky achieved a truly
independent style which reconciled, as, more
absolutely and more radically, did Pollock's, the
previously irreconcilable : drawing as an
image-generating activity, and painting as an
activity which implied assertion of the flatness
of the flat canvas (The Limit, The Orators,
Agony, The Betrothal II, Year after Year, all of
1947). A new kind of painterliness, freed of a
depicting function as drawing was not, was
largely the means to this.
In his own work, and through the progress of
his admiration, from Cezanne, via Picasso
and the transitional Kandinsky, to Miró and
even Duchamp, guided in the latter stages by
Roberto Matta,9 Gorky exemplified the Jackson Pollock, One 195o. Oil and enamel on canvas, 305 X 209 in. MOMA
developing relationship between American and
European painting. The argument as to taught at the Art Students League in New York, framework and an ideology for post-war
whether he should be seen as 'the last Surrealist where Pollock was then enrolled, and in 1934 he `colour painting' generally and for 'Post-
or as a pioneer of the New American painting' is opened the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts painterly Abstraction' specifically.12
best left unresolved. Rubin's characterization in New York. Hofmann exhibited occasionally with the
of him as a 'transitional painter'10 seems Hofmann was steeped in first-hand experience Abstract Expressionists during the forties, but
appropriate, so long as it is not employed to of Cubism, Fauvism and Expressionism and in generation (he was, for instance, 32 years
derogate the achievement and independence of their various extensions. Clement Greenberg, older than Pollock), in origin (he was 52 when
his last paintings. who attended lectures given by Hofmann and he first visited America) and in his work, he
Hans Hofmann, a much older man than was deeply affected by his teaching and evades complete integration with them. His
Gorky (he was born in 188o), was uniquely conversation, has written 'You could learn painting, for all its quality at its best, and for all
qualified to transmit to a younger generation more about Matisse's colour from Hofmann its immense variety, remained European in a
the central concerns of early twentieth-century than from Matisse himself', and 'no one in this specific sense. There is evidence of a
European art. He grew up in Munich at the time country, then or since, understood Cubism as consistent pursuit of 'substantiality' and of a
of the Sezession's activity there. He was in thoroughly as Hofmann did'.11 pervasive attachment to composition as a
Paris from 1904 to 1914, during the fauve and Hofmann's chief concern, which he process of evident relating of parts13 which
cubist episodes, and had been a close friend of transmitted forcefully and articulately to his proclaims some strong European loyalties.
Robert Delaunay. In 1915 he opened a school students, was for a colour/form unity in which Among Hofmann's students in the late thirties
of Fine Arts in Munich, where the tenets of pictorial space was to become 'plastic' through was Lee Krasner, whom Pollock was to marry
Kandinsky's abstract art had been formulated the assumption, by processes of colouring, of in 1945. She introduced him to Hofmann in
a few years earlier, and where, during the war, the 'placing' function previously filled by 1942. Greenberg has attributed to Hofmann's
Hofmann stored many of Kandinsky's processes of drawing. He thus synthesized example and influence the fact that 'the "new"
paintings of the crucial transitional period. aspects of cubist and fauvist theory and American painting in general is distinguished
The year he closed his Munich school, Hofmann prepared to a very considerable extent a by a new liveliness of surface'14 but it is hard

Picasso, Guernica, 1937. Oil on canvas, 11 ft 5 1/2 in x 25 ft 5 3/4 in. MOMA, New York
12