I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Thursday Thinker, I share a smart idea or theory.
In his essay “The Search for the Real in the Visual Arts” published in the monograph Search for the Real (1948), abstract artist and abstract art teacher Hans Hofmann defines the search for the real as the metamorphosis of external physical facts into a self-sustaining spiritual reality:
The physical carries (commonly painting or sculpture) is the medium of expression of the surreal. Thus, an idea is communicable only when the surreal is converted into material terms. The artist’s technical problem is how to transform the material with which he works back into the sphere of the spirit.
In the essay, he uses surreal to mean a metaphysical state where the spiritual content of a work of art absorbs and dominates its physical foundation. For Hofmann, surreal forces are those that are beyond physical reality. The surrealness of art therefore represents the spiritual or the intangible but requires a physical carrier such as paint or sculpture to be communicated.
Hofmann proposes that when an artist relates two physical facts (like two lines or colors) in an emotionaly controlled way, it creates a third fact of a higher order. This non-physical phenomenon is surreal or magic. To Hofmann, art is most profound when it is surreal, meaning the more-than-real content has successfully overshadowed the materiality of the piece:
But it is the multi-reflex of a particular thought with respect to an over-all idea that finally lifts an artistic expression into the realm of magic. In other words, it is the surreal content of the work that absorbs and overshadows the structure and the physical foundation. The spiritual quality dominates the material.
Hofmann’s life and legacy
Hofmann was more well-known as a teacher of mid twentieth century abstract artists than as an artist himself until late in his life. He opened his first school in Munich in 1915 then later established the Hofmann School of Fine Arts in New York (1933) and Provincetown (1934). He taught students how to feel their way emotionally into art. He eventually became known as the “dean of the New York School of Abstract-Expressionist Painting.”
Following his retrospective at the Addison Gallery in 1948 at age 67, his career exploded. He went from having only 12 one-man shows prior to that exhibit to having 33 one-man shows and appearing in over 60 group exhibitions in the years that followed. In 1958, age 78, he stopped teaching to devote himself full-time to painting. By 1960 he was chosen as one of four artists to represent the United States at the prestigious Vienna Viennale.
Hofmann’s push and pull theory
Hofmann taught his students a theory of push and pull as a specific mechanism by which an artist could turn a physical, material surface into a spiritual and surreal experience.
He writes:
Depth, in a pictorial, plastic sense, is not created by the arrangement of objects one after another toward a vanishing point, in the sense of the Renaissance perspective, but on the contrary (and in absolute denial of this doctrine) by the creation of forces in the sense of push and pull. Nor is depth created by tonal gradation—(another doctrine of the academician which, at its culmination degraded the use of color to a mere function of expressiong dark and light).
Since one cannot create “real depth” by carving a hole in the picture, and since one should not attempt to create the illusion of depth by tonal gradation, depth as aplastic reality must be two dimensional in a formal sense as well as in the sense of color. “Depth” is not created on a flat surface as an illusion, but as a plastic reality. The nature of the picture plane makes it possible to achieve depth without destroying the two-dimensional essence of the picture plane.
So, he proposes that using traditional perspective in a painting to create depth destroys the surface and creates a lie. On the other hand push and pull preserves the material reality of the flat surface while simultaneously creating a spiritual reality of depth. The artist uses opposing forces — where one color or shape pushes forward and another pulls back — the artist creates a state of constant tension. The canvas becomes a living entity.
The surreal — the “higher third” — is directly generated by push and pull:
- Fact A — a physical line or color on the canvas
- Fact B — another physical line or color placed in relation to the first
- The surreal result — the tension or vibration created between those two marks.
The tension is not physical; it is a psychological and spiritual movement. It exists only in the mind of the viewer. Thus it is surreal. It transcends the physical reality of the material.
Pragmatically, Hofmann taught his students to use contrasting colors (warm/cool), forms (he recommended planes more than lines), and textures to create “push” (advancing) and “pull” (receding) effects that animate the surface of a painting without traditional perspective
Example of push and pull
Here, the dark blue plane in the upper left draws me in, as though to the far distance. By contrast, the warm rust orange below pushes forward. The yellow field seems to hover somewhere in between, and then my eye goes to the small rectangle of dark red in the green field, making me want to enter, as though it is a window or a door.
You can see in this artwork how Hofmann used shape, color, and marks to create a dynamic painting which overcomes its two-dimensional surface.