Hans Hofmann: The Nature of Abstraction offers a fresh and revealing assessment of the artist's prolific and innovative painterly career. The comprehensive exhibition and accompanying catalogue will feature approximately seventy paintings and works on paper by Hofmann from 1930 through the end of his life in 1966, including works from public and private collections across North America and Europe. Curator Lucinda Barnes builds on new scholarship published over the past ten years and the 2014 catalogue raisonne to present Hofmann as a unique synthesis of student, artist, teacher, and mentor who transcended generations and continents. His singular artistic achievement drew on artistic influences and innovations that spanned two world wars and transatlantic avant-gardes. Over the last fifty years Hofmann has come to be understood primarily from the vantage of his late color-plane abstractions. Hans Hofmann: The Nature of Abstraction expands our understanding and reinvigorates our appreciation of Hofmann through an inclusive presentation of his artistic arc, showing the vibrant interconnectedness and continuity in his work of European and American influences from the early twentieth century through the advent of abstract expressionism. Published in association with the Berkeley Museum of Art Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA). Exhibition dates: Berkeley Museum of Art Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA): February 27-July 21, 2019 The Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA: September 21, 2019-January 6, 2020

Hans Hofmann, a representative of Abstract Expressionism and American Modernism during the 20th century with European roots, had a fundamental influence as a teacher on the development of modern art in America. His brightly coloured paintings, watercolours and drawings can now be discovered in a European retrospective. From 1904 until 1914, the painter Hans Hofmann (1880 - 1966), who was a friend of Picasso, Braque, Matisse, the Fauves and Robert and Sonia Delaunay, witnessed and absorbed the new art in Paris, the centre of European art. In his art school, founded in Munich in 1915, he became a mediator of French modernism and achieved international fame as an art teacher. In 1932 he emigrated to the United States and two years later opened the Han s Hofmann School of Fine Arts in New York. He influenced a new generation of American artists, including Jackson Pollock, Helen Frankenthaler and Barnett Newman.