The Justice

Click here to view the pdf file of the Justice's spread on the new Hans Hofmann exhibit at the Rose Art Museum

Where does art come from? The kind of art that covers the walls in museums, sells for record prices at auction, that emblazons the desktop wallpapers of college students? There's an idea that art springs forth in a fit of divine inspiration from the artist's mind to the canvas before him. Art, in this way of thinking, is a highly original manifestation of the artist's personal expression.

So where does the art school come in? The romantic idea of the artist setting pure idea to canvas leaves out an essential element of an artist's development: teaching. Hans Hofmann, the subject of the Rose's keynote exhibition this winter, may not be quite as familiar a name to students as Jackson Pollock or Willem de Kooning, but as the teacher to many abstract expressionist painters including Pollock's wife, Lee Krasner, his importance in art history is much more than his reputation among the American public suggests.

"Hans Hofmann: Circa 1950" fills the Rose's Lois Foster Wing, one of the museum's largest single gallery spaces. The paintings line the walls and hang on panels in the center of the room. The paintings' deceptively uninteresting arrangement (especially in contrast to the surrealism exhibit that filled the space last semester) actually serves to make the room seem quite big and overwhelming at first view.

The exhibition contains a variety of works by Hofmann, many of which have never been shown in a U.S. museum before. The exhibition centers around a 1950 project to create a series of murals for a Peruvian city under the direction of architect and city planner Josep Sert. All of Hofmann's studies for the murals are part of the Rose show, in addition to other paintings and works on paper.

Many of Hofmann's paintings fall squarely in the "my two year old could do that" category, which is why I would highly recommend this exhibition to art lovers and amateur museumgoers alike. It can sometimes be easy to dismiss abstract expressionist work as scribbles or spilled paint when viewed from a computer screen or a sheet of newspaper, but in person, the paintings take on a new light, and it immediately becomes clear that the works' colors and compositions are much more thoughtful than anything a toddler would necessarily develop for a finger-paint project.

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