HANS HOFMANN
Weissenburg (Germany), 1880 – New York,(USA) 1966 

His first art studies took place in Munich in 1898. In 1904 he went to live in Paris, where he became acquainted with Fauve and Cubist ideas at first hand. Berlin was the setting for his solo exhibition, in 1910, a year in which he worked closely with the Delaunays. 
In 1915 he opened a School of Fine Arts in Munich. Its reputation attracted numerous foreign students and enabled him to extend his teaching to various cities in Europe after the war. His creative activity remained practically confined to drawing during that period. 
In 1933 he left Europe in order to settle in New York, where he combined teaching with a return to painting, strongly marked by Fauve aesthetics at that point. He acquired American nationality in 1941, and the forties brought him official recognition on the American art circuits, where he had a remarkable influence, especially on the Abstract Expressionists. His work remained receptive to the evolution of pictorial languages, gradually radicalising towards non-figurative postulates although never abandoning colour.
In 1958 he gave up teaching in order to devote himself exclusively to painting. Two years later he represented the United States at the XXX Biennale di Venezia, together with Philip Guston, Franz Kline and Theodore Roszak. During the last years of his life there was a series of public tributes in the United States, especially the wide-ranging retrospective of his work at the MoMA in New York in 1963, three years before his death.