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Lot Essay
Still Life with Fruit and Coffeepot represents an important transitional moment in Hans Hofmann’s career. Having worked as a highly influential teacher of art from 1915, during which time he drew constantly but had little time to paint, Still Life dates to just a few years after the artist returned to painting on a consistent basis. This large, exuberant composition reveals Hofmann working through the early influence of the Cubists and the Fauves to reach full abstraction and his place as a key figure of Abstract Expressionism.
Hofmann’s debt to earlier European painters, in this case Cézanne and Matisse in particular, can be seen in the composition’s fractured forms, distorted perspective, and vivid coloring, which combines grounding earth tones and enlivening primary colors. The still life appears to depict the artist’s studio for, aside from the title’s fruit and coffeepot, located on a tabletop that tilts towards the picture plane, a canvas is visible in the panel’s middle ground. Yet, while the lower part of this canvas’s frame is delineated, its upper section is smudged and indefinite. Like the rest of the painting, a jumble of brushstrokes and patches of pigment indicate the forms of objects, such the table, the coffeepot, and a vase of flowers, but much is left representationally indistinct. The color-formed apples of Cézanne, for instance, are here transformed into daubs of different hues outlined in black that only abstractly denote fruit. As Clement Greenberg has observed, it is in the early 1940s that Hofmann’s “still lifes become more and more schematically rendered, and finally vanish” (C. Greenberg, “Hans Hofmann,” Art and Culture: Critical Essays, Boston, 1989, p. 192). Still Life with Fruit and Coffeepot is prescient of that decisive moment.
Hofmann’s debt to earlier European painters, in this case Cézanne and Matisse in particular, can be seen in the composition’s fractured forms, distorted perspective, and vivid coloring, which combines grounding earth tones and enlivening primary colors. The still life appears to depict the artist’s studio for, aside from the title’s fruit and coffeepot, located on a tabletop that tilts towards the picture plane, a canvas is visible in the panel’s middle ground. Yet, while the lower part of this canvas’s frame is delineated, its upper section is smudged and indefinite. Like the rest of the painting, a jumble of brushstrokes and patches of pigment indicate the forms of objects, such the table, the coffeepot, and a vase of flowers, but much is left representationally indistinct. The color-formed apples of Cézanne, for instance, are here transformed into daubs of different hues outlined in black that only abstractly denote fruit. As Clement Greenberg has observed, it is in the early 1940s that Hofmann’s “still lifes become more and more schematically rendered, and finally vanish” (C. Greenberg, “Hans Hofmann,” Art and Culture: Critical Essays, Boston, 1989, p. 192). Still Life with Fruit and Coffeepot is prescient of that decisive moment.