Untitled

Drawing was a regular part of the painter Hans Hofmann’s artistic practice. His drawings always functioned independently from oil paintings, and never served as preparatory sketches for them. As exemplified in this work, Hofmann often began by building an overall framework with ink, first mapping out shapes with gestural lines and then establishing the positive and negative spaces of the composition. Saturated blacks and rapidly sketched-in color define volumes and voids, flat shapes, and linear passages.

This work is a classic example of Hofmann’s ability to create a tension between the flatness of the two-dimensional picture plane and a sense of three-dimensionality created by the marks on the paper sheet. Hofmann coined the phrase “push-and-pull” to describe this tension—a concept that most painting students still learn today.