In 1963, Hans Hofmann, age eighty-three, arranged to give forty-five paintings and a very substantial sum of money to the University of California at Berkeley. The funds were intended to help build a new museum on campus where the donated works could be exhibited. It was the fulfillment of the legendary teacher and painter’s long-held desire to have an institution care for a substantial group of his best works, and the culmination of an even longer connection with Berkeley’s art department and many of its faculty. That connection began in 1930, when Worth Ryder, an instructor at Berkeley who had studied at Hofmann’s progressive Schule für Bildende Kunst (School of Fine Art) in Munich, invited his former teacher to lead a summer art course at the California university—a very attractive alternative to the rigors of Germany at the time, despite the growing fame of the Munich school. Hofmann returned to Berkeley the following summer to continue teaching and to have his first American exhibitions, shows of black and white drawings made during his American sojourns and in Europe, held at the Berkeley art department and at San Francisco’s California Palace of the Legion of Honor. In the summer of 1932, Hofmann returned to the United States again to teach, this time at the Chouinard School of Art in Los Angeles, and then traveled to New York to teach at the Art Students League. He never returned to Germany.
If it’s not possible to get to Berkeley before July 21, you can later see “Hans Hofmann: The Nature of Abstraction” at the Peabody Essex Museum, in Salem, Massachusetts. It’s only a couple of hours’ drive, traffic permitting, from Provincetown, where Hofmann taught for so many years and painted many of the works in the Berkeley show. Or there’s a leisurely, scenic ferry. Whichever coast you choose to visit, try not to miss this fine exhibition.
