Push Answers Pull

Hans Hofmann is 80, and his claim to a place in the top ranks of American painters is secure. Yet Hofmann's renown is not grounded in a lonely, inarticulate struggle of artist and canvas. He, more than anyone else, has managed to combine the roles of teacher, example and influence in leading U.S. art to its flowering of abstract expressionism in the past 15 years. This long effort has scarcely seemed to age Painter Hofmann. He looks like a jolly burgomaster who has just turned 50, and as his latest show in Manhattan's Kootz Gallery proves (see color), he still has all the pulsating vigor of a 20-year-old.

Hofmann was born in Weissenburg, Bavaria, and his well-meaning father, a stolid civil servant, had hopes that the boy would one day be a famous scientist. Young Hofmann had the aptitude: he pored over engineering books, when scarcely out of school invented an electromagnetic comptometer. But at 18 he abandoned his tinkering to devote himself fulltime to art. He went to Paris, had a brief flirtation with the Fauves--the radical "wild beasts" who were moving away from objective naturalism--and with the cubists. The affair was "rather a platonic one," says he, for he was already preoccupied with ideas of his own. Over the next 45 years, teaching many thousands of students in Germany, at the University of California in Berkeley, in Manhattan's Greenwich Village and in Cape Cod's Provincetown, he worked them out.

The Canvas Is a Door. From his study of physics, he had become fascinated with the notion of a universe made up of energy. This was the invisible life that beat behind and beneath all surfaces, and Hofmann wanted to record it. In his view, there is no such thing as emptiness: what appears to be emptiness is merely a space filled with force that has its own volume and form. Nor is there such a thing as motionlessness, for everything that exists must react to something else. A color automatically dilutes or enhances a neighboring color. Objects gouge out forms in space, and as one form recedes, another comes forward. The constant process of "push answering pull and pull answering push" is what Painter Hofmann tries to capture.

In painting a picture, he approaches the canvas as if it were a door to be broken into to reveal the hidden life beyond. Each line, dot or patch of color --for example, in Lent, the orange splash at the right--gives the artist a sensation and suggests the next step he must take.

"Painting," Hofmann says, "means forming with color," and he speaks of the oils waiting for him on his palette as if they were musical instruments, "like violins or flutes that I must orchestrate into a symphony." From color, too, comes the sense of shallowness or depth; in abstractions like Hofmann's, the rules of perspective do not apply. In the end. the canvas must seem to breathe.

How to Make Magic. Unlike many of his abstractionist colleagues. Hofmann has the virtue of variety. Some of his canvases seem tormented, as if they had been pushed and pulled a bit too hard.

In Lent, the mood is lyrical, produced with spontaneity and comparative ease.

The massive rectangles of Elysium, with their varied thicknesses and textures, are both somber and subtle. They glow before the eye, drop back into space. As the eye moves about them, they in turn seem to move in relation to one another.

Taking off almost as much paint as he put on, Hofmann managed to achieve the magic he wanted. What could have been static and graceless chunks gradually assume life, like slow-motion dancers in a solemn ballet.

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