The painter Hans Georg Albert Hofmann was born in Weissenburg, in Bavaria, in 1880, and died in New York in 1966. His works influenced Abstract Expressionism in the United States. After beginning to draw and paint at a very young age, from 1898 to 1904 Hofmann attended an art school in Munich, where he came in contact with Impressionist painting. In 1904 he left for ten years to live in Paris. The city left its mark on his art, and it was there that he got to know Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Robert and Sonia Delaunay and Georges Braque. In the years 1908 and 1909 he showed his work in Berlin. Exempt from war service owing to a lung ailment, in 1915 he founded his first art school in Munich, which attained international recognition in the 1920s. With the rise of National Socialism Hofmann emigrated to the United States in 1932. The National Socialists declared his art “degenerate”. In New York in 1933 he founded the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts. In 1942 he met Jackson Pollock. Two years later Peggy Guggenheim presented his first solo exhibition in her New York gallery. In 1959 Hofmann participated in documenta 2, and in 1963 New York’s Museum of Modern Art presented his art in a solo show. He represented the United States at the 30th Venice Biennale in 1960.
