The Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts

Tina Dickey: Let’s start with the school. Tell me about the sorts of students that were attracted to the school. Why do you think they came?

James Gahagan: I think you will find there’s a great deal of difference as to what kind of students came in the 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s… You have to remember, I only came into the picture in the late 40s. In the 30s and 40s until after World War II, most of the students that came to Provincetown or New York really had heard of Hofmann either from Europe or from his teaching in California. After World War II, it was an entirely different thing. For example, speaking for myself, I was in the Navy. When the war was over, I went back to college. Two of my instructors in college had studied with Hofmann. They were veterans. They went to Europe after the War. They studied with Leger and discovered that you really can’t study with Leger because he refused to speak any other language but French. They heard of Hofmann, so they came and enrolled in the New York school. Now, that was so different that many people, like Lillian (Orlowsky) Freed, will insist that the Hofmann School prior to WWII and the Hofmann School after WWII were two entirely different things. I disagree with her, but I understand what she’s saying because for one thing, a lot of the GIs that came in weren’t serious.

Those that were serious were absolutely serious, obsessed, crazy people, as you would have to be if you want to spend your life doing anything. They came to class and everything, but there was mixed motive. The same with the colleges. Very slowly we started to get a tremendous amount of students from California. Kind of a delayed reaction from Hofmann’s teaching there in the 30s. I think that some of those people that studied with him in the thirties started to teach- and this was a pattern that kept up until the school was closed. And in their teaching, a lot of people became aware of Hofmann; I think much more aware of Hofmann through that process than actually seeing his work, because most people that came to study with him had never seen his work. They heard his name but they didn’t see his work. It wasn’t exhibited that extensively really until the late 50s.

TD: What do you think attracted them to Hofmann? What do you think they heard about him?

JG: Sounds like such an obvious thing- even more painfully obvious today: that he taught. That he actually thought he know something that he could verbalize and demonstrate about the art of painting and could transmit it to you. Now, that sounds so simple and so obvious, you don’t get the full meaning of it. When you go to study, and had been in the past studying with anyone, they showed you their own technique of how to paint. They would actually paint and then you were supposed to paint the way they did. And they tried to transfer their technique and their sense of imagery to you. That was the traditional way. Hofmann didn’t do that. He did demonstrate. He would occasionally work on your painting only for a few strokes to give you an example. He would work on your drawing but really he was teaching you aesthetic theory, leading to what we call plasticity. Had nothing to do with how to paint. He never gave you a painting lesson. You painted whatever way you wanted to paint. He was concerned with how you thought and then how you looked at things. And he had all different kinds of techniques to do that, but the myth and the reality coming out of that is that everyone thought he was teaching abstract painting and everyone thought he was teaching the way he painted. That’s the mythology, and it’s absolutely untrue. Everybody simply painted the way they wanted. Some painted very representationally. Some painted a la Mondrian. Didn’t make any difference to Hofmann. That’s not the way he taught. He did not teach painting technique. That is something I picked up for most of my life when I went into teaching. I tried to teach people how to think, how to see, how to look at something, how to respond to it. How to be honest. All that I learned from Hofmann.

I studied with eight to ten people before I studied with Hofmann, and without casting dispersions on any of them, I don’t actually remember learning anything specifically from any of them. It wasn’t until Hofmann that suddenly there was, “Oh! That’s how I can look at it,” or, “That’s how I can think about it.” How I painted, I have to invent that, that’s me. That was novel. And once it spread that that was the core of his teaching, it finally got crowded. Whereas in the thirties there were maybe, I don’t know, ten, maybe fifteen students in the New York school. Suddenly we couldn’t handle them all. And certainly in Provincetown we had to turn people away.

TD: Tell me something about the Friday critiques in the 40s and 50s. What sort of methods was Hofmann using to criticize the works?

JG: I think his critiques pretty much had the same structure whether you’re talking about the 30s, 40s, 50s or 60s. I’ll explain the structure to you, then tell you what was a little different about the 50s and 60s compared to earlier. It mostly had to do with numbers, the size of the class, and the size of the big Friday crits. It was always one-on-one. He would walk from easel to easel, and he would talk to you about the still life or about the model. Now again, there’s a mythology about abstraction and a mythology about Hofmann. In the classroom, in the drawing classroom, and the painting classroom, you had to work from the object. You didn’t just make up an abstraction. There was a model posing, and you had to be drawing that model- or there was a still life; you had to be working from the still life. You could push it very abstractly or very naturalistically, but when he walked up and he looked at your drawing or painting, and then he looked at the model or the still life, he expected to see something, some connection between the two.

No matter how abstract you were working, what he essentially was looking for was whether you saw and were responding to the composition itself- the forces in it, the movement and the depth, the sense of scale. All those things that had to do with painting had nothing to do with any particular style of painting. Scale, movement, rhythm, so on. Now that- I’m convinced that he taught that way even in Europe. Though I think as a teacher, he got obviously more experience and more sophisticated in the language as he was developing his own theories and as he understood English. Because at first- well, even into the fifties- my essential job in the school- well, I’ll give you an example. He would be giving someone a criticism and after every second or third word, he would say, “Nekker, nekker, nekker?” Kind of like n’est-ce pas? Is that not so? People would say to me, “Nekker seems to be a very important word. What is it?” and I would say, “it isn’t really a word. It’s a Yiddish expression. It’s a German expression. It just means, “Right? Isn’t that so?” But he would try to explain and demonstrate and he used his hands a lot, which is maybe where I got to waving my hands also.

Movement in depth and rhythm, talking about plasticity, what plasticity actually means. It simply means there is a movement into depth and an automatic counter movement that comes and hits the surface of the canvas, which is what we call the picture plane. The physical material plane magically turns into the picture plane, which is actually a creation of the artist himself, because the picture plane can be almost anywhere. All movements that go into depth come out, reside on the picture plane, and that’s how you experience depth rather than see it. It’s not optical depth. It’s not even the kind of depth that you’ll see in most photography. Though a good photographer at least intuitively understands the two-dimensional nature of what they’re doing and that the eye is measuring different forms and planes and dots and lights. And one is actually experiencing the depth, but you’re not actually seeing it the way you would if you used linear perspective to give the illusion of this kind of depth here.

So, my job really was when Hofmann got done with the crit and moved to the next student, that student would say, “What did he say?” because he spoke one-third French, one-third German, one-third English- and very freely and inventively. And so my job was to translate it. Why I had the skill, I don’t have any idea. The first time I walked in as a guest- I think it was in Provincetown in ’49 to his drawing class, and he was giving a crit- I was absolutely stunned. I never heard anyone talk that way about painting. He talked like he knew what he was talking about. He meant something and he was trying to explain it and describe it. I never heard a teacher do that before about painting or sculpture. That’s when I decided, “This will be my last teacher.” I seem to understand intuitively what the hell he’s talking about, even with all this mixed, multi-language lingo. Whatever that was, Hofmann spotted it quickly and said, “You explain to anyone if they’re having trouble with what I’m doing.” I just seemed to understand it.