Douglas Hofmann
American, b. 1945
Douglas Hofmann is a painter of sumptuous canvases that reveal beauty and elegance yet are anchored in realism. Using techniques of the Old Masters,[1] he references the finest art of the past and elicits an emotional response.
Hofmann was born in Baltimore on 13 February 1945, the only child of German-American parents, and has lived there all his life. His childhood was marred by his father’s alcoholism, the break-up of his parents’ marriage in 1952 and repeated changes of school and accommodation. He began to draw in 1954, after seeing the Walt Disney film 20,000 Leagues under the Sea and receiving the accompanying book, which he copied avidly. Living in relative poverty and rebellious at school, he scraped his way through high-school graduation in 1963.
Planning to enrol for a business degree, Hofmann diverted at the last moment to the Maryland Institute to sign up for art college. However, his training was interrupted after a few weeks when his father lost his job at Martin Aircraft and could no longer help pay for tuition. Hofmann secured a temporary post in the local department store, Hecht’s, setting up window displays. So impressive was his creative work that he was transferred to the town centre shop, where his colleagues not only trained him in window dressing but took it upon themselves to introduce him to art museums, the avant-garde scene, art history and the style industry. When his father took on a new job in 1964, enabling him to return to the Maryland Institute, Hofmann was well equipped to start art classes.
At college, the students were taught about a wide range of artistic styles and media, but Abstract Expressionism[2] dominated the scene; Hofmann, wishing to pursue representation and realism, swam against the currents of the time. After studying an austere form of New Realism with George Nick,[3] he enrolled with the painter Joseph Sheppard.[4] A successful professional artist, Sheppard showed Hofmann the Maroger method, a discipline that recreates the oil-painting medium and techniques used in the Netherlands during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.[5] During his college years Hofmann married Fran Cullberston and the first of his two children was born.
Hofmann started to sell his paintings in 1966, and in spring 1968 he both graduated and held his first one-man show in Baltimore. Painting direct from life, he had found a personal style that captured an instant on canvas. He chose to paint quiet scenes of everyday life, using as models members of his family and friends. The seventeenth-century Flemish painter Johannes Vermeer[6] was his prime inspiration: ‘Vermeer showed me that an artist could be extremely successful by placing a normal person in a real room with good or at least interesting lighting, and attempting to paint merely what he saw’, Hofmann wrote in an autobiographical essay.[7] ‘A Vermeer painting might seem simplistic, but in truth portraying the complexities of real images correctly is insanely difficult.’
In the late 1970s, after a period of illness and a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, Hofmann had a breakthrough in his career. Having struggled for a decade to produce enough of his meticulously painted works to support himself and his family, in 1978 he was offered a contract and a solo exhibition in New York by Jack Solomon of Circle Fine Art. With the prospect of a national platform for his paintings, Hofmann decided to move on from principally family scenes to portraying the female form. He hired beautiful models and placed them in elegant settings. Using skills acquired when he window-dressed at Hecht’s, he set about acquiring the right props – antique furniture, Tiffany lamps, Art Nouveau posters, tapestries, oriental rugs – to create lush tableaux centred on flawless nudes.
As a Circle artist, Hofmann was offered the opportunity to make lithographs of his original works; these multiple copies could reach a far wider audience than the six or seven paintings he was able to complete in the course of a year. Training in a new set of concepts and processes, he learned to break down his image into 15 to 20 component colours, each to be drawn on a separate sheet of semi-transparent mylar. Spending weeks per year on this laborious task, he emerged as a master printmaker.
In the mid 1980s, the focus of Hofmann’s painting shifted to ballet. Again capturing specific moments of daily activities, he followed the lead of one of his ‘artistic heroes’ sometimes associated with early Impressionism, Edgar Degas,[8] in subject matter if not in technique. Dancers rehearsing, tying on their ballet shoes, or simply waiting, feature as often as ballerinas on stage. The works are full of light and floating tulle, exemplifying grace and femininity, even when the dancers are bony or tired. ‘Like Degas and Manet’, writes Hofmann, ‘my goal is to leave to the viewer some tangible emotional feeling or insight into the subject’.
After the stock market crash of 1987 and subsequent failure of Circle Fine Art, Hofmann was introduced to Halcyon Gallery, and his paintings now have a worldwide spread. His first museum show, Light and Grace, was held at Britain’s Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery in 2000, accompanied by the launch of his biography of the same title. Since then his paintings have once more been exploring new subject matter: street scenes and unique outdoor settings.
Hoffman has had numerous solo and group shows in galleries throughout the United States, including the Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio; the National Academy of Design, New York; and the Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore. Tokyo, Hong Kong and London have also hosted exhibitions. His paintings are in the permanent collections of the Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska; the Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington; Nassau County Museum of Art, Roslyn Harbor, New York; and the Westmoreland Museum of American Art, Greensburg, Pennsylvania.
[1] The term ‘Old Masters’ refers to skilled European painters pre-1800; it derived from the title of Master awarded by a local artists’ guild.
[2] Abstract Expressionism was an art movement characterised by emotional intensity, centred in New York following the Second World War; it included a variety of non-figurative styles, among them action painting and colour-field painting.
[3] American art professor George Nick (b. 1927) depicts the settings of people’s lives and is known for his pure painting – a celebration of the pleasures of paint.
[4] Best known as a painter, Joseph Sheppard (b. 1930) has also produced prints, drawings and sculptures and taught painting and anatomical drawing; he describes his art as ‘based on the return to those standards which demand the knowledge of composition, perspective, color, three-dimensional form, draftsmanship and anatomy’ (Sheppard, Joseph Sheppard: Fifty Years of Art, Florence, 2001, p. 5).
[5] Sheppard had studied with Jacques Maroger (1885–1962); he, in turn had worked under the French artist Louis Anquetin (1861–1932), who knew and exhibited with, among others, Vincent van Gogh, Georges Seurat and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Maroger was a painter and technical director of the laboratory at the Louvre in Paris; he researched the Old Masters’ medium both to improve conservation techniques and in the hope that it would enable modern artists ‘to create crisp surface patinas and a range of thinly blended tones’ (Joel Taffet in Douglas Hofmann: Light and Grace, London, 2000, p. 19). He emigrated to the United States in 1939, teaching first at the Parsons School of Design, New York, then at the Maryland Institute.
[6] Dutch Baroque artist Johannes Vermeer (1632–1675) is known for his oil paintings of middle-class domestic interiors.
[7] http://www.gregoryeditions.com/d_hofmann_bio.htm.
[8] The French Impressionist movement began in the mid 1860s as artists sought to record fleeting visual reality in terms of light and colour; French painter Claude-Oscar Monet (1840–1926) was the originator of the Impressionist style and leader of the group of Impressionist artists in the 1870s and 1880s. Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas (1834–1917) was a French painter and sculptor whose innovative composition, skilful drawing and perceptive analysis of movement made him one of the masters of modern art in the late nineteenth century.
Douglas Hofmann
