dieser beitrag wurde verfasst in: englisch (eng/en)
verfasserin/verfasser: Xavier Costa, Tina Dickey, Eric Mumford, Martí Peran, Maurici Pla
titel: Hans Hofmann. The Chimbote Project. The Synergistic Promise of Modern Art and Urban Architecture
isbn: 84-89771-07-3
+: Barcelona 2004
«In an effort to enlighten a public eye long coroded by the descriptive murals widely produced in the 1930s for the Works Progress Administration, art dealer Sam Kootz paired his artists with architects on a variety of projects for his 1950 exhibition The Muralist and the Modern Architect (October 3-23): Hotmann with Josep Lluís Sert and Paul Lester Wiener, William Baziotes with Philip Johnson, Adolph Gottlieb with Marcel Breuer, David Hare with Frederick Kiesler, and Robert Motherwell with The Architect's Collaborative (Walter Gropius). Kootz wasn't the first fallery to promote the modern mural: a year earlier at the Betty Parsons Gallery, Jackson Pollock had exhibited his collaboration with Peter Blake entitled «Murals in Modern Architecture.» (p. 18)
«The challenges of the project inspired Hofmann to reiterate and clarify his long held thoughts on the distinctions between mural painting and easel painting. «Painting – like architecture – involves predominantly spatial problems,» he wrote that autumn:
A good easel painting has the faculty of assimilation with any environment. But the mural painting must predominantly serve an architectural purpose – it must not contradict the architectural idea. […]» (p. 25)
«In 1949, critic Harold Rosenberg stated for the Intrasubjectives exhibition:
The modern painter is not inspired by anything visible, but only by something he hasn't seen yet. […] Things have abandoned him, including the things in other people's heads (odysseys, crucifixions). In short, he begins with nothingness. That is the only thing he copies. The rest he invents. The nothing the painter begings with is known as Space.» (p. 27)