Hans Hofmann’s Swamp—Elegy is an ambitious painting, combining a fastidious study of color and composition with a primal desire to capture the creative caprices of the soul. The painting’s fecund surface pulls viewers in and plunges them into a lush rendering of Hofmann’s interior landscape. Produced in the final decade of Hofmann’s life, the work reflects the efforts of a mature artist, at last presenting his own authoritative voice.
Much of Hofmann’s oeuvre, Swamp—Elegy in particular, is characterized by a refusal to settle into a specific style or a predictable visual vernacular. This is perhaps because of the artist’s unique position in the history of 20th century art. Clement Greenberg remarked, “I would maintain that the only way to begin placing Hofmann's art is by taking cognizance of the uniqueness of his life's course, which has cut across as many art movements as national boundaries, and put him in several different centers of art at the precise time of their most fruitful activity” (Clement Greenberg, “Hofmann” in Exh. Cat., New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, Hans Hofmann, 1990, p. 124). Educated in Germany during the first decade of the 20th century, the artist studied under local artists who used a particularly vibrant color palette, associated with German Expressionism. When he moved to Paris at age eighteen, he became subsumed into the predominant culture of Cubism. Upon moving to the United States, the artist became aligned with the burgeoning group of New York School painters, who championed the gestural power of the unconscious. In short, Hofmann’s cultural upbringing brought him into direct contact with some of the most dynamic and important artistic movements in the history of modern art.
Swamp—Elegy relays the artist’s innate understanding of the variety of artistic techniques to which he was exposed. The painting’s bright, grassy greens with flutters of scarlet red and shocks of cerulean blue recall the pumped-up color palettes of German Expressionist artists, such as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. By transposing these colors onto an abstract subject, the artist compels the colors to take on an unprecedented power and solidity. The articulation of rectangular blocks or “slabs” of color on the painting’s surface create a kind of architecture reminiscent of Cubism’s faceted constructions. Meanwhile, the inclusion of spontaneous, bursting strokes of paint and textured surface reveals the influence of the brazen Abstract Expressionists. Irving Sandler contends, “Each canvas was to be an arena in which opposites vied: nature and abstraction; the material and the transmaterial or spiritual; the preconceived and the impulsive; and the romantically free and the classically ordered and disciplined" (Irving Sandler, “Hans Hofmann: The Dialectical Master” in Exh. Cat., New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, Hans Hofmann, 1990, p. 77). Hofmann’s painting embraces his diverse influences and their contradictory impulses and condenses them into one impressive composition. The work appears to call the autonomy of established, homogeneous artistic movements into question. Hofmann was, after all, a teacher for most of his life, and predisposed to the interrogation of artistic techniques and methods. Swamp—Elegy suggests that true artistic expression cannot be summarized or typified, but rather must venture into unexplored creative territories.
The title Swamp—Elegy lends some clues to the philosophical underpinnings of this painting. Hofmann wrote extensively about his practice and noted that his later paintings reflect an effort to represent his “deepest insight into the experience of life and nature” (the artist quoted in Katharine Kuh, The Artist’s Voice: Talks with Seventeen Modern Artists, New York 1962, p. 128). Swamp—Elegy, of course, conjures up associations with nature and the experience of remembrance, but the relationship between the two words is not clear. Hofmann remarked, “I bring the landscape home in me” (the artist quoted in Robert Moorhouse, “The Structure of Imagination: Hofmann’s Late Paintings,” Hans Hofmann: Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings, Surrey 2014, p. 61). Instead of painting an exterior subject, the artist strives to conjure up an interior nature, one that evades the limitations of conventional or expected imagery or technique. The result is an utterly idiosyncratic painting, one that draws on the familiar tenets of Expressionism, Cubism, and Abstract Expressionism and eviscerates their cultural currency in favor of earnest and experimental expression. Looking at the canvas, the viewer is able to peer into the marshy recesses of the artist’s mind, to eulogize his aesthetic influences, and to discover his wholly innovative vision.