What goes on in abstract art is the proclaiming of aesthetic principles... It is in our own time that we have become aware of pure aesthetic considerations. Art never can be imitation.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes that art is about expressing aesthetic principles rather than merely imitating reality.
Hans Hofmann's quote highlights the essence of abstract art, suggesting that it focuses on conveying aesthetic principles rather than depicting the physical world. In contemporary times, there is an increased recognition of the importance of these pure aesthetic considerations, indicating a shift in how we perceive and value art. Hofmann asserts that true art transcends direct imitation, suggesting that its purpose lies in the expression of beauty and concept rather than representation.
In practice
During an art lecture, I referenced Hofmann's quote to illustrate the principles of abstract expressionism.
Color is a plastic means of creating intervals... color harmonics produced by special relationships, or tensions. We differentiate now between formal tensions and color tensions, just as we differentiate in music between counterpoint and harmony.
In nature, light creates the color. In the picture, color creates the light.
The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.
The whole world, as we experience it visually, comes to us through the mystic realm of color.
Colors must fit together as pieces in a puzzle or cogs in a wheel.
A work of art is a world in itself reflecting senses and emotions of the artist's world.
When you use film, you use accidents, but there aren't any accidents with digital photography. I don't mind that it's easy. But I do mind that there is a sort of consensus with the camera and the subject and the light, and you look at something, and you photograph it, and you get what you see.
The writer, like a swimmer caught by an undertow, is borne in an unexpected direction. He is carried to a subject which has awaited him--a subject sometimes no part of his conscious plan. Reality, the reality of sensation, has accumulated where it was least sought. To write is to be captured--captured by some experience to which one may have given hardly a thought.
It is godlike ever to think on something beautiful and on something new.
The beauty and genius of a work of art may be reconceived, though its first material expression be destroyed; a vanished harmony may yet again inspire the composer; but when the last individual of a race of living things breathes no more, another heaven and another earth must pass before such a one can be again.
Rationality is what we do to organize the world, to make it possible to predict. Art is the rehearsal for the inapplicability and failure of that process.
A writer's heart, a poet's heart, an artist's heart, a musician's heart is always breaking. It is through that broken window that we see the world.
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