Trapezoids & Empathy

"At the time of making a picture," says Painter Hans Hofmann, 71, "I want not to know what I'm doing; a picture should be made with feeling, not with knowing . . . A shape can be sad or gay, a line delirious."

Hofmann's latest paintings, sad, gay and delirious, were on display last week in a Manhattan gallery. Drunken trapezoids in blinding reds and blues lurched against whirling, multicolored backgrounds. Blobs of oil streaked across canvases like Technicolor comets, leaving woozy hexagons and rectangles in their wake.

Hofmann likes bare canvas. To him it is "a perfect expression of 100% volume." But he rips into the plain white with a bull-like energy. One slashing stroke or bright blob deserves another. Each changes the nature of the canvas, and therefore the strategy of attack. Hofmann describes the process as creating "push and pull on the picture surf ace." He insists it is no child's play; it requires "empathy in a psychoplastic and rhythmic sense."

More & more modern painters and critics agree with Hofmann, revere him as the dean of a fast-growing school of U.S. abstractionists. Such leading lights of the school as Jackson Pollock and Robert Motherwell snub nature, keep their eyes on the canvas and paint nothings like fury.

Hofmann himself still gets a lot of his ideas from the things he sees around him. But he admits that his most ambitious works are mainly creations of his own imagination. "Canvases from nature I produce very fast," says Hofmann. "Ones from the imagination take a long time."

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