Hans Hofmann

"Hans Hofmann (1880-1966) was born in Bavaria, the son of Theodor and Franziska Hofmann. When he was six he moved with his family to Munich. Here his father took a job with the government. In 1932 he immigrated to the United States, where he resided until the end of his life.
Hofmann's art work is distinguished by a rigorous concern with pictorial structure, spatial illusion, and color relationships. His completely abstract works date from the 1940s. Hofmann believed that abstract art was a way to get at the important reality. He famously stated that “the ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.”
Hofmann was renowned not only as an artist but as a teacher of art, both in his native Germany and later in the U.S. In Munich he founded an art school, where Alf Bayrle, Louise Nevelson, Wolfgang Paalen, Worth Ryder and Alfred Jensen, were among his students. He closed this school in 1932, the year he immigrated to the U.S.
In America, he initially taught a summer session at the University of California, Berkeley in 1930, after which he returned to Munich. In 1931 he taught another summer session at the University of California, Berkeley and a semester at the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles before again returning to Germany.
After Hofmann relocated to New York City he began teaching in 1933 at the Art Students League of New York. Leaving the League in the mid-1930s Hofmann opened his own schools in New York and later in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Many famous or notable artists, especially some who could generally be classified as Abstract Expressionists, studied with Hofmann in New York and Provincetown. These distinguished alumni included: Lee Krasner, Helen Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell, Larry Rivers, Mary Frank, Nell Blaine, Robert De Niro, Sr., Jane Freilicher, Allan Kaprow, Red Grooms, Wolf Kahn, Marisol Escobar, Paul Resika, Burgoyne Diller, Paul Georges, Judith Godwin, Lynne Mapp Drexler, Roland Petersen, Ken Jacobs, Frank Stella, Anton Weiss and Donald Jarvis.
In 1958, Hofmann closed his schools in order to devote himself to his own art." [Source: Unknown and currently being research.]