Otto Hofmann (artist)

Otto Hofmann ( born April 28, 1907 in Essen, † 23 July 1996 Pompeiana (Liguria ) ) was a German painter who studied at the Bauhaus in Dessau.

Life and work

From 1928 to 1930 Hofmann studied at the Bauhaus in Dessau and met with Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky. 1930 established the Bauhaus for his works an exhibition and in the same year he was appointed by the Jena Kunstverein for the exhibition, young artists from the Bauhaus Dessau invited. With the Nazi seizure of power, his work was banned as degenerate and he fled as a member of the Communist Party in Switzerland and Paris. In 1934 he worked with Paul Klee in Bern. For family reasons, he went back to Germany in 1935 and in 1939 was drafted. In 1945, he fell into Soviet captivity.

After his release, he moved in 1946 after Rudolstadt, in Thuringia, where he started his artistic activity again. As in the GDR, his work was not appreciated, he moved in 1950 to West Berlin, where he received the 1953 Art Prize of the City of Berlin and then lived from 1953 to 1965 as an artist in Paris. Between 1966 and 1975 he taught at the Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin. Since 1976 he lived and worked until his death in Pompeiana.

The exhibition The Poetics of the Bauhaus in the Palazzo Ducale in Genoa shares his life's work into four phases: The Bauhaus and the years of censorship, Russia, Divided Germany and the European Stays and Pompeiana. The art historian Helmut Börsch -Supan said about the work of Hofmann For me his pictures and the charisma of his personality are inextricably linked. He painted as he was as a unkorruptierbarer [sic ] character who prefers to reset took from you, than adapt.

Occasionally, his works can be found in the auction trade.

Works in public collections

• Moon in the Garden, oil on cardboard, 29.3 × 29.8 cm, Lower Saxony State Museum Hanover