Audio Description

Full Audio Transcript (Expand)

Fall Euphony

Hans Hofmann’s Fall Euphony at first could seem to belong on the walls of a daycare center. Across the painting’s six foot-wide by four foot-tall canvas, variously sized, mostly-rectangular shapes, mainly in vibrant colors, nest together like a rustic set of puzzle blocks returned to their box. Vertical and horizontal streaking here and there testifies to how Hofmann applied paint, which was by spreading with the long and short sides of a slender spatula. Along the edges between blocks up-close, out-of-place specks of white and other colors become visible.Yet in overall effect the shapes and colors are tidy and uniform.

Out of about twenty, a dozen of the pieces come in contact with an edge of the painting and so make up part of the outline. A complicated blue one along the top middle branches into three fingers and a thumb extending inside. Along the bottom edge of the painting, a mustard-colored block resembles a capital L, and the flat top of its slender ascending arm makes flush contact with a descending blue fingertip left of center.

Among the blocks located or extending to the middle of the painting, a complete set of the most basic and contrasting variations of red, green, blue and yellow are represented. Alongside and around them other blocks exhibit the same hues in a succession of gradations from light to dark, concluding with an unequivocally black block in the lower left corner. A few others suggest gradations along another dimension, evoking a blend of two of the pure colors, such as a lime-colored block close to the center, which seems intermediate between blocks of green and yellow directly below it. To the right and above there is a block that is simply gray, while below and to the left there is an equally gray but possibly darker block in diagonal opposition.

The painting comes to seem less systematic after a while. The big blue shape soon appears not to be just one blue or even just one piece. Along its boundary with a big primary yellow square in the upper right corner, an incompletely mixed strip of a paler blue tint has been applied. After noticing this, nearby smearing along the blue boundary with other blocks seems possibly intentional. Finally, it becomes apparent that the whole far-left section of the blue shape, encompassing the thumb and first finger, are a very slightly lighter blue, which appears abruptly and only on one side of a narrow isthmus that first seemed to join this section to the rest. Other subtleties and complications appear the longer you look.

Hofmann inscribed his signature and the year “59” close to the bottom in black across two brightly tinted red blocks in the lower left. 1959 was only the first year after he’d retired from four decades as a professor of art. Fittingly, Fall Euphony seems not just to employ but to invoke and demonstrate the principles of color Hofmann had for so long lectured and written books about.

Without depicting or exactly replicating the colors of autumn tree leaves as they change, Hofmann has somehow captured and conveyed something of the phenomenon, as well as the mood. The euphony Hofmann had in mind may be in how simply the painting evokes all this. Like the pleasure of a poetically pithy phrase or aphorism. Including even a downbeat one.