Werner Hofmann (art historian)

Werner Hofmann (2010)

Werner Hofmann (August 8, 1928 in Vienna - 13 March 2013 in Hamburg) was an Austrian art historian, cultural journalist, writer, curator and museum director, who is "considered by his colleagues as one of the most distinguished European scholars of modern art and its ideology."[1]

Life and work

Hofmann was the son of Leopold Hofmann and Anna Visvader. From 1947 to 1949, he studied art history at the universities of Vienna and Paris, where he completed a Ph.D. dissertation on the "Graphische Gestaltungsweise von Honoré Daumier". From 1950 to 1955 he worked as an assistant at the Albertina in Vienna. At that time, he was also a visiting professor at Barnard College, Columbia University in New York. In 1960, he published his groundbreaking study on 19th-century European art, Das Irdische Paradies: Kunst im 19. Jahrhundert, which was soon translated into English. In it, he explained 19th-century art out of its opposing themes rather than in a chronological manner. In 1964 he was a visiting professor at the University of California at Berkeley.

In 1962, Hofmann was the founding director of Vienna's Museum of the 20th Century, which he ran until 1969 - today mumok (Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien). From 1969 to 1990 he was director of the Hamburger Kunsthalle. From 1981 to 1982, he held a visiting professorship at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Hofmann curated famous "Kunst um 1800" exhibitions at the Hamburger Kunsthalle on Caspar David Friedrich, Philipp Otto Runge, William Blake, Henry Fuseli, John Flaxman, J. M. W. Turner and Francisco de Goya and also exhibitions on contemporary artists such as Franz Erhard Walther, Joseph Beuys and Georg Baselitz, which are "regarded as milestones in the history of exhibitions at the Hamburger Kunsthalle and for German art museums."[2]

Hofmann is known for having connected two schools of art history: the Vienna School with the Hamburg School. According to the Dictionary of Art Historians, his "work was highly interdisciplinary, drawing examples from music, philosophy and literature to elucidate what were in many cases well-known works of art in new ways. This non-linear, a-historical (but not anti-historical) view of art history influenced a generation of modernist art historians who viewed their art works thematically rather than as a series of style changes."

Still full of energy and having a new project on "Kunstkammern" and Julius von Schlosser's work on the same subject in mind, Hofmann died of a heart attack in a hospital.[3]

Awards

Select publications

Further reading

References

  1. ↑ "Werner Hofmann To Speak On Art", The Stanford Daily, Volume 145, Issue 56, May 13, 1964.
  2. ↑ "Werner Hofmann gestorben", art: Das Kunstmagazin, March 14, 2013
  3. ↑ Martin Warnke, "Werner Hofmann", Die Zeit, March 21, 2013.

External links

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