The smooth blocks of vivid colour that appear in Pre‑dawn 1960 are characteristic of Hofmann’s paintings after 1958, the year he closed his New York art school.^[i] Irving Sandler has suggested that ‘Hofmann may have derived the idea of using rectangles in his painting from one of his teaching techniques: attaching pieces of construction paper to the canvases of his students’.^[ii] André Emmerich has confirmed that ‘Hofmann used sheets of commercial Color‑Aid paper to plot out the “slabs” in his paintings and we have in fact examples of used Color‑Aid in the files and portfolios left by the artist’.^[iii] A circular form cut-out of Color‑Aid paper, of the same diameter as the orb that appears in Pre‑dawn and in related paintings such as Nirvana 1963 and Rising moon 1965, was also found among Hofmann’s papers.^[iv]

In Pre‑dawn the contrast between the smooth, brightly-coloured rectangles and the surrounding darker relief‑like congestion of paint sets up the sort of spatial tension or ‘push‑and‑pull’ effect by which Hofmann urged his students to synchronise their development of form and colour. This pictorial grammar, with its idea of the picture plane as something inviolable, was especially appealing to critics wishing to defend abstract painting. For Hofmann, however, the push‑and‑pull tension of his paintings was a way of translating into specifically pictorial terms the underlying force–counterforce dynamic he perceived in nature. This is clearly reflected in Pre‑dawn, not only in its lyrical title, but in the way it is composed. Like a conventional landscape, the weight of the painting remains at the bottom, while the red disk, a specific reference to sun or moon, floats above.

Michael Lloyd and Michael Desmond^[v]

^[i] Hofmann opened the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts in New York in 1934. Prior to this he had an art school in Munich, Schule für Moderne Kunst, from 1915–32.

^[ii] Irving Sandler, The triumph of American painting: A history of Abstract Expressionism, Harper and Row, New York, 1970, p 147, note 5.

^[iii]  André Emmerich, correspondence with the Australian National Gallery, 19 February 1985.

^[iv]  Cynthia Goodman, Hans Hofmann, Abbeville Press, New York, 1986, p 103. Nirvana 1963 and Rising moon 1965 are both private collection.

^[v] Adapted and updated from Michael Lloyd and Michael Desmond, European and American Paintings and Sculptures in the Australian National Gallery 1870–1970, Australian National Gallery, Canberra, 1992, pp 306–7, by Christine Dixon.