Time & Perspective Quote by Hans Hofmann

Hofmann is drawing a hard border: abstract art is not a decorative detour from “real” painting, it is painting finally admitting what it has been doing all along. When he says abstract art “proclaim[s] aesthetic principles,” he’s rejecting the old alibi that art earns its keep by copying the visible world. The point isn’t that nature is irrelevant; it’s that nature is never simply transferred. Every choice of edge, color, scale, and rhythm is an argument about how seeing should feel.

The sly provocation sits in “our own time.” Hofmann positions modernism as a moment of sudden honesty, when artists stop pretending that resemblance is the measure of value and instead foreground the mechanics of experience: spatial tension, push-pull dynamics, color as force. That phrase smuggles in a manifesto of historical progress: abstraction isn’t an eccentric style, it’s an evolution in visual consciousness. It also defends a market and a movement that, in Hofmann’s lifetime, was still being litigated as fraud or elitism.

“Art never can be imitation” reads like a rebuke to academic realism, but the deeper target is the audience’s craving for recognition. Imitation flatters the viewer: I know what that is. Hofmann wants art to do something riskier, to build a reality rather than mirror one - to make the canvas a site where perception is engineered. In mid-century terms, this is also a bid for autonomy: art as its own language, not illustration, not propaganda, not mere storytelling.