The exhibition (and accompanying catalogue) Hans Hofmann: Circa 1950 sets out to convince viewers that it was a “singularly important year” in the artist’s career (9). In contrast, at a panel discussion on March 27, 2010, at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art, curator Catherine Morris referred to 1950 as a “minor moment” in Hans Hofmann’s life. So which is it? After several visits and a thorough reading of the catalogue, it’s hard to say. While the year was clearly a momentous one for Hofmann (American, b. Germany, 1880–1966), it was only sometimes so for the reasons the curators suggest. Even when we make allowances for the hyperbole that seems de rigueur these days for curatorial projects, the exhibition’s ambitious claims are unmatched by the work on view. Ultimately, a more thorough investigation of some less grandiose claims would have made the exhibition a more engaging—not to mention, intellectually rewarding—experience.

The argument for the significance of 1950 to Hofmann’s career is clearly outlined by the exhibition narrative, which focuses on a major, if unrealized, commission for a public art project in the Peruvian town of Chimbote, and on contextualizing that project within Hofmann’s contemporaneous body of work. According to Morris and her co-curator Michael Rush, 1950 was important not just because of this commission but because it also marked major stylistic and theoretical developments in his work. The introductory panel for the exhibition as presented at the Philbrook asserted that, “1950 can be seen as the beginning of his most prolific and important period as an artist,” going so far as to claim that it was not until this decade that Hofmann began creating work characterized by a “highly stylized and action-based geometric abstraction.” Catalogue essayist Irving Sandler ratchets his superlatives even higher, claiming, “From 1956, when Hofmann was 76, to the end of his career, he achieved an original and masterly synthesis of Mondrian-like geometric abstraction and Matisse-like color and facture” (97). The year 1950 happened also to be when his place within the history of modernism was institutionalized, both through his affiliation with the Irascibles and his inclusion in the 1950 Provincetown exhibition, Post-Abstract Painting 1950—France and America.

In 1950, at the invitation of art dealer Samuel Kootz, Hofmann embarked upon a collaborative project with Spanish-Catalan architect Josep-Lluis Sert to lay out a new public square for the town of Chimbote. Central to their plan was a bell tower for which Hofmann designed mosaic mural decorations. Never before shown in a U.S. museum, the mural studies for Chimbote are presented as the impetus for, and the heart of, the exhibition. And yet in both the gallery and the catalogue, there is a dearth of information, historical or critical, about these works and their context. The paintings themselves are powerful studies of color and form, as we expect from a painter of Hofmann’s reputation. Wall texts dutifully walk us through Hofmann’s theory of push-pull, his uncharacteristic use of Christian iconography, and the alternating emphasis on expressive brushwork and post-Cubist geometric abstraction in each panel. “The Chimbote studies are nothing if not paintings,” asserts Rush, in defense of his claim that the nine studies “provide a synthesis of all that Hofmann had been moving toward since he resumed painting in 1934” (16, 15). Hofmann’s own distinction between “decorative” mural work and easel painting is rightly dismissed by the exhibition curators as a distraction from the Chimbote studies’ concern with painterly problems.

In their eagerness to locate the works within a genealogy of Hofmann’s gallery paintings, however, Morris and Rush scrimp on more immediate contextual information. They attempt to explain the relationship of these studies to Hofmann’s conception of the final product with a series of sketches as well as a brief text. Neither is without its flaws, however: for one thing, the discrepancies between the sketches and the existing mural studies are unexplained—as is the decision, in the catalogue, to exclude the mural painting Push and Pull (1950), not just from the Chimbote set of paintings but from the book entirely, despite its presence in Hofmann’s sketches. In some cases, of course, the connections between the panels and the sketched tower designs are evident, but I found myself looking for a more thorough exploration of how each study painting related to Hofmann’s ideas about the final product. In the end, I turned to Xavier Costa’s excellent book on the Chimbote project, conveniently for sale in the Philbrook Museum of Art’s store, to sort out the intricacies that were left a mystery in the gallery (Xavier Costa, ed., Hans Hofmann: The Chimbote Project. Barcelona: Actar/MACBA, 2006).

The show’s general lack of information is compounded by its sometimes confusing presentation of details—a problem whose magnitude seems disproportionately large when so few facts are offered in the first place. Most significantly, the exhibition text describes Hofmann’s central tower as a pointedly secular response to the tradition of church bell towers in city squares, a reading that would have interesting implications for the iconography of Hofmann’s design, which includes crosses and other religious imagery. Without even turning to an outside source, however, we discover that Rush describes the murals as “intended for a church,” in the exhibition catalogue (16). This latter interpretation has the force of general scholarly opinion behind it: Costa, in The Chimbote Project, is even more precise: “Sert’s conception for Chimbote included a civic center composed of several structures, particularly a new church. . . . A disengaged concrete slab was to be placed in front of the church . . . [and] would serve as a visual reference to the traditional design of the bell towers” (9). I agree wholeheartedly that a historicized discussion of secularization is vital if we are to understand Hofmann’s (and Sert’s) approach to this project, but asserting as fact an interpretation of the tower that is at variance not only with Rush’s catalogue essay but with scholarly opinion more broadly is at best careless.

To be fair, the exhibition curators make it clear that their premise is about context, rather than an in-depth study of Chimbote itself—and it would be interesting to consider how Hofmann’s secular and apolitical position, so frequently asserted, colored his approach to painting both at and beyond Chimbote. If, as Rush suggests, we should consider these studies not as a separate program of decorative and public work, but as a coherent part of Hofmann’s oeuvre, then the relationship between the nine Chimbote panels and the rest of the works in the show—all produced in 1950—should receive the bulk of the curators’ attention. Would that it did. What we get, however (again, in the catalogue essays as well as in the gallery), is a discussion of Hofmann’s output in 1950 that parallels, rather than includes, the Chimbote murals. We are introduced, for instance, to Kandinsky as a formal influence; we might wish that the curators had also considered the Russian artist’s interest in urban planning as a way to connect Hofmann’s ideas about painting with his plans for Chimbote. Overall, the exhibition begins to feel like two separate shows: one of the Chimbote project and another of Hofmann’s work in 1950.

What if we consider that hypothetical latter show on its own terms? It is beautifully presented: narratively coherent, visually compelling, and with an intellectually engaging premise. Particularly for an artist like Hofmann, who Clement Greenberg entertainingly described as employing a “diversity of manners” that hinted at “an undue absorption in problems and challenges for their own sake,” investigating the output of a single year immediately struck me as an exercise rich in potential (Greenberg, exhibition catalogue, 95). And indeed, if we evaluate this more modest endeavor, rather than asking the exhibition to prove that 1950 was a watershed moment in Hofmann’s career, we discover a show that is both innovative and insightful. The whole in this case is far greater than the sum of its parts; I left the exhibition thinking that the most generous interpretation of Hofmann’s work in 1950 might be that it is uneven. In an exhibition that includes only nine paintings in addition to the Chimbote studies and a selection of works on paper, it was startling to find work that was, to put it plainly, bad. Alongside triumphs of Hofmann’s characteristic painterly-geometric abstraction such as White Space (1950) and The Pumpkin (1950) were the muddily-painted, ill-conceived compositions of Image in Green (1950) and Untitled (Palette Sketch) (1950).

Particularly with the Chimbote commission occupying much of the artist’s energy, it is unsurprising to discover that Hofmann made some hasty or poorly thought-out paintings—but that doesn’t quite explain the curators’ decision to include them in this exhibition. Far from convincing us that Hofmann was, in 1950, exploring productively experimental paths, it leaves us instead with the impression that he would have been wise to stick with the core strengths he had established over a lifetime of practice. And despite the disconnection between Chimbote and the rest of the work in the exhibition and catalogue, in this show those strengths are most powerfully expressed in the Chimbote mural studies.