Walls of color : the murals of Hans Hofmann

The centerpiece of Walls of Color: The Murals of Hans Hofmann will be nine oil studies by Hofmann, each seven feet tall, for the redesign of the Peruvian city of Chimbote. This was Hofmann's extraordinary collaboration, in 1950, with Catalan architect José Luis Sert - the man who designed the Spanish Pavilion at the Paris World's Fair in 1937, for which Picasso's great mural Guernica was conceived. Although never realized, this visionary project was to include a huge mosaic wall - a freestanding bell tower in the town center - designed by Hofmann, which would incorporate not only his own highly evolved notions of Abstract Expressionist visual dynamics, but also forms symbolic of traditional Peruvian culture, religion and history. Although now nearly forgotten, Hofmann also created two huge public murals in Manhattan. In 1956, for the developer William Kaufman, and in collaboration with the noted pioneer modernist architect William Lescaze, Hofmann created an astonishing, brilliantly colored mosaic mural, wrapped around the elevator bank in the main entrance hall of the office building at 711 Third Avenue. Two years later, in 1958, commissioned by the New York City Board of Education, Hofmann created a 64-foot long and 11-foot tall mosaic-tile mural for the High School of Printing (now the High School of Graphic Arts Communication) on West 49th Street.