Push-pull between teacher, students

An opportunity to do just that is afforded by a terrific exhibition on Cape Cod at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum. Called “Search for the Real: Drawings by Hans Hofmann and His Students,’’ it’s made up of no more than 34 drawings, eight of them by Hofmann, the rest by his students.

Hofmann moved to America from Germany in 1932 and acted as midwife to the birth of abstract expressionism. He taught in New York and, during the summers, from 1935 to 1958, in Provincetown, where his work can still be seen (and bought) in local commercial galleries such as the Julie Heller Gallery.

The drawings here are mostly in ink or heavily worked charcoal, and they come with unhelpful titles of the “Untitled’’ variety. They’re genuine student works, in other words; none of them was intended as finished, salable pictures. About half of them have been borrowed from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (which put on its own show celebrating Hofmann’s teaching prowess back in 1979); the others come from various dealers and private collectors.

Born in 1880, Hofmann had known Picasso, Matisse, Braque and many other major figures of European modernism. His influence - either direct or indirect - on the American generation that included Jackson Pollock, Willem De Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, and Larry Rivers is renowned.

Among Hofmann’s students in Provincetown were Lee Krasner, who is represented in this exhibition by a small and haunting self-portrait in pencil, and Robert De Niro (the actor’s father), whose muscular and vigorous study of a seated male nude is the strongest (the most intense, concentrated, and convincing) of many similar efforts in the show.

But really the key work here is by Blanche Lazzell, the modernist who moved to Provincetown in 1915 and was already an esteemed artist when she began to take Hofmann’s classes in the late 1930s. It’s a charcoal study of a seated female nude, her limbs and joints abstracted into sharp-angled boxes and rectangles.

Part diagram, part life study, it’s a peculiar specimen, and it’s full of information one longs to decode. For Lazzell’s drawing has been plastered with arrows, plus and minus signs and various neatly inscribed Teutonic commands, all of them by Hofmann (“Oppen [sic] on this side,’’ for example, accompanied by arrows pushing to the left).

At this stage of their lives, Lazzell and Hofmann were both fairly deaf. A further impediment to their communication was Hofmann’s poor English. So these vigorous and intelligent marks and annotations, which resemble the hasty blackboard scrawls of a nuclear physicist, were probably the most effective means of exchange they had - certainly all they needed.

It’s impossible to be sure exactly which of the rigidly geometric marks are Hofmann’s and which were Lazzell’s originals. But we do get a compelling sense of Hofmann’s busy, self-confident pedagogy at work. So it’s no surprise to learn that this drawing, and several others like it, were what inspired curator Donald Beal to organize the show.

What sort of teacher, then, was Hofmann?

Thanks to his own prolific writings, and the recollections of his students, we know a fair amount about his ideas. We know that at the core of Hofmann’s philosophy was his famous “push-pull’’ theory, which had to do with the dynamic balance of a successful picture.

People tend to associate “push-pull’’ with tensions between colors that appear to push forward and those that seem to recede in space. But the theory’s scope was much wider, and here, in drawings that are devoid of color, we get a corrective: an increased sense of the importance of tone (light and dark) and the directions and angles of marks.

In an eloquent 1980 essay by Fritz Bultman, one of Hofmann’s students, reproduced in the exhibition’s slim catalog, the author explains that for Hofmann, two-dimensionality was not “an ‘accepted’ condition [of a painting or drawing] but a creation of the artist.’’ Artists begin, he believed, by destroying the two-dimensionality of the picture surface before recreating it, integrating volume, space, color, and light.

These were all phenomena Hofmann associated with life - hence the title of his collected musings on art, published in 1948, “The Search for the Real,’’ which has been recast as the title of this show.

So much for the philosophy. “The concepts of my school are fundamental,’’ Hofmann once said. “But a true artist could violate them all.’’

While it’s clear that Hofmann had a program - and a rigorous one at that - it’s also clear that what his students responded to was his open-mindedness.

The range of approaches in the students’ work here, from expressionist blurtings to severe geometric abstractions, attests to this openness, just as the prevalence of pentimenti - smudges and re-drawn lines, second and third and 23d attempts - attests to the students’ commitment to what they were doing.

Commitment was one thing, and to be commended. But Hofmann did not like art that strained too hard for effect. Hence his dislike of the elaborate concoctions of a surrealist like Salvador Dalí and his fondness for the surrealist principles of automatism and spontaneity (he especially admired Miró).

He did his best to encourage, as Maura Coughlin writes in the catalog’s second essay, “the development of the artists’ intuitive, unconscious gesture and the visual language it produced.’’

Among American artists who were lucky enough to attend his classes in Provincetown and New York, Hofmann inaugurated a new way of seeing. It was grounded in the formal and perceptual revolutions of early 20th-century modernism in Europe, but it left room for something more. And those who came under his influence wasted no time making the most of that room, opening new doors of their own in the process.