BERKELEY SCHOOL OF ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM

Hans Hofmann, renowned painter and teacher and master of the most advanced art school in Europe, had come to the United States from Munich for the very first time (1930). He traveled to Berkeley at the invitation of a former student, Worth Ryder, a professor in the university's art department. His presence was little noticed outside Berkeley at the time, but his impact on the Bay Area art scene was significant. Hofmann introduced a new formalist vision into Bay Area art, and he influenced the teaching of art at the University of California for more than fifty years.
- Steven A. Nash, Facing Eden: 100 Years of Landscape Art in the Bay Area, The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

There was an intense atmosphere of work in the Munich Hofmann school and a sense of something so good that it would be impossible to get it without a struggle.
- John Haley, Student, Munich Hoffman School, 1927

Hofmann's teaching provided modernist artists, including many of the founders of Abstract Expressionism, with a new artistic vocabulary, and it also influenced leading critics, notably Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg.
- Irving Sandler, The Triumph of American Painting: A History of Abstract Expressionism

Worth Ryder, fresh from his studies with Hans Hofmann in Munich was largely the creator of the curriculum at Berkeley, ably assisted soon after by John Haley, Erle Loran, and, later, Glenn Wessels. Their attitudes toward the teaching of art were strongly influenced by the ideas and practice of Hofmann, the founder of the first school of modern painting, who was then unknown in this country, but who has since become perhaps the most important single artist in the development of contemporary American painting.
- Herschel Chipp, Introduction, Paintings By U.C. Artists, Faculty of the Departments of Art of UC Berkeley and Davis, University Art Gallery, Berkeley, 1965

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Hans Hofmann and John Haley in Carmel, California, May 12, 1931
Photo by Harry Bowden

The name 'Berkeley School' was first applied by the well-known art critic Alfred Frankenstein in 1937 while reviewing the second annual watercolor exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Art. This grouping referred to the work of a small number of artists many of whom were teachers or students at the University of California, Berkeley. The primary artists in this group, which later expanded to include abstract artists of the 1950's and 1960's, are Nancy Genn, John Haley, Karl Kasten, Erle Loran, James McCray, Sonya Rapaport, Felix Ruvolo, Worth Ryder and Glenn Wessels.

Willem de Kooning, Litho #1, 1 of 7, 1961
Willem de Kooning's first print created under the guidance
of Karl Kasten at UC Berkeley.

While the term 'Berkeley School' initially described the California Scene watercolorists of the mid 1930's, it also describes this highly charged group of Hans Hofmann influenced painters who by the early 1950's had developed a strong and colorful style of abstract painting. This style challenged the darker paintings of the San Francisco School that had evolved under the influence of Clyfford Still at the California School of Fine Arts from 1946 to 1950.

Hans Hofmann, Provincetown, 1951
Photo by Karl Kasten

The primary influence of the 'Berkeley School' group came from the teachings of Hans Hofmann which emphasized the abstract qualities of line, color, texture and space. At the invitation of Worth Ryder, Hofmann taught summer school at U.C. Berkeley in 1930 and 1931. This appointment as a visiting professor eventually led to Hofmann's permanent residence in the U.S. and his establishment of an art school on the east coast. Many of the Berkeley School artists studied with Hofmann in either Europe or America. Haley, Ryder and Wessels studied at the Hofmann Schule in Munich, St. Tropez and Capri in the late 1920's and Kasten and Loran followed suit in America in the 1950's. In gratitude, Hofmann donated fifty of his major works of art to the University of California Berkeley Art Museum.

Margaret Peterson and Jay DeFeo

A number of Hofmann's east coast students from the 1940s and 1950s became noted artists including Joan Mitchell, Lee Krasner, Michael Goldberg, Helen Frankenthaler, Larry Rivers, and Frank Stella among many others. However, at the beginning of the 1930s, a significant acknowledgement of European modernism had already taken place among the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley. Hans Hofmann's two summers teaching at Berkeley, in 1930 and 1931, followed by a show of his drawings at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in the summer of 1931, encouraged a blend of modernisms incorporating the teachings of Cezanne, Matisse, and Kandinsky.  This early thread of American modernism extended its way through the works of the Berkeley School artists of the 1930s and 1940s and unfolded in scale and color with their abstract expressionist works of the 1950s and 1960s.

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The open calligraphy and 'free shapes' that rule in 'Abstract Expressionism' were foretold in many other pictures Hofmann did before 1948 ....
When they were first shown they were too new.
- Clement Greenberg

Tioga by Worth Ryder, 1927

Selected Faculty and Students of University of California, Berkeley
George Abend, Boyd Allen, Jerrold Ballaine, Adelie Landis Bischoff, Elmer Bischoff, Joan Brown, William Theo Brown, Edward Corbett, Jay Defeo, Richard Diebenkorn, James Budd Dixon, Ralph Du Casse, Claire Falkenstein, Sam Francis, Nancy Genn, Michael Goldberg, John Grillo, John Haley, George Herms, Hans Hoffman, Jack Jefferson, Karl Kasten, James Kelly, Walter Kuhlman, Adelie Landis, Erle Loran, Fred Martin, James McCray, Virginia Gould McCray, Emiko Nakano, Manuel Neri, George Miyasaki, Richard Nelson, Margaret Peterson O'Hagen, Richard O'Hanlon, Chiura Obata, Stephen Pace, David Park, Roland Petersen, Sonya Rapoport, Felix Ruvolo, Worth Ryder, Peter Shoemaker, David Simpson, Hassel Smith, Clay Spohn, Raimonds Staprans, George Stillman, Sam Tchakalian, Peter Voulkos, Vaclav Vytlacil, Brian Wall, Glenn Wessels, Paul Wonner, Winfrid Zogbaum.