New Art City

Chapter One

THE PAINTER AND THE CITY

I

“Mitcha, why aren’t you home painting?” This was what Hans Hofmann said to Joan Mitchell when he saw her out walking her dog early one morning in the paint-happy 1950s. Hofmann was in his seventies and Mitchell was turning thirty. She had studied with him briefly, in the school he had run in Manhattan since 1933. And like so many other artists of her day, she had felt the casually messianic impact of this man who was thickly built, with a large, powerful head and an orator’s way of using his arms and hands to underscore a dramatic point. In the 1950s Hofmann and his wife, Miz, were living in a fifth-floor walk-up on Fourteenth Street, not far from his school, which was on Eighth Street, and Mitchell worked in several studios in the neighborhood. Hofmann and Mitchell would run into each other in Washington Square Park, that patch of green dominated by the famous triumphal arch, and all around them

Was Greenwich Village, with its extraordinary cache of nineteenth-century domestic architecture and its occasional modern storefronts and its faded fascination. The Washington Square of Hen ... read full excerpt from: New Art City ebook