"The relative meaning of two physical facts in an emotionally controlled relation always creates the phenomenon of a third fact of a higher order, just as two musical sounds, heard simultaneously create the phenomenon of a third, fourth or fifth. The nature of this higher third is non-physical. In a sense it is magic. Each such phenomenon always overshadows the material qualities and the limited meaning of the basic factors from which it has sprung. For this reason Art expresses the highest quality of the spirit when it is surreal in nature; or, in terms of the visual arts, when it is of a surreal plastic nature."
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'Search for the Real in the Visual Arts', p. 41
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Hans_Hofmann
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Hans Hofmann
Hans Hofmann (21 March 1880 – 17 February 1966) was one of the older abstract expressionist painters working in New York. Hofmann originally came from Germany where he experienced the new art and so he connected European with modern American abstract art. He had strong influence as an art-teacher and writer on the younger American abstract artists after 1940.
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