Richard Peter Hoffman (1911 - 1977)

Three Freedoms - Worship, Communication and Assembly, February, 1960, mixed media on paper, signed lower right, 28 x 19 3/4 inches, exhibited Portrait of Freedom, Lehigh Art Alliance, Pennsylvania Power & Light Co. building, Allentown, PA, Leh's Department Store Main Floor Gallery, Allentown, PA, Pennsylvania State Museum, Harrisburg, PA, each 1960 (label verso); literature: Hellerich, Mahon H., and Swank, Scott T., A Pennsylvania German Precisionist: The Art of Richard Peter Hoffman, The Pennsylvania German Society, 1990, p. 111

$2,750

Richard Peter Hoffman was a Pennsylvania painter, designer, photographer and art lecturer. Born in Allentown, Hoffman attended Mercersburg Academy where one of his classmates was the actor Jimmy Stewart. At Mercersburg, Hoffman first became seriously interested in art and after graduation he matriculated at the New York School of Fine & Applied Art (Parsons School of Design). After completing his degree in commercial art in 1932, Hoffman worked a graphic artist and designer in New York before returning to Allentown during the depths of the Great Depression.

Splitting time between artistic pursuits and working at his family's grocery store, Hoffman was a founding member of the Lehigh Art Alliance in 1937, an organization in which he would participate for most of his career. In 1939, one of Hoffman's photographs won an award at the New York World's Fair. By 1946, Hoffman settled on watercolor, tempera and crayon as his main media for artistic expression, often used to create a form of Precisionism informed by symbols of Pennsylvania German culture. Over time, he developed a unique version of rural modernism. In 1948, he had a solo exhibition of these works at Henry Salpeter Gallery in New York. In connection with this show, a New York Times critic commented, "Art with strong Pennsylvania Dutch roots that disciplines feeling with design: Respect for simplicity in life, farm, church, home. Source of stability welcome in midst of current art neuroses."

Through the late 1940s through the 1950s, Hoffman was actively involved with the Philadelphia Watercolor Club, the Woodmere Art Gallery and the Philadelphia Art Alliance. He had a second solo New York show at Gimbels and the Allentown Museum of Art honored him with a one-man show in 1962, which was followed by a solo exhibition of forty-four of Hoffman's watercolors at the the Woodmere Art Gallery in 1963.

Soon after completing the present work, Hoffman's output declined, as he produced fewer then twenty fully realized paintings after 1960. Hoffman is listed in Who Was Who in American Art and all other standard references. In 1990, the Pennsylvania German Society produced a monograph about Hoffman and his art called A Pennsylvania German Precisionist: The Art of Richard Peter Hoffman.