Gaston Hoffmann (1883-1977) "love One Another" Religion Militaria

Gaston HOFFMANN
(Paris 1883 - Nice 1977)
“Love each other”
Oil on canvas mounted on panel
H. 69 cm; L. 123 cm
Signed lower right. Titled on a label on the back

Provenance: Descendance of the artist.

Related work: - Preparatory charcoal drawing.
- Sketch for the figure of Christ.

Gaston Hoffmann's paintings are rarely encountered, but never forgotten. Whether they exude a kind of burlesque poetry from everyday life, or whether they reintroduce the surrealist spirit of Bosch or Brueghel in the midst of the modern period, they always emanate a euphoria, a humor, a unique inventiveness which gives who watches them for a moment of happiness. Jean Veber, his predecessor at the Salon des Humoristes, was obviously one of his models. But his huge paintings, teeming with dozens of small comic characters, also evoke Devambez who went from miniature to gigantic... It is all the more surprising to discover, in this Lorraine master inclined to gaiety, such dark allegories than the one we present. To be surprised would be to forget that Hoffmann is part of that generation which, in its flesh and soul, was branded by the monstrous absurdity of the First World War. A time that we ourselves naively hoped would finally be over! Our table, which can certainly be dated to the conflict or its immediate aftermath, is sufficiently eloquent to make it unnecessary to explain it. Note only that the artist does not resort to war reporting, like many of his contemporaries. In this large painting, he plays on the insoluble contradiction between the ideals of humans and the reality of their acts: the solitude of Christ wandering in a calcined landscape, flooded with blood, strewn with ruins and corpses, constitutes here an image of a rare power. This disturbing work, - because their aim is to remind us of the madness inherent in History, not to please us -, deserves to appear in a timeless imagery of the War, following that other Lorrain who is Jacques Callot . Perhaps the most extraordinary thing is that after witnessing this darkness, after having extracted its pictorial essence, Gaston Hoffmann was able throughout his career to create the most joyous images possible!