MARGO HOFF CRAYON & GRAPHITE MIXED MEDIA PAINTING

Margo Hoff
American, 1912-2008
Un-titled Landscape
Signed: M HOFF (lr)
Mixed media on Paper
Crayon & Graphite
5.5 x 8 inches

Condition report: Very good to excellent; 99.5% original surface paint. Very minor foxing. Otherwise excellent.
Additional Notes: Housed in its original hand carved mahogany wooden frame.
Lot Note(s): Reddish brown chalk: Price $210- (unknown hand) to verso.
Fairweather Hardin Gallery by Margo Hoff (unknown hand) in pencil. Sunday Afternoon Gallery. Custom Framing: 548 Chestnut St. Winnetka, Illinois 60093.
COMPARABLE #1: For a similar quality example see: Hindman, 4/29/2007; Lot: 15 with a presale estimate of $200 ? 400 USD ? SOLD: $600 USD

ARTIST BIO:
Margo Hoff (born 1910) died during the early morning hours of Sunday, August 17, 2008. She passed, in her sleep, in Manhattan. She was 98 years of age. In keeping with her wishes, she was cremated, and her ashes placed in Graceland Cemetery, in Chicago, Illinois. She also specified that there be no funeral service. Although those of us who knew her mourn her, more moving than her loss is the inspiring life she led. She was fearless, pursued her dreams, created great art and achieved great success. Hers was a long and amazing journey.

A memorial was held on the afternoon of January 17, 2009, in the Spartan 14th Street loft that served as her painting studio?and, in later years, her home?for many, many years. Her remembrance was well attended. Margo's daughter Mia Buehr was there, as was her son-in-law, Ken Vaughn. Also present were some of the many people whose lives she'd affected over the years, including colleagues, students, friends. Some of those present Margo had known for decades; some had known her more casually; some had never had the joy of meeting her in person, but nearly felt as though they had?through what they'd heard and read about her?and most of all, through her singular and astounding body of work.

Of course it would be impossible to capture here in words the energy and the heartfelt emotions of the memorial itself, but what follows are transcriptions of what various people came forward to say about Margo.

Margo's gallerist in Chicago, John Corbett (of Corbett vs. Dempsey gallery), had very much wanted to attend in person, but this proved impossible. He did provide the following overview of Margo-as-artist, which was read by Charles Hovland. John has graciously given permission for us to post his text on MargoHoff.com.

'Margo Hoff?A Life in Art' by John Corbett (Copyright January, 2009; used by permission)

Margo Hoff was too expansive and bold a creative force to be adequately encapsulated. She was, from early in her life, a thoroughly international artist, both in reputation and in personal philosophy. Over the course of an astonishing seven decades of artistic production, Hoff was extremely well-traveled, exhibited extensively in many different kinds of contexts, and was celebrated in places far from her three most settled residences, Tulsa, Chicago, and Manhattan. And although her initial acclaim was earned as a painter, Hoff was in the most genuine sense a polyglot artist, working in a range of two-dimensional media including woodcut, lithography, casein, oil, watercolor, crayon, gouache, every variety of collage, textiles, and stained glass.

To attempt a sweeping description of such a varied and multifarious person is certain to leave important things out, but the following biography touches on some of the key elements of Hoff?s life as an artist and the brilliant body of work she produced.

Perhaps the best way to understand Hoff?s artwork is to tie it directly to the unfolding of her personal life. After a youth spent as a member of a large family in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where she was initially exposed to art, studied drawing, and began to imagine herself as an artist, Hoff settled in Chicago. It was in the Windy City that she came to artistic maturity and formulated an aesthetic identity. Indeed, for many of her collectors and friends, she remains a great Chicago artist, despite the fact that she eventually spent nearly half a century in New York. But her style as a figurative painter ? and to some extent even her signature approach to abstraction ? were formulated in the vibrant and highly stimulating environs of Chicago?s mid-century art scene, starting with her studies at the School of the Art Institute.?

Unlike some of her contemporaries in Chicago, Hoff was not drawn to surrealism, preferring more prosaic subjects to the hysterical, off-beat and highly dramatic ones of Gertrude Abercrombie, Julia Thecla, Aaron Bohrod, Karl Priebe, and Ivan Albright. And where many of her generation ? including Buehr ? were influenced by the brushy expressionism promoted by Francis Chapin, Hoff preferred a clean, linear style. Where her earliest work was rich in volumes and modeling, she eventually began to incorporate more complex patterns and would develop a unique way of mixing flat, unmodulated areas, exchanging a naturalism more a more stylized kind of figuration. This may well have been impacted by her work as a printmaker, which was quite extensive in the ?40s and ?50s, especially in the tricky medium of woodblock, of which she was an absolute master. Some of her most emblematic images are her woodblock prints, often made in tiny editions, from this period.

Very good to excellent; 99.5% original surface paint. Very minor foxing. Otherwise excellent. Housed in its original hand carved mahogany wooden frame.