towards the decorative. It was the direction between Cézanne tapestries and El Greco flowing figures, rich in grace, spontaneity, taste, and borne by a passionate baroque. In this fertile period also he was still restlessly searching. Two trips to India enriched his material, but did not bring him to any objective variations. Every experience has been utilized to attain a shorter method of expression. The surface of his paintings was simplified. This idyll was broken into by the war. Hofer sat for several years in a German prison camp. Here there was no incentive to luxurious pictures, but rather to puzzlings over the problems of form. He went off into the bleak world of abstraction. Form lost its flesh, the stroke was sharp and angular, the colour ornamental. Strangely enough, the result was not devoid of a certain hyper-modern elegance. After his release he remained for a time in Switzerland and then settled in Berlin. His ornamental surfaces brought him close to the fresco, which had already tempted him in Rome along the line of Marées' reconstructions. Perhaps it was his good fortune that the times were unfavourable to such commissions. They compelled him to exert more effort. His skill placed itself at the service of vision. In this way the artist in him was outdone by the human with its struggle for symbols, and a contemporary tactics which can only be named German was the result. Nor has Berlin left this painter with an attitude free of bitterness, but this turn does not leave the rest of Europe out of account and allows the up-to-date-ness of the object to operate only to a very limited degree. The forced lyricism of earlier years has given way to the sustained and sharply concentrated rhythm of the epic. If Hofer had to paint frescos to-day, the problems of form would not be the only thing to interest him.
At least, the earnestness of these days has not done harm to German art. After the parroting of the last generation, it is trying to get into its own sphere. The road there leads through labyrinths. Discipline—a too facile concept with us Germans—is not an absolute protection. Success depends upon more elementary conditions. We shall gain an art if we succeed in rescuing our humanity from the ruins of Europe.
