[ Photographs ] Hofmann, Otto Night collage entitled " Begegnung! Auf Dem Quai." Mixed media collage with photographic halftone reproductions, airbrushing, and original artwork; overall size 11.5 x 8.25inches, with Hofmann's signature and date, and

[ Photographs ] Hofmann, Otto Night collage entitled " Begegnung! Auf Dem Quai." Mixed media collage with photographic halftone reproductions, airbrushing, and original artwork; overall size 11.5 x 8.25inches, with Hofmann's signature and date, and the title, all in white ink, on recto. 1934 E7000-10000 A haunting and complex artwork by the Bauhaus-educated Hofmann (1907-94 that appears to be an allegory of womanhood and urbanity. Hofmann places images of the Venus of Willendorf, a mechanized modern woman ( with notebook in hand , and a Venus like figure playing a flute in the same dark dreamscape. These female archetypes hover in an unsettling urban environment in which a tiny single skyscraper foregrounded by outsize pieces of German currency, and a bizarre apparatus upon which the nude woman plays may be seen,- a detailed rendering of a clipper ship is also in the background. From the beginning, Hofmann experimented with photographic technique and collage. After graduating from the Bauhaus, in 1931, and with the subsequent rise of the Nazis, Hofmann fled Essen and moved to Zurich, where he befriended the Dadaists, and also met Arp, Kandinsky, and Leger. For a brief time, in 1935, he lived in Berlin and worked in a ceramics factory, all the while making his own art. Soon after and his family spent years of unquiet exile in Paris and Italy, where he became an architect and farmer. For a monograph on Hofmann's works, see Timothy Baum Nachtcollagen By Otto Hofmann ( Berlin & New York: Folker Skulima, 1981).