Werner Hofmann (art historian)

Werner Hofmann (8 August 1928 in Vienna – 13 March 2013 in Hamburg) was an Austrian art historian, cultural journalist, writer, curator and museum director, who is "considered by his colleagues as one of the most distinguished European scholars of modern art and its ideology.

From 1947 to 1949, he studied art history at the universities of Vienna and Paris, where he completed a Ph.D. dissertation on the "Graphische Gestaltungsweise von Honoré Daumier".

In 1960, he published his groundbreaking study on 19th-century European art, Das Irdische Paradies: Kunst im 19.

Hofmann curated famous "Kunst um 1800" exhibitions at the Hamburger Kunsthalle on Caspar David Friedrich, Philipp Otto Runge, William Blake, Henry Fuseli, John Flaxman, J. M. W. Turner and Francisco de Goya and also exhibitions on contemporary artists such as Franz Erhard Walther, Joseph Beuys and Georg Baselitz, which are "regarded as milestones in the history of exhibitions at the Hamburger Kunsthalle and for German art museums.

Still full of energy and having a new project on "Kunstkammern" and Julius von Schlosser's work on the same subject in mind, Hofmann died of a heart attack in a hospital.