Wright Auction

Artist Margo Hoff was born in 1910 in Carthage, Missouri, but she grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Her father was a carpenter and she was the second oldest of eight siblings. In an unexpected twist of fate, Hoff contracted typhoid fever upon turning thirteen in 1923, which confined her to bed for the summer. During this period of convalescence, Hoff discovered her passion for art, spending considerable time drawing and creating paper cutouts. After graduating from Tulsa Central High School, Hoff went on to attend Tulsa University, the National Academy of Art in Chicago, the Art Institute of Chicago, the University of Chicago, and Hull House.

Hoff's figurative approach to art was profoundly influenced by her travels to Mexico in the 1940s, where she encountered the work of Mexican painters from the 1930s, including Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros. This vibrant artistic milieu left an indelible mark on Hoff, shaping her aesthetic sensibilities and thematic explorations. Throughout Hoff's life, she remained committed to her craft, experimenting with a wide range of artistic media, including woodcut, lithography, casein, oil, watercolor, crayon, gouache, collage, textiles, and stained glass.

In the 1950s, Hoff exhibited her paintings and prints across the United States and eventually had a solo show at the Wildenstein Galleries in Paris in 1955. Hoff made a pivotal choice in 1960 to relocate permanently to New York City, where her work found frequent representation in prominent galleries like Hadler-Rodriguez, Saidenberg, Babcock, Betty Parsons, and Banter. Hoff's artistic evolution was marked by a shift in style and technique following her move to New York. While most of Hoff's Chicago paintings are decidedly Modernist figurative compositions—which resemble Surrealism or Magical Realism, while actually working through a wholly original lexicon shaped by the Mexican muralists as well as Matisse—her New York period consisted largely of geometric abstraction and collage work, first on paper and then on canvas. This phase of her career was characterized by brighter colors and a departure from her earlier earth-toned palette.

Despite traveling extensively, often to teach, and gaining acclaim as a New York-based artist, Hoff remained deeply connected to her roots, with Chicago serving as a formative backdrop even in later years. Thus, she has a significant legacy as an important, if underappreciated, Chicago Modernist artist. Although Hoff died in her Manhattan studio loft at the age of ninety-eight in 2008, her ashes were ultimately interred at Graceland Cemetery on the North Side of Chicago. Throughout her lifetime, Hoff was recognized with numerous awards and honors, including the prestigious Logan Art Institute Prize. Currently, paintings by Hoff are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago—which has what some consider Hoff's masterwork, Murder Mystery, 1945—along with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC, and elsewhere.