André Hofer was born in 1890 and was primarily influenced creatively by the 1900s and 1910s. The first decades of the twentieth century were defined by the dynamic development of visual and pictorial art. These decades were an era of experimentation, with artists exploring into ideas surrounding Post-Impressionism, Expressionism and Abstraction. These developments took hold with artist communities and collectives around the world, with many groups developing a variety of ways of communicating their ideas. After the First World War, artists began to explore psychological uses of art in response to the horrors they had experienced. Dadaism, an absurdist movement inspired directly by the events of the war, spread to a number of countries across Europe and began the careers of renowned artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, Hannah Höch and Kurt Schwitters. The movement of Surrealism, inspired by ideas concerning psychology and the subconscious which were first established by Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, was developed from the ideas posed by Dada.