Margo Hoff

Born June 14, 1910, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the second of eight children, Hoff attended Tulsa Central High School before studying at the University of Tulsa around 1930 to 1931. In the early 1930s she moved to Chicago, where she trained at the National Academy of Art (1934 to 1935) and at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and later audited art history courses at the University of Chicago from 1941 to 1944. She also studied and taught at Hull House. She married SAIC instructor George Buehr, and the couple traveled together to Mexico on several occasions.

In Chicago, Hoff built her reputation through the Art Institute's annual "Chicago and Vicinity" exhibitions, winning prizes in 1944, 1945, 1946, 1950, and 1953, including the Logan Medal and First Prize for her painting Stagefright in 1953. The Art Institute purchased her painting Murder Mystery in 1946, and she began a long association with Fairweather-Hardin Gallery in Chicago, opening her first one-person exhibition there in 1955. That same year, a prize tied to a Chicago exhibition brought her a solo show at Wildenstein Galleries in Paris, generally credited with giving her international recognition. She also completed mural commissions, including one for the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.

Hoff moved to New York City around 1960 and continued to paint, exhibit, and produce prints and canvas collages there for the rest of her career, showing at galleries including Betty Parsons Gallery, Saidenberg Gallery, and Babcock Gallery. She received honorary doctorates from Saint Mary's College (1969) and Drew University (1987). Hoff died in her sleep in her Manhattan loft, which had served as both her home and her studio, in the early morning of August 17, 2008, at the age of 98. Per her wishes, she was cremated, and her ashes were placed in Graceland Cemetery in Chicago.

Hoff's reputation was built largely through repeated institutional recognition rather than a single defining review. Art Institute of Chicago director Daniel Catton Rich praised her "unhackneyed feeling for design" and "a most sensitive control," adding that "she has added an intangible feeling of mystery and suspense to her painting," a remark the Art Institute still cites today. Her run of prizes in the Art Institute's "Chicago and Vicinity" annuals across the 1940s and early 1950s, her inclusion in the Denver Art Museum's annual Western exhibitions through the 1950s, and her 1955 solo debut at Wildenstein Galleries in Paris together mark her as a significant, prize-winning figure in mid-century Chicago modernism whose narrative, faintly uneasy figuration set her apart from more strictly abstract contemporaries. Later gallery surveys of her paintings, canvas collages, and prints from 1940 to 1990 have continued to present her as a rediscovered figure in that history.

Hoff's auction market is thin relative to her institutional standing, but it has grown more active in recent years. Her current auction high is Dream of Flying (1950), which sold for USD 139,700 at Christie's New York on 21 May 2026, well above its USD 7,000 low estimate and about 46 percent above her previous recorded high. That prior record had been set by the same painting, sold for USD 30,240 at the Wright and Toomey & Co. "Elevated: Art Via Chicago" auction, a result described at the time as a world record for the artist. There is no published catalogue raisonne, so provenance tracing through the artist's estate and through specialist dealers such as Peyton Wright Gallery and David Cook Galleries is the main tool for verification.

Hoff's market has very few recorded auction results, so any single sale, including the current 2026 high for Dream of Flying, should be read as an early data point rather than a stable trend line. Because there is no catalogue raisonne, collectors should look closely at provenance, particularly for works that trace back to the artist's estate through galleries such as Peyton Wright Gallery and David Cook Galleries. Her broad museum presence, spanning the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, is the strongest evidence of her lasting art-historical standing, even as her auction record remains sparse and still forming.