Hans Hofmann profoundly influenced the development of American art in the 1930s and ’40s, representing a crucial link between European formal innovations of the early 1900s and Abstract Expressionism in America.

Hofmann enrolled in art school in Munich in 1898 and lived in Paris from 1904 to 1914, where he familiarized himself with Impressionism and Post-Impressionism and witnessed the emergence of Fauvism and Cubism. Caught in Munich by the outbreak of World War I, Hofmann decided to open an art school, and by the 1920s it attracted students from all over the world seeking to learn about Cubist form, Fauve color, and Expressionist brushwork. Shortly before the Nazis seized power, Hofmann decided to leave Germany for good. In 1933, he opened another art school in New York. He taught art for over four decades, and his students included Helen Frankenthaler, Red Grooms, Alfred Jensen, Lee Krasner, Louise Nevelson, and Frank Stella.

Many of Hofmann’s ideas about painting culminated in his famous “push and pull” theory, in which the illusion of space, depth, and even movement on a canvas was created abstractly through color and shape. By placing colors of varying intensities against each other in paintings like Mirage, Hofmann derived dynamic form from their interaction as receding areas are pulled up to the surface and protruding areas are pushed back, perfectly illustrating his theories about the dynamics of the picture surface. To further emphasize this kind of tension, Hofmann juxtaposed a central area of dense impasto with a more loosely painted background. Rooted in nature yet liberated from its representation in this way, Hofmann’s teachings and paintings made important contributions to the belief that reality lies within the parameters of painting itself—one of Modernism’s major tenets.