High Summer

Through his teaching at the Art Students League of New York in the early 1930s and then at his own schools in New York and Provincetown, Hans Hofmann is credited with having a major influence on the development of American Abstract Expressionism. In 1958, at the age of seventy-eight, he closed his schools and, free from teaching duties, dedicated himself to painting, producing some of his most remarkable work in the last decade of his life. The spatial tension in this painting that results from a dense, vigorous application of paint combined with emphatic rectangles epitomizes Hofmann’s mature painting. The artist viewed nature’s role as a stimulus, which he makes clear with the title.