ABSTRACT
Both as a painter and as a teacher–but especially as a teacher–Hans Hofmann was immensely influential during the last quarter century of his long life. There was a period in the 1950's when past or present enrollment in the Hofmann School seemed a virtual passport to the limelight, and certain university art departments dispensed his pictorial doctrines like a patent medicine guaranteed to cure every aesthetic ill. It also means that an older generation of artists and critics, whose attachment to Hofmann was all but inseparable from its attachment to art itself, has now been orphaned by history, deprived of its accustomed stance as defenders of the vanguard faith, and placed in the unfamiliar role of defending "tradition." For Hofmann was, above all, a codifier of modernist pictorial procedures–in a sense, an academician of the modernist tradition–while remaining an exponent of romantic Expressionism.
