For Hans Hofmann, a leading figure of the abstract expressionist group, the optimum creative expression was endeavoring to translate inner states of mind or emotion into "pure" non-objective design. Just as a composer of music imparts mood and feeling through abstract audio sensations (volume, meter, harmony, dissonance, the tone and coloring of various instruments), so also should the visual artist be able to communicate personal sensibilities through the very handling of the chosen medium, and in selection and arrangement of lines, shapes, colors, and texture for their potential inherent psychological associations. The artwork does not represent corporeal things or scenes, but presents an abstract of the artist's disposition, at the time the piece was executed at least, along with a demonstration of technical facility and sense of composition. Rather than just "looking at" or "reading" a non-representational work, one is invited to project psychically into it, so as to "experience" the visual phenomena much as a listener is transported by music.

In Hofmann's work, heavy paint is applied boldly; color is ebullient. The viewer senses the artist's energy and intense absorption in a creative process that is simultaneously improvisational and methodical. One gesture or color seems to have motivated another, and still another, until the work was systematically brought to completion. The sum effect is explosive, yet held in a dynamic equilibrium. Hofmann described what he wanted to do pictorially in terms of force and counterforce. Barbara Rose explains:

According to Hofmann, the essence of painting was the balancing out of certain types of pictorial tensions caused by spatial pushing and pulling at the picture plane, created by color and form relationship. Downgrading the purely intellectual and theoretical in favor of the intuitive and sensuous, Hofmann stressed the instinctual and the spontaneous.

The Hunter Museum's robust oil, Scintillating Blue 38-30 (the numbers allude to the size of the painting in inches), is characteristically turbulent. Yet the eye takes the composition in a calculated pattern, moving on the staccato repetition of color and the organized network of diagonals.

Hofmann was born at Weissenburg, Germany, in 1880. As a youth he studied music, mathematics, and science in Munich. Remarkably, at age sixteen, and until he was eighteen, he served as assistant of public works for the state of Bavaria. In 1903 he went to Paris to pursue technological studies, but instead enrolled at the cole de la Grand Chaumire. Matisse was attending the school at the same time. Soon he became a close friend of orphist Robert Delaunay, and he met Braque and Picasso. His style evolved rapidly, from meticulously rendered portraits and figure studies to still lifes and landscapes, first in a cubist manner, then in the freer and more colorful mode of the fauves. By the early 1940s, he arrived at a non-objective style that combined the compositional precepts of cubism and the vitality and coloristic expression of the fauves. Interestingly, he also experimented at that time with "drip and run" paint application several years before Jackson Pollock appropriated a similar technique.

Hofmann also had a gift for effective teaching. He returned to Munich in 1915 and opened his first art school. One of his students there, Worth Rider, went on to become a professor of art at the University of California, Berkeley. Rider invited Hofmann to teach at the Berkeley summer session in 1930, and again the following summer. Hofmann moved permanently to the United States in 1932, and he became a citizen in '41. In 1932 and '33, he taught at the Art Students League in New York City. In '34 he opened the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts on Manhattan's 8th Street. Later he established a popular summer extension at Provincetown, Massachusetts. At his schools he introduced the most advanced concepts of European painting. Clement Greenberg noted that from Hofmann "you could learn more about Matisse's color . . . than from Matisse himself." Burgoyne Diller, Helen Frankenthaler, Lee Krasner, and Louise Nevelson are among his better-known students.

Because Hofmann was twenty to thirty years older than most of the generation of artists who emerged as the American avant-garde in the decades just before and just after World War II, he became a kind of patriarch to them. Truly, as both practicing artist and teacher, he had a profound influence on modern art in the United States for more than thirty years. He ceased teaching in 1958, but continued painting until shortly before his death in 1966.