Towering Spaciousness

Bavarian-born Hans Hofmann settled in New York in the late 1930s. During the 1940s he became a devoted and influential teacher, especially of the first and second generations of Abstract Expressionists. In Towering Spaciousness, the artist combines strictly defined geometric forms with thickly applied, gestural areas of orange, blue, yellow, pink, and green. Blocks of color are built into towering spatial intervals. Indeed this painting well represents the artist's "push-and-pull" theory. In considering the spatial relations he created on the picture plane, Hofmann wrote in 1948: "Push and pull are expanding and contracting forces which are activated by carriers in visual motion. Planes are the most important carriers, lines and point less so."