Hans Hofmann

Hans Hofmann was a German-born American painter and one of the most influential art teachers of the 20th century. After years in Paris before the First World War he ran a school in Munich, then emigrated to the United States in 1932 and opened schools in New York and Provincetown, where his pupils included Lee Krasner and Helen Frankenthaler. His theory of push and pull described how colour creates space. His late paintings of floating rectangles of intense colour, such as The Gate, are among his best-known works.