Hofmann’s consistent experimentation with paint is evident in the exhibition and had a profound influence on Stella’s own need for innovation of abstraction. “To think we are just at the beginning of abstraction is quite the concept,” Stella said, looking around our galleries at Hofmann’s paintings.

At the beginning of Stella’s career, Hofmann passed away. As a second generation student of Hofmann, Stella walked through the exhibition remarking just how wrong Hofmann’s techniques would have been viewed at the time.

"All of the transitions are broken,” Stella observed while looking at Ora Pro Nobis, a large canvas from the 1960s that exemplifies Hofmann’s “push and pull” principle. In this painting, Hofmann centered a yellow rectangle against a gestural background of darker paint and a more loosely formed blue rectangle. “You would never just leave this mud here,” Stella said, referring to the darker reds and yellows. “This wasn’t possible anywhere else."

Both of these well known leaders in the art world — this museum director and world-renowned artist — have immersed themselves into lifelong explorations of visual thinking in terms of space and volume through the language of abstraction. It is the straightforwardness of painting that continues to occupy Stella, who has also worked in three-dimensional sculpture. In fact, he considers great painting three-dimensional, as he noted while looking at Exaltment--a painting of Hofmann’s he knows well as it hung in the living room of his art teacher’s home at Phillips Academy. Looking at the canvas almost 70 years later, Stella remarked how the painting felt huge to him as a boy, emphasizing Hofmann’s ability to create such direct force through his manipulation of paint in color and shapes.

The late paintings captivated Stella, who spent a lot of time looking at the rectangles in Sanctum Santorum. “It’s hard to know when he put the rectangles in,” the artist marveled as he inspected the surface. For Stella, Hofmann made painting mysterious. Where did he start? “No one was better at giving you the possibility than Hofmann,” Stella says of Hofmann’s teaching.

As a young and rising curator, I’m struck by Stella’s concept that we are just at the beginning. For Hofmann too, it was the last 10 years of his life that he was the most productive, painting the largest most prolific colorful canvases. We are constantly evolving as creative individuals, and if Frank Stella, who has already had a long and prolific career, is just at the beginning, there’s no other place I’d rather be.

Toward the end of the tour, I asked Stella if he could ask Hofmann one question, what it would be. Stella smartly responded, “I’d ask him where he bought his paint.”