The ambitious survey exhibition Hans Hofmann: The Nature of Abstraction , placing more than half of Berkeley’s holdings in the context of an impressive selection of other canvases, watercolors and works on paper, from public and private collections throughout the United States, was inaugurated there. Organized by the Berkeley Art Museum’s Curator Emerita Lucinda Barnes, the show spans most of Hofmann’s life as artist, from the 1920s to just before his death early in 1966. Berkeley’s stellar examples, chosen by the painter himself, never looked this good in the old museum.

The work was originally exhibited in Hofmann’s last New York exhibition, which opened just before his death a month short of his 86th birthday. Berkeley’s exuberant The Castle (1965), an explosion of clear hues ranging from pale yellows to saturated greens and forms ranging from crisp rectangles to aggressive clumps to transparent washes, as loose and airborne as Ora Pro Nobis is solemn and confrontational, was also seen in that last show. Together, the two powerful paintings bracket the wide range of Hofmann’s pictorial conceptions.

From 1904 to 1914, he had lived in Paris, supported by a wealthy German patron who had been impressed by the young Bavarian’s early efforts. During this heady period, when ambitious young radicals such as Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Georges Braque were inventing Fauvism and Cubism, Hofmann was part of the small international art world of pre–World War I Paris, seeing work that would resonate in his own art for the rest of his life and forming friendships with members of the vanguard. (The great mystery is why Hofmann didn’t enroll in Matisse’s short-lived school—an opportunity to work with an artist he seems to have known casually and whose work he always revered—especially since one of the people who helped organize the school was a fellow German, a painter who was almost certainly part of Hofmann’s circle.) In the summer of 1914, Hofmann and his future wife, Maria Wolfegg, known as Miz, were traveling, so they were out of France when the war began. As German nationals, they could not return to Paris. All of their possessions, including the paintings Hofmann had made during his ten-year stay, were lost.

Back in Munich, his former patron no longer able to support him, Hofmann opened his school. He later described himself as not being a teacher in the usual sense but rather a painter who had to teach to sustain his art. Yet for the next two decades, he devoted himself to the school. The demands of teaching kept him from painting. For twenty years, Hofmann almost exclusively drew in black and white; hence the works in his first American shows. He began to paint again only in 1934, when he was teaching in Gloucester, Massachusetts, invited by a former student, as he had been invited to Berkeley. Encouraged by his student Mercedes Carles (later Mercedes Matter) and her artist father Arthur B. Carles, with whom he shared a house, he began a series of landscapes. The works that soon followed are high points of “Hans Hofmann: The Nature of Abstraction”—a group of large, all-stops-out studio interiors, painted between 1935 and 1938, some of them “portraits” of a massive round table with a random assortment of props, against a background of canvases and studio furnishings. Another group plays a tall cupboard, with vases and urns placed on its top, against a painting of the cupboard on a nearby easel. The viewpoints and relationships of the depicted object and the depicted painted image of the object shift from picture to picture. One of the most dazzling is Studio Unfinished (1936, Collection of Toby Emmerich, Los Angeles), with its playful interchange between fiction and fiction of a fiction. Both Matisse and Cézanne haunt these paintings, but the saturated, slightly acidic palette and the vigorous paint-handling are Hofmann’s own, as we see throughout the exhibition.

A series of Provincetown landscapes, made between 1936 and about 1942, document Hofmann’s fascination with the geography and radiant light of the Cape Cod fishing town where he spent his summers starting in 1935, especially his liking for the geometric houses and the barn-studio at the top of a hill where he first held his classes, translating New England into that super-heated palette and bold swipes of the brush. A group of Hofmann’s small, experimental poured-and-dripped paintings, mostly from the early 1940s, bear witness to an interest in non-traditional paint application typical of the period. Hofmann didn’t continue to pour or drip, although for the rest of his life he made a wide variety of paint handling part of his expressive vocabulary, just as he did a wide variety of hues.

These never-ending changes, evidence of Hofmann’s unsuppressable appetite for exploring possibilities suggested in the course of working, are perhaps the most unchanging aspect of his work. Each painting seems to pose the question, “What happens if I do this?,” and, having done that, “What happens if I now do the opposite?” The selection of works in “Hans Hofmann: The Nature of Abstraction” obviously reflects this restless evolution, but it also underscores a kind of compositional constant, an echo, now more pronounced, now less, of the loaded tabletop that dominates the earliest works on view. In this context, even Hofmann’s late, wholly abstract, confrontational paintings from the late 1950s and early 1960s—the walls of hovering blocks of color, the slab paintings for which he is best known—can be read as tabletops, with the surface of the canvas becoming a tipped-up supporting plane, as it does in Cubist still lifes. Is this the only way to read these paintings? Certainly not. Hofmann was too much of a shape-shifter to be restricted to only one interpretation, but the current show provokes this kind of thinking. It makes us look at even iconic slab paintings, such as Berkeley’s glorious Sanctum Sanctorum (Holy of Holies—Holy Place) (1962) or the collection’s aptly named Magnum Opus (1962), in fresh ways. Then we return to savoring the play of varied edges, hues, paint surfaces, and placements that create the animated pulse that distinguishes all of Hofmann’s most achieved paintings, the celebrated “push and pull.”

There are wonderful paintings throughout the show, many wildly different from one another. It’s hard to believe that Berkeley’s Scintillating Space (1954)—a tall canvas with elongated, sometimes angled, red and blue geometric planes floating in a shimmering sea of thickly dabbed red, white, and blue stabs of the brush—was done in the same decade as the crisp, rectangular interior, Magenta and Blue (1950, Whitney Museum of American Art), with its loaded tabletop and trellised window: possibly a riff on one of Braque’s Billiard Table series, with which Magenta and Blue shares many allusions. Only the unmodulated, radiant color and the sense of a clean, geometric underpinning seem common to both paintings. Even the last part of the exhibition, dedicated to paintings of the 1960s, is similarly diverse. Hofmann, having finally closed his school in 1958, at age seventy-eight after more than four decades of teaching, was able to devote himself full time to painting.

The canvases of his last years bear witness to a magnificent burst of energy and invention, undiminished, despite the sudden death of his wife of almost forty years, in 1963. The slab vocabulary of floating, sharp-edged rectangular planes dominates these pictures, but Hofmann, characteristically, changes density, alters the clarity of edges, shifts from delicacy to a loaded surface, and more.