Nulli Secundus 1964

Hans Hofmann made this energetic painting with luscious, sweeping gestures of oil paint. It’s full of reds, blues, greens, and yellows jostling for space. I can almost feel him at work, pushing and pulling the paint around, figuring it out as he goes. It feels impulsive, like he's wrestling with something. Look at the way that dark red sort of bleeds into the bottom—it’s like a heavy weight anchoring the whole thing. Above, the blues and greens are more buoyant, maybe even hopeful? And then there are those slashes of red near the top—bold and assertive. Hofmann was deeply influential, both as a painter and a teacher. His ideas about "push and pull"—this sense of dynamic tension—resonates with the work of lots of other painters. The painting embraces ambiguity and uncertainty, and that's where it becomes really interesting because there's no one way to read it.