I‘ve heard Hans Hofmann spoken of with awe for almost as long as I can remember. A teacher at my high school had studied with him, a fact often repeated to account for her unorthodox methods–even in New York, in those days. It conferred status, although she ranked lower than a colleague who had ac tually been a student at the Bauhaus, but that’s another matter. Today, almost twenty-five years after Hofmann’s death, such connections still seem to count. A well-known and successful New York landscape painter, who has been exhibiting for more than two decades, is often described as having been “Hofmann’s monitor,” as though that established his legitimacy. A few years ago, when I gave a lecture on American art of the 1940s at a museum near Toronto, I was introduced to a shy, soft-spoken man of about sixty who wanted to tell me about his time as a Hofmann student. He had gone to New York at the urging (and with the assis tance) of a remarkable woman named Alexandra Luke, one of English-speaking Canada’s first abstract painters, herself a veteran of eight summers at Hofmann’s Provincetown school. I had heard of Luke’s devotion to Hofmann, but I hadn’t known that she had sent younger Canadian artists to see him. Her former protege asked if I knew a certain New York landscape painter; “He was Hofmann’s monitor, you know.”

The memories remain vivid and the legend persists. This spring, a serious and gifted painter, a