“Late style” is what is supposed to happen to gifted, long-lived artists. At best, it manifests itself as a bold expansion of ideas implicit in earlier work or as a reckless exploration of new possibilities. The most exciting late style works seem fearless, as if the maker’s accumulated experience of thinking about, looking at, and making art over a long working life is so powerful that it obliterates all preconceptions of what a work of art could or should be. Think of Titian’s or Rembrandt’s roughly brushed, introspective, emotionally charged paintings of their last years, which thumb their noses at sixteenth- and seventeenth-century ideas about finish, “correctness,” and touch. Think of Monet’s flickering, elusive images of his lily pond or the Japanese bridge that spanned it, which reinvent landscape painting as a dense fabric of overscaled brushstrokes and disorienting space. Or Matisse’s rigorously simplified, deceptively casual Vence interiors of the 1940s or his rapturous, deceptively economical gouaches découpés of his last decade, which summarize the preoccupations of his entire life as an artist in a fresh, wholly reconceived formal language.

The late style works of the monstre sacré, Picasso, can seem the efforts of an infuriated, prodigiously gifted child trying to exorcise demons—in this instance, age, a deteriorating body, and eventual death; at worst, they simply reprise as mannerisms things that were once formal imperatives. Hofmann’s most radiant, energetic, generously scaled canvases were painted in the last years of his long life (he died at eighty-six), although