efflorescence (at age seventy-eight) of his work. In 1963, Miz Hofmann, his partner and wife for over sixty years, passed away after a surgery. Two years later, Hofmann married Renate Schmitz, who remained with him until his death from a heart attack in New York City on February 17, 1966, just prior to his 86th birthday. Work and exhibitions Hofmann's art is generally distinguished by its rigorous concern with pictorial structure and unity, development of spatial illusion through the “push and pull” of color, shape and placement, and use of bold, often primary color for expressive means. In the first decades of the century, he painted in a modernist, though still identifiably representational style, creating landscapes, still lifes and portraits largely influenced by Cubism and Cézanne in terms of form, and Kandinsky, Matisse and Van Gogh in terms of color. He began an extended period focused solely on drawing some time in the 1920s, returning to painting in 1935. By 1940, however, he began to paint completely abstract works such as Spring, a small oil on panel “drip” painting. Art historians have described that work, and others such as The Wind (1942), Fantasia (1943) and Effervescence (1944), in terms of their “painterly attacks,” jolting contrasts, rich color, and gestural spontaneity as “records of the artist’s intense experience” of paint, color, and processes that were arbitrary, accidental and direct, as well as intentional. They demonstrate Hofmann's early stylistic experimentation with the techniques that would be termed “action painting,” which Pollock and others made famous by the end of the decade. Hofmann believed that abstract art was a way to get at important reality, once stating that “the ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary, so that the necessary may speak.” Hofmann's work in the 1940s was championed by several key figures who initiated a new era of growing influence for art dealers and galleries, including Peggy Guggenheim, Betty Parsons, and Samuel M. Kootz. His first New York solo show at Guggenheim's Art of This Century gallery in 1944 was positively reviewed in the New York Times, ARTnews and Arts Digest. Critic Clement Greenberg regarded that show—and Jackson Pollock's a few months prior—as a “break-out” from the “cramping hold of Synthetic Cubism” on American painting, which opened the path to the more painterly style of abstract expressionism. That same year, Hofmann was also featured in a solo exhibition at The Arts