also as a teacher of art, both in his native Germany and later in the U.S. His value as a teacher lay in the consistency and uncompromising rigor of his artistic standards and his ability to teach the fundamental principles of postwar abstraction to a diverse body of students. He founded his first school, Schule für Bildende Kunst (School of Fine Art) in Munich in 1915, building on the ideas and work of Cézanne, the Cubists, and Kandinsky. His hands-on teaching methods included ongoing discussion of art theory, life drawing sessions, and regular critiques from Hofmann himself, a practice which was a rarity in the Academy. By the mid-1920s, he attained a reputation as a forward-thinking teacher and was attracting an international array of students seeking more avant-garde instruction, including Alf Bayrle, Alfred Jensen, Louise Nevelson, Wolfgang Paalen, Worth Ryder, and Bistra Vinarova. Art historian Herschel Chipp asserted that the school was likely the first school of modern art in existence. Hofmann ran the school, including summer sessions held throughout Germany, and in Austria, Croatia, Italy and France until he emigrated to the U.S. in 1932. In the U.S., he initially taught a summer session at the University of California, Berkeley in 1930, at the invitation of former student Worth Ryder, then a member of the art faculty. He taught again at Berkeley and at the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles the next year before again returning to Germany. After relocating to New York City, he began teaching at the Art Students League of New York in 1933. By 1934, Hofmann opened his own schools in New York and in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Many notable artists studied with him, including Lee Krasner, Helen Frankenthaler, Ray Eames, Larry Rivers, Allan Kaprow, Red Grooms, Nell Blaine, Irene Rice Pereira, Gerome Kamrowski, Ward Jackson, Fritz Bultman, Israel Levitan, Robert De Niro, Sr., Jane Freilicher, Wolf Kahn, Marisol Escobar, Burgoyne Diller, James Gahagan, Richard Stankiewicz, Linda Lindeberg, Lillian Orlowsky, Louisa Matthíasdóttir and Nína Tryggvadóttir. Beulah Stevenson, a long-time curator at the Brooklyn Museum, was also among his pupils. In 1958, Hofmann closed his schools in order to devote himself exclusively to his own creative work. In 1963, The Museum of Modern Art curated the traveling exhibit "Hans Hofmann and His Students," which included 58 works representing 51 artists. Despite being credited with teaching a number of the most gifted women artists of the period—at