Yevheniia Podurets, Contributing Photographer

I went to the Yale University Art Gallery on one of those first cold November days when the need for a thick wool coat — and the sudden disappearance of daylight after 4 p.m. — hit my warmth-loving soul with brutal clarity. Walking into the exhibition room alleviated that small tragedy: Situated against a cobalt-blue background, 18 lush and playful works would offer an enigmatic illustration of Hans Hofmann’s philosophy of love and dedication.

During my visit, the exhibition curator Michèle Wije explained that Hofmann arrived in the United States in 1932 at the age of 52. He made a bold, self-directed escape from the rising totalitarian tensions in his native Germany. The first to bring Cubism, Fauvism and color theory into the bloodstream of American art, Hofmann cannily coined the push-pull theory of color perception and went on to teach over 1,500 rising artists in New York and Provincetown, Massachusetts, nurturing a generation of American modernists.

Hofmann wasn’t a hippie, a rebelling intellectual or a tortured melancholic. He was a man who lived through two world wars and the paranoia of McCarthyism and whose instinct was simply to apply himself where he was most useful. Today, such a refusal to turn one’s life into a political statement feels oddly radical. His life is a representation of doing what you are good at, staying curious and pulling color — and meaning — from wherever the world offers it.

It was perhaps because he was so absorbed in the business of living — and in art as its most attentive extension — that only at 77, after closing his schools, did Hofmann turn his full force onto his own canvases. The late works, glowing against the gallery’s blue walls, serve as a testament that his work is a concentrated artistic liberation, not a midlife crisis or a therapy session.

You sense this vitality as you move through the exhibition. There is no fixed Hofmann style; instead, there is an ongoing willingness to risk, to alter, to try again. That spirit is strangely contagious — you leave the exhibition room wanting to jump on to the next thing in your day, feeling newly oxygenated.

“Provincetown Landscape” is unlikely to give you a clear portrait of the Massachusetts topography, but the way Hofmann deconstructs nature into its simplest forms will appeal to those more engineering-minded. That mood of experimentation is also evident in the 1947 work “Untitled,” where avid art historians will appreciate the nods to Joan Miró and Henri Matisse in his use of non-naturalistic hues.

Yet the selection also makes clear how easy it is to feel outpaced by Hofmann’s level of abstraction. Many works remain beyond the comprehension of even a fairly educated viewer. But they are so alluring in their richness of color and playfulness of shapes that it invites you to walk around the room and look at the compositions from all different angles to try to capture that spirit.

My favorite piece of those presented was one of Hofmann’s last works — “Art Like Love Is Dedication.” In it, you feel the core of Hofmann’s temperament: the conviction that self-reinvention is a form of humility; that contrast is a type of truth-telling; that energy, if handled well, can be offered rather than imposed. It gives the viewer a feeling — an unmistakable jolt — but also room to metabolize it.

Hofmann’s labor of love, displayed throughout the room, suggests that you can construct your own realm of light and dedication if you meet the world with your senses awake and receive the chaos around you with a genuine sense of curiosity.

Hofmann stands out as a scientist of life because he engineered his way out of a traditional German upbringing by reinventing himself repeatedly. As Wije mentioned during our walk-through, he went from designing an early comptometer in Bavaria to becoming a musician to founding art schools to finally embracing his own painterly voice.

Each stage was an experiment in form, color and emotion, conducted with the curiosity of someone who believed that experience, not doctrine, was the real material of art. His oeuvre suggests that even in eras shadowed by repression and fear, the human impulse toward expansion persists. In his world, and perhaps in ours if we’re attentive enough, life will win over death, and light will win over darkness.

The Hans Hofmann exhibition is on view at the Yale Art Gallery until June 28.