“In nature, light creates the color,” said the German painter Hans Hofmann. “In the picture, color creates the light.” Hofmann was born in Bavaria in 1880, established an art school in Munich in 1915, became an American citizen in 1941, and taught and painted in New York and Provincetown until his death in 1966, at 85. His artistic pedigree included participation in the European avant-garde and firsthand knowledge of the “isms” that swept through the early 20th century. He was lionized by Clement Greenberg, and his teaching was influential and quotable. (My personal favorite: “The whole world, as we experience it visually, comes to us through the mystic realm of color.”) This exhibition brings together nine large-scale panels that Hofmann painted in 1950, studies for a mural in Chimbote, Peru, that never came to be. The panels are powerful and represent a late-period turning point for Hofmann. They haven’t been displayed together for 30 years. —L.J.