In 1935, the Bavarian-born artist Hans Hofmann opened his summer school in Provincetown, a timeless fishing harbor and a center of artistic activity located at the tip of Cape Cod, Massachusetts. The title Spring on Cape Cod refers to this area, where he taught for over twenty years and whose natural beauty he admired. The painting centers on his love of color and its expressiveness. Green and brown evoke a landscape, but Hofmann did not imitate nature. Instead, his intimate experience of contemplating nature is presented poetically. He insisted that, even in abstraction, “nature is always the artist’s best source of inspiration, but in its spiritual, not physical sense. In nature . . . every living thing exists in relationship to other things.” In Spring on Cape Cod Hofmann created a dynamic composition based on sophisticated relationships of tension and balance between its colored forms.