The exhibition is exciting for several reasons. First, its spans 50 years in the influential, innovative artist's life and includes 70 paintings, many of them rarely on public view. Second, it's a show organized by the still-young museum, one that will not travel elsewhere and thus should attract serious art lovers from other cities and countries to this small city on the Gulf. Third, an impressive catalog written by guest curator Karen Wilkin and published by George Braziller, a leading publisher of art books, provides a feast for the eyes and the mind, with images of Hofmann's vibrant, colorful paintings and appreciations and essays by admirers as diverse as sculptor Anthony Caro, painter Helen Frankenthaler and playwright Tennessee Williams.

The Hofmann show also happens to fulfill a dream for Naples Museum's founder, Myra Janco Daniels, who hoped to someday present his works even before the opening of the museum nearly four years ago. "I met an attorney who was working with Hofmann's estate," she recalls. "And I said to him, 'That's my favorite painter, and someday I'm going to have a museum and present a show of his work.' And now that we are, I think people will come from all over because it hasn't been done even in major cities."

The timing couldn't be better: A recent PBS documentary titled Hans Hofmann: Artist/Teacher, Teacher/Artist, narrated by Robert De Niro (whose artist parents met in a Hofmann class), should stimulate interest even in those less aware of the place Hofmann holds in 20th-century art.

And quite a place it is. Hofmann, born in Germany in 1880, had the good fortune to live a long time (he died in 1966) and to meet and become friends with groundbreaking artists whose contributions spanned the decades and the world-Pablo Picasso, Robert Delaunay and Henri Matisse early in his life as an artist in Paris; Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Red Grooms, Stella and many others in his years spent teaching in the United States. Hofmann's is a double legacy; he left behind not only his own incredible paintings, but throughout his 40 years of teaching at his schools in both New York and Provincetown, Mass., he influenced several generations of artists who continue to pass down the lessons they learned from him.

Hofmann's reputation as a teacher (his teaching was a financial necessity for him and his wife, "Miz") loomed so large, in fact, that it often overshadowed his own work. For a number of years after coming to the United States, Hofmann did only drawings; and much of his very early work, which experimented with everything from pointillism to Fauvism to Cubism, was destroyed or lost during the tumult of World War I.

When he did begin to paint again, however, he had a second flowering as an artist, with his first solo exhibition (at Peggy Guggenheim's Art of the Century gallery in New York) in 1944 followed by his inclusion in the Whitney's annual exhibition of contemporary American painting the next year and a retrospective at the Addison Gallery of American Art in 1948-the first one-man exhibition given by a museum to an abstract expressionist. At the time he was 68-with years of productive creativity still before him.

The PBS documentary on Hofmann offers clips of him at work in both teaching and painting mode. Like the Naples Museum exhibition, it presents the viewer the chance to sink into his canvases rich with cobalt blues, cadmium reds and yellows and deep greens, laid on in a demonstration of his "push-pull" theory of how colors work to suggest space and volume. "It's not the form that dictates the color but the color that brings out the form," Hofmann told his students. He also taught them that "in nature, light creates color. In painting, color creates light."

"He was a wildly original painter and someone whose very eccentricity has had an enormous influence on many, many artists," says curator Wilkin, an art historian who's also written monographs on artists David Smith, Stuart Davis and Helen Frankenthaler. "Many of the things that I described as his contributions as a teacher can be seen in his painting-particularly in his late painting, the so-called slab pictures where you have these rectangular and square blocks of paint of different densities arranged in such a way that they imply a kind of spatial pulse. ... There was a material expressiveness in all of Hofmann's work, the ability to go from transparent washes to paint squeezed right out of the tube. The analogy you might use is with music-he's always playing with the full symphony orchestra and all that kind of tonal and sound variation. He's never playing on a solo instrument."

Interviews with many of Hofmann's students in the PBS film provide insights into the man as well as the artist and the teacher, with fond recollections of his "Santa Claus laugh," his mingling of broken English, French and his native German when speaking, his habit of drawing his own little sketches in a corner of students' works in order to easily demonstrate where they might have gone wrong. Several describe his Provincetown home as a continuation of his art theories, with bold, primary colors dominating the furniture and walls. "He was living color," says film director Irvin Kershner, a one-time student. A visit must have been very like stepping inside one of Hofmann's paintings.

Works in the Naples Museum exhibition have been borrowed from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, the estate of Hans Hofmann and private collectors who seldom let their prized Hofmann paintings out of their sight. The time span of the works ranges from an early 1918 painting to two works from his Renate Series, inspired by his second wife and created in the last year of his life.

In a piece published in connection with a Paris show Hofmann had in 1949, playwright Tennessee Williams wrote that some artists step forward with "the authority of pure vision. Van Gogh had that. Picasso has it. And Hans Hofmann also has a place with those giants who move straight into the light without being blinded by it." For painter James Gahagan, who studied with Hofmann for years and also went on to teach many artists himself, Hofmann is simply "the most significant artist/teacher of the last 200 to 300 years."

Hans Hofmann: A Retrospective opens Nov. 1 at the Naples Museum and continues through March 21, with illustrated lectures by Wilkin set for 10 a.m. Nov. 6 and Feb. 26. For more information, call 597-1900.