A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.
– Hans Hofmann

 As an artist and a teacher, Hans Hofmann (1880-1966) had a profound affect on the development of art in America. 

Hofmann was raised in Munich and studied art in Paris. He established an art school in Munich in 1915. In 1930 Hofmann was invited to teach a summer session at UC Berkeley. He retuned to the U.S. several times and, eventually, remained in the States and taught at the Art Students League in New York before opening the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts in 1933 and a summer school in Provincetown, Massachusetts in 1935. 

His students included Lee Krasner (who introduced Jackson Pollock to Hofmann), Helen Frankenthaler, Red Grooms and other notable American artists. Wolf Kahn, whose family emigrated to America from Germany, was not only a student of Hofmann’s but also an assistant. He often translated for Hofmann, who did not have a great grasp of English.

Noted American art critic, Clement Greenberg, said that Hofmann was "in all probability the most important art teacher of our time.”

In the 1920s, Thomas Hart Benton taught at the Art Students League. Among his students was Fairfield Porter (1907-1975), who was not only one of America’s finest mid-century representational painters, but also a prolific writer, who encouraged artists to commit to figurative and realistic styles while understanding the aesthetics of abstract expressionism. "The realist thinks he knows ahead of time what reality is,” he wrote, “and the abstract artist what art is, but it is in its formality that realist art excels, and the best abstract art communicates an overwhelming sense of reality.”

Benton’s best-known student was Jackson Pollock. To Pollock, Benton was not just a teacher, but also a mentor and father figure. They had a very close relationship and stayed in touch even after Benton left New York and became the director of the Department of Painting at the Kansas City Art Institute from 1935 to 1941.

There are some people who seem to be born teachers. American abstract artist Nicolas Carone was one of those people. He  taught at Yale University, Columbia University, Brandeis University, Cornell University, Cooper Union, School of Visual Arts, and Skowhegan School. He was a founding faculty member of the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture (NYSS), where he taught for 25 years.

One of his students at NYSS was Noreen Naughton, who went on to become a teacher herself, and retired as Professor Emeritus of Art from Kapiʻolani Community College, University of Hawaii. She was awarded the University of Hawaii Board of Regents' Excellence in Teaching Award in 1994.  

In 2015, Naughton was invited to lecture at NYSS about Carone’s metods, based on her manuscript: The Teachings of Nicolas Carone, Master Artist Teacher: Narratives, Critiques and Conversations from 1969 to 2010.

Carone was also a good friend of Jackson Pollock and was considered an expert historical resource on the life and works of Pollock.

In 2017, Carone’s former student, Megan Williamson, curated a show, in Chicago, of Carone’s works to mark the centennial of the artist’s birth. “Nick taught the language of the picture plane, believed in the metaphysics of art making, and encouraged his students to pursue their own path,” Williamson said in an interview in the Chicago Reader. “He was a connection to the grand tradition of painting.”