“For many decades, Doris Staffel, a former student of both Philip Guston and Hans Hofmann, and a former colleague of Franz Kline, has been one of Philadelphia’s preeminent abstract painters and colorists,” says the Woodmere Art Museum in Philadelphia. “Honoring that long commitment to the art of Philadelphia, Woodmere will present the first exhibition to examine her entire career, as well as her first solo show in a museum. Her paintings and drawings incorporate abstracted figurative and foliage elements applied with sinuous lines and differentiated applications of thick and thin paint.

“Now in her nineties, Staffel was born and raised in Brooklyn, and moved to Philadelphia, in 1940, to study at the Tyler School of Art. An influential figure to younger artists, she taught for twenty-seven years at The University of the Arts.”

According to the painter Betsey Batchelor, one of many former students of Staffel’s, “Doris framed painting in the largest possible terms. Painting was never about making pictures, but about having an experience, inquiry. I sensed from Doris that there was a kind of morality to painting; something deeply authentic seemed to be required of the maker.”

“Doris Staffel: Painter, Teacher” starts tomorrow, July 28, and runs through September 30 at the Woodmere Art Museum, 9201 Germantown Avenue, Philadelphia, 215-247-0476, woodmereartmuseum.org.

Franklin Einspruch is the art critic for The New York Sun. He blogs at Artblog.net.