Throughout his career, Hans Hofmann responded with great energy and joy to the seascape of Cape Cod, where he spent his summers and directed a school beginning in 1935, just three years after his arrival in the United States. The Ocean shares with the greatest of his last decade's achievement the synthesis of Cubist structure and vibrant Fauvist palette in a totally abstract vocabulary.

As Irving Sandler has observed, "as Hofmann's structure became geometric, his surfaces remained physical, scored and overpainted, and his color became even more high-keyed, so much so that it is barely contained within the rectangles." (I. Sandler, "Hans Hofmann: The Dialectical Master," Hans Hofmann, New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, 1990, p. 86)