The bronze sculptures of Charles Despiau seemed to me the only contemporary works that could approach the purity and grandeur of the stone figures of the Sixth Century B.C.," he recalled.
"Between 1929 and 1931 I had done a series of wash drawings from my window high up in Passy overlooking Paris and it was in these that I discovered how the aggressive tangibility of spaces could dissolve the concrete object world."
But the artist was already turning from sculpture toward painting, what he called, "exciting but, in a sense, terrifying excursions into this new and strange realm of subjectively expressive abstraction."
From 1936 on Wolff expressed himself in abstract painting: "Spaces of magic light and vivid color, emptied of fixed points of reference, of self-enclosed objects and locally isolated things, color spaces containing only the heavy black lines of brush strokes that defined their limits; this was what emerged....with a kind of furious aimlessness.
Wolff joined with Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Gyorgy Kepes in 1938 when they established the Chicago Institute of Design, the American revival of the German Bauhaus school.
After World War II Wolff was professor of Art at Brooklyn College, where as department chairman his faculty included Ad Reinhardt, Burgoyne Diller, Stanley Hayter, Carl Holty and Mark Rothko.