Robert Jay Wolff's formal art training began in the night school of the Chicago Art Institute in 1928 and ended with a few months in the sculpture atelier of the French academician Henri Bouchard at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris in 1930.

Paris in 1929 and 1930 was alive with the new art of the School of Paris, and Wolff saw paintings by Miro, Matisse, Picasso, and Braque and the sculpture of Brancusi, Zadkine, Gonzales, Archipenko. "They all held an inescapable fascination for young and uncommitted eyes," he wrote years later.

Wolff returned to Chicago in 1932, where he continued to work in sculpture. He spent hours drawing. "My studio in Chicago was a seventh-floor loft in an old building on Wacker Drive at Wabash Avenue. My windows faced west, and looked down on the busy Chicago River. The river stretched out before me, its bridges one after the other rising and descending with the coming and going of boats and ships of all kinds, large and small. The tall buildings of the Loop towered over me to the south while across the river to the north and west there was the contrast of dingy old warehouses and wharfs.

Wolff's sculpture received prizes in juried shows at the Chicago Art Institute in 1933 and 1934, and in a one-man exhibition in 1935. 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, off self-enclosed objects and focally isolated things color spaces containing only the heavy black lines of brush strokes that defined their limitsthis was what emerged....with a kind of furious aimlessness. I was not sure what it was that was happening but I knew that what ever it was it was vividly alive. This was the here and now of my life. I had taken the long, final step out of the shelter of art history and I found that I was quite alone."

Wolff became a member of Abstract American Artists in 1937 and exhibited with the group. 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. Wolff's book Essays on Art and Learning, was published in 1971.

Wolff's work is represented in collections including: Art Institute of Chicago, Brooklyn Museum of Art, estate of Alexander Calder, estate of Marcel Breuer, Guggenheim Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Tate Gallery in London, and the Wadsworth Athenaeum