About the Artist

Hassel Smith was a celebrated and influential artist and educator, based on the West Coast of the United States during the development of American Abstract expressionism. Primarily a painter, Smith’s activities over seven decades included drawing, printmaking, sculpture, assemblage, collage, poetry and assorted critical texts.

Having established his reputation in the United States, Smith lived in England from the mid-sixties until the end of his life. There he achieved major shifts of style with artistic continuity between contrasting iterations of figuration and abstraction.

A revered and dedicated teacher, during the late forties and early fifties Smith taught at the California School of Fine Arts (CSFA, later the San Francisco Art Institute) under the leadership of Douglas MacAgy and Clyfford Still. He was a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley (UCB), and Los Angeles (UCLA), later becoming Principal Lecturer and Head of Fine Art at Bristol Polytechnic (England).

Smith’s late career gained outstanding momentum of production during the eighties and nineties, and was distinguished by the development of two overlapping yet distinct styles of ‘measured’ and gestural abstraction in painting.

Smith’s works have been collected by over thirty American museums, the Tate Modern, London and many influential collectors.