Oeuvre
Spanning seven decades from the thirties to the late nineties, Hassel Smith’s work, chiefly in painting, combined two contrasting periods of figuration with three major phases of abstraction.
Early Years
1915 – 1937
Born in Sturgis, Michigan, Hassel Smith grew up between Lake Michigan and the California coastline, where his family would relocate periodically for the health of his mother, Helen Adams Smith.
Smith entered Northwestern University in Chicago four years after the Wall Street Crash. His interests ranged across the Classics and Mythology, Arts, Humanities, and Sciences. He graduated with distinction in History of Art, Literature, and Chemistry, and was awarded a scholarship to Princeton for History of Art. Smith enrolled for summer classes in 1937 at the California School of Fine Arts (CSFA), under Maurice Sterne. The choice, originally a time-filler, proved to be life-altering as Smith declined the invitation to Princeton, and remained on the West Coast for three decades, emerging as one of the foremost painters of his generation.
Plein-Air and Figuration
1937 – 1949
Smith studied at CSFA for two years 1937-39. The influence of Maurice Sterne caused him to embrace drawing as a critical appraisal of visual experience, concentrated in shapes, forms, lines, and space, independent from verisimilitude and illustrative representation - an orientation that persisted through his life and career.
Captivated by the European tradition of plein-air painting, Smith toured the city of San Francisco and surrounding Bay Area in search of street scenes, bar interiors, and landscape panoramas. He received the important Abraham Rosenberg Foundation Traveling Fellowship in 1941 and based himself in the old gold mining region of Northern California until the end of 1942, a period during which his drawings and paintings based on towns and landscape locations deepened in linear energy and freedom of brushwork. Unable to paint during the war years, while employed as a camp supervisor by the Farm Security Administration, and later as a log scaler by the United States Forestry Service, Smith made drawings of migratory field workers near Arvin, in the Central Valley.
Exploration
1949 – 1963
Hassel Smith was employed as an instructor at the CSFA soon after the end of World War II, where he engaged with the energy of renewal and artistic innovation then concentrated in San Francisco. While teaching at CSFA (1945-51) Smith had frequent contact with, among others: Clyfford Still, Richard Diebenkorn, David Park, Frank Lobdell, and Elmer Bischoff. The work of Clyfford Still had a transformative and lasting impact on Smith, and the artists continued to correspond with one another until the end of Still’s life in 1980.
By the mid-fifties Smith developed a fluidly dynamic rendering of abstraction, in painting and drawing, noted for the integration of ‘whiplash line’ with vivid form and pictorial space. He exhibited widely, on both coasts of the United States as well as in Britain and Italy. He was the only practitioner of the new abstraction movement based in Northern California to be integrated among the emerging innovative artists in Los Angeles, exhibiting regularly with Ferus Gallery, and later with David Stuart Gallery.
Transition
1963 – 1970
Smith’s desire to escape repetition provoked his return to figuration as a refuge for reorientation and renewal. Yet the works of this period bore no stylistic or strategic relation to Smith’s figuration of the late forties. The emerging large-scale figurative works were not studies from observation, but resulted from interweaving of memory and invention. They comprised alternative approaches to pictorial challenges engaged during the Fifties, but were a transitional series navigating a journey of color, shapes and spatial relationships that bridged the distance between non-objective representation and abstraction. Hence paintings from the early and mid Sixties recall the drawing and application of the preceding decade, whereas ensuing changes in rendering of shapes and events in space, characterised by virtuosic use of a large cartographer’s compass, anticipate Smith’s return to abstraction in the ‘Measured’ paintings of the seventies and eighties.
Having been selected by Walter Hopps in 1961 for a retrospective at Pasadena Art Museum, Smith’s impact in Southern California included friendships with John Altoon, Tony Berlant, Ed Kienholz, and Robert Irwin. The LA painter Ed Moses memorably referred to Hassel Smith as ’the grandfather of us all’.
Passing through a vivid four-year arc that encompassed a year in Cornwall, a year in Hollywood, and the decision to leave the United States - after teaching sojourns in Berkeley (UCB, 1964-66), and Los Angeles (UCLA, 1965-66) - Smith moved permanently to England with his family in late 1966.
The Measured Paintings
1970 – 1986
The ‘measured’ series of paintings, initiated in Bristol at the beginning of the seventies, gathered depth and momentum during the first half of the eighties. Following retirement from full-time teaching in 1980, Smith and his wife, the family therapist and author, Donna Smith, moved from Bristol to an eighteenth-century former rectory in the countryside between Somerset and Wiltshire.
Abandoning oil in favor of acrylic paints, with advantages of rapid drying-time, opacity and tranlucency, the ‘measured’ paintings were produced in the isolation that arose through distance from the gravitational center of Smith’s reputation. Complexity of compositional strategy emerged with clarity and exuberance. The ‘measured’ paintings are characterised by thin application of high-density acrylic pigments, and the tension between vivid brushwork and use of compass in drawing. Underlying grids, partially overworked, were allowed both to emerge and be hidden, thus narrowing the distance between painting and music, formal and improvised.
Having shared an important friendship with the painter Peter Lanyon during the Cornish year (1962-63), Smith renewed contacts with artists based between London and the Southwest, including Patrick Heron, Terry Frost, Albert Irwin, and Paul Feiler.
Gestural Abstraction
1986 – 1998
As the paintings of the fifties and early sixties gave access to Smith’s brief significant return to figuration, so the figurative paintings of the late sixties anticipated the ‘measured’ paintings of the following decades. In a similar evolution, the underlying structure of the ‘measured’ paintings gradually dissolved, surrendering to gestural brushwork and volatile markmaking, driven by distinct depth and a vortex of pictorial space. The development of large-scale works through the late eighties established a new acrylic series mingling opaque and translucent overlays, within fields of raw or lightly-tinted canvas. Smith’s inner resources rallied as he sensed the limits of his physical strength. The paintings of 1995-97, his final years of production, and a voluminous output of drawings (graphite and wax crayon on paper), are lyrical explorations of spatial potential in the visual plane.