Hassel Smith; abstract expressionist (also jazz-influenced)
Hyfler/Rosner
Exuberant Abstract Expressionist
http://www.lib.ucdavis.edu/ul/about/art/images/portuguese-navigator-73.jpg
http://www.stevenwolffinearts.com/dynamic/artwork_display.asp?ArtworkID=491
http://www.metroactive.com/papers/sonoma/11.28.02/hasselsmith-0248.html
http://www.magnoliaeditions.com/IndexFrame.html
The Independent
19 April 2007
Robin Houston
Hassel Wendell Smith, artist and teacher: born Sturgis,
Michigan 24 April 1915; married 1944 June Meyers (died 1958;
one son), 1959 Donna Raffety Harrington (one son, two
stepsons); died Sutton Veny, Wiltshire 2 January 2007.
Hassel Smith was the last survivor of the remarkable group
of San Francisco Bay Area artists who embraced Abstract
Expressionism after the Second World War. A teacher as well
as an artist, he was arguably the most innovative and
influential of them and his place as one of America's
foremost West Coast artists is assured.
He was born in 1915 to progressive middle-class parents in
Sturgis, Michigan. His course in Art History at Northwestern
University in Illinois required him to practise as well as
study art and on graduating he enrolled in 1936 at the
California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco to study
painting and drawing under the guidance of Maurice Sterne.
Smith said that he owed to Sterne the discovery of what he
called "the joys and mysteries" of translating three
dimensions to two.
After leaving the CSFA in 1938 Smith was rarely able to
exhibit or sell his work and so had to support himself in
other ways. In 1939 he was employed by the California State
Relief Administration to work by helping the men on San
Francisco's "skid row". Smith described the task as
"shattering", but it allowed him to continue painting.
In 1942 he declared himself to be a conscientious objector
and he went to work with the migrants who laboured in the
fields of the San Joaquin Valley of California. Here Smith
made powerful, rapid, documentary portraits of these rural
poor. In the valley, too, he met and married the social
worker June Meyers.
Shortly after the war Smith joined the faculty of the
California School of Fine Arts, a distinguished group that
included Clyfford Still, David Park, Elmer Bischoff and
others, and in the late 1940s these artists gave brilliant
life to a manifestation of Abstract Expressionism unique to
the West Coast of America. Smith's conversion to Abstract
Expressionism was "instantaneous". He was not alone and the
momentum became unstoppable. It had what one critic
described as "the intensity of a religious revival" and it
is said that Smith's teaching was startlingly influential in
this rebirth.
Far from being religious, however, his approach to Abstract
Expressionism was to produce blasphemous, off-the-cuff,
action painting. Smith's pictures were jazz-influenced,
flamboyant and witty. His first solo exhibition, in 1947 in
San Francisco, was acclaimed as "exuberant and
accomplished".
Leaving the CSFA in 1952, he took over an apple orchard in
Sebastopol to the north of San Francisco where he continued
to produce his dynamic, humorous abstracts, exhibiting in
Los Angeles as well as San Francisco. In 1958 June died and
a year later he married Donna Raffety Harrington. Smith now
moved into figurative work with a bravura and humour that
produced many of his most sought-after paintings. Smith's
human figures are uniquely his: they have an awkward
elegance, as if shy and clumsy people have suddenly been
blessed with confidence and grace. They exude passion and
often bawdiness.
He was now exhibiting in London as well as the United
States. In 1962 he and his family lived for a year in the
Cornish fishing village of Mousehole. Though they returned
to the US while Smith taught at the University of
California, they migrated permanently to England in 1966
when Smith became Senior Lecturer at the West of England
College of Art in Bristol. His absence from the US
thereafter perhaps weakened his professional and commercial
impact in America.
Smith's figurative work gradually morphed into "measured"
paintings. Compasses and rulers became essential in creating
abstractions, with inspiration drawn from North American
quilts, arithmetic and musical rhythms. They were
challenging and never greatly popular. But in Smith's
mid-sixties he and Donna moved to the countryside near Bath
and a new freedom appeared. The formality was abandoned, the
palette widened, and the brush regained a flighty supremacy
as Smith recaptured his wit and vividness. And finally, in a
creative Indian summer, he painted a body of organic,
mysterious and colourful abstracts which are among his best
and most appealing pictures.
By 1997 a neurological disorder was affecting the movement
of Smith's limbs and although intellectually uncompromised
he had to stop working.
Robin Houston