Hassel Smith

HASSEL SMITH

HASSEL SMITH

Weinstein Gallery

This book has been published on the occasion of the exhibition Hassel Smith at Weinstein Gallery, San Francisco, October 27–December 5, 2012.

Weinstein Gallery is proud to represent the Estate of Hassel Smith.

We would like to acknowledge the gracious support of Donna Smith and Mark Harrington from the Estate, as well as the kind assistance of Larissa Spicker and Kim and Chris Collet.

Weinstein Gallery 383 Geary Street San Francisco, California 94102 www.weinstein.com

© 2012

Weinstein Gallery, San Francisco Essay “Looking at Hassel Smith” © 2012 by Mark Harrington

Publication directed and edited by Jasmine Moorhead Production by Jasmine Moorhead and Nicholas Pishvanov Designed by Linda Corwin, Avantgraphics Text set in ScalaSans Printed by California Lithographers, Concord, California Printed in the United States of America

Front cover: #1 About #9 1979–80, overworked 1981 Acrylic on canvas 68 x 68 inches Back cover: Number 4 1952 Oil on canvas 67 x 99 inches Inside front cover: Hassel Smith, Sebastopol, California, 1960 Inside back cover: Hassel Smith in his studio, Rode, England, 1986 Photo page 6: Andre Moreau; photo page 7: Charles Strong

HASSEL SMITH—HERE AND NOW Rowland Weinstein and Kendy Genovese

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hen asked to describe Hassel Smith, the man, the portrait painted by the words of his friends and family is pluralistic: “iconoclastic” and “contrarian,” “rebellious” and “intelligent,” “just marvelous fun” and “always on the dance floor.” It is no surprise that Hassel Smith was as complex as his paintings.

Revered by Art in America as a “West Coast underground legend,” Hassel Smith was a critically acclaimed artist and respected innovator in the early abstract experimentations taking place in post–World War II California. Synthesizing the art, jazz, poetry, and politics of the day into his breakthrough paintings, Smith became a central figure in what is now called the San Francisco Renaissance. His unique style of wildly vivid brushstrokes and explosive color was so astonishing that critics such as Allan Temko cited him as the most influential artist in California. Smith would paint for sixty years, moving from figuration to abstraction to non-objective and back again to lyrical abstraction.

Along with Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko, Richard Diebenkorn, David Park, and others, he would champion a new avantgarde and provoke a revolution in painting as a teacher at the California School of Fine Arts under Douglas MacAgy. He would enjoy highly successful solo shows at Dilexi and King Ubu galleries in San Francisco, the groundbreaking Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, as well as Gimpel Fils in London and André Emmerich in New York City. Smith would also be honored with three retrospective exhibitions during his lifetime at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1975, the Oakland Museum of California in 1981, and the Sonoma County Museum in 2002.

Yet as important, influential, and beloved as he was, the artist and his magnificent works have been conspicuously absent from recent major exhibitions of American art and

sadly relegated to a mere footnote in the history of Abstract Expressionism, of which he was one of the West Coast pioneers. Perhaps it was his eventual retreat to England and his continual change of styles; maybe it was his sometimes outspoken, volatile nature or his strong political views in an era of McCarthyism and the Cold War; or perhaps when he turned his back on the critics and curators, they turned the page in art history.

On the occasion of Hassel Smith’s memorial exhibition at the San Jose Museum of Art, critic Tyler Green was moved to comment: “Hassel Smith is one of the most under-appreciated American painters of the post-war era. . . . Smith’s paintings are in the collections of lots of museums you know and love, but they rarely make it out of storage. . . . That’s too bad. Smith deserves better.” Art in America additionally asked, “Where is the major survey this fascinating artist deserves?” We adamantly agree.

It is our great honor to bring Hassel Smith back to the Bay Area with the first San Francisco retrospective of the artist’s paintings to be mounted in more than thirty years.

Our exhibition coincides with the release of the muchawaited monograph, Hassel Smith: Paintings 1937–1997. With contributions from six respected art history luminaries, the exceptional scholarship offers a critical appraisal of Smith’s entire life’s work and persuasively positions Smith’s artistic achievements in the history of American painting.

For our part, we believe the art speaks for itself and like Hassel, perhaps strongly. We are pleased to present this survey of paintings representing six decades of the artist’s work. It is our hope this exhibition will allow a celebration to ensue of both the man and his work. As the visionary curator Walter Hopps aptly advised: “Again, there is Smith’s reminder that his paintings are about nothing, they are something which waits to meet and include us.”

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LOOKING AT HASSEL SMITH Mark Harrington

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assel Smith was active as a painter from the late 1930s to the late 1990s. His diverse oeuvre spans the seeming contradictions of abstraction/figuration and expressionism/hardedge. Yet the continuum of his praxis conforms readily to the dialectical progression of thesis-antithesis-synthesis.

Though infatuated by vaudeville, employing painterly equivalents of slapstick and caprice with deft effect, Smith was confirmedly anti-nihilistic and a visual thinker of clear purpose and incisive instinct. In appreciating the art of Hassel Smith one may grasp the principle of contradiction as a catalyst for renewal, perceiving within the flow of contrasting methods and concerns both the freedom and the disciplined energy of an artist for whom: “In art there are many problems, yet art itself is never a problem.”

Smith attended Northwestern University during the mid-1930s, pursuing an active social life amid the bars and dance halls of Chicago while studying both widely and brilliantly. Absorbing the influences of the World’s Fair and the great historical collections of painting to be seen in mid-30s Chicago, as well as the appearance of Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo (under the direction of Massine—which made a lifelong impression), Smith sidelined his passion for chemistry to major in art history, winning a graduate scholarship to Princeton for the fall of 1936. But a decision to follow summer classes in drawing and printmaking at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco, prior to assuming the Princeton scholarship for a Master’s in art history, proved fateful. The influence of his tutor, Maurice Sterne, did not merely encourage a radical change in the focus of Smith’s life, it helped determine the kind of artist that Smith would become.

The “laboratory” of Sterne’s class, according to the

Hassel Smith, c. 1941–42

evidence from reproductions of students’ work at CSFA during the late 1930s, could not be identified as radical. It is the absence of radical style that may have been the strength of Sterne’s influence. Smith, in later years, credited Sterne with having stepped outside of prescribed technique to confer a stylistically neutral approach to perception and observation: an orientation that emphasized the contemplation of shapes and their relationships as fundamental to spatial awareness

and visual thought. The artist was definitively liberated from replication and illustration.

Smith was awarded a Rosenberg Traveling Fellowship through CSFA in 1940–41, which took him for extended periods to the Motherlode region of Northern California.

Though relatively few works from this period still exist, it was clearly a highly productive phase, as witnessed by the leap in assurance of the execution of landscapes and townscapes deriving from studies of the streets and environs of the decaying communities of Columbia and Angels Camp. Smith was captivated by surviving aspects of the gold-mining era in the saloons, sequestered houses, and verdant gardens of the old towns. The distinctive boldness of drawing and dashing paint application, together with a vivid complexity of color, establish the oil paintings of the 1940s as the first of several important stages in the development of Smith’s work.

More than half a century after the Motherlode period, towards the end of the 1990s, Smith made a modestly scaled vertical rectilinear painting titled Mission Control to Sojourner: “Return to Earth!” (p. 37). In retrospect, the paintings of the previous five decades present a journey of stellar reach: the tracking signal on an imagined radar screen attests to circuitous pathways, high-speed journeys into nebulous space followed by pause, then sudden alterations of direction that seem willfully directed to baffle pursuit. Regrettably, the metaphor is misleading, for the conquest of doubt precludes the questionable likelihood that signals were received from a navigational source external to the artist. The brilliance of Smith’s journey consists in the vindication of a complex path through the persistence of high achievement, formal clarity, and technical mastery. He was a superb stylist and a fearless visual thinker, undaunted by the demand for a marketable identity and the assurances of repetition.

The principal phases of Smith’s output form a sequence of six progressions, having a recurring pattern of overlapping influence: plein air and representational paintings of the 1940s;

abstract expressionism of the early 1950s to mid-60s; return to figuration and representation, 1964–70; development of hard-edge abstraction, the “measured” series from the early 1970s to mid-80s; gestural abstraction in mid-80s to early 90s; and late abstraction in his final painting years from early to late 1990s.

An overview of the entire oeuvre reveals common elements between paintings that may otherwise appear so contrasted as to have emerged from different artists.

Hence, the flamboyant brushwork of representational paintings of the late 1940s, in which each stroke describes shape and defines color, anticipates the signature works of the “thunderbolt” phase from the early 1950s to mid-60s, characterized by an evolving merger between pictorial field and electric manipulation of line.

It is clear that the ensuing return to figuration, during the second half of the 1960s, was a passage between major periods of non-representational painting. The outset of this sharply defined body of work contrasts so markedly with its ending that it would be impossible to understand the late 60s as anything other than a vital transition, a return to base as preparation for departure. We may be thankful that the late figuration of Hassel Smith produced both some of the most amusing and some of the most elegant of representational painting by any artist of the West Coast, uniquely unfettered by the European atelier tradition.

At the outset of the 1970s, Smith spoke often of kinetics and gave considerable attention to the artists active in that area on both sides of the Atlantic. This preoccupation coincided with a rigorous investigation of the chemistry of paint, resulting in the abandonment of oil-based products for the entirety of the artist’s late career. A much earlier painting, The Triumph of Gargoyalism (1957), was a manifesto in both title and substance (household oil paint) for an anti-aesthetic memorably evoked by Smith’s prescriptive statement, in the early 50s, that a painting should be “so ugly I wouldn’t hang

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it on my shithouse wall.” The urgency for an uncompromised aesthetic, an aesthetics of beastliness, had transformed by the late 1960s to an aesthetics of restraint and understatement, that positively embraced the introduction of the thenrelatively-untested acrylic paints in separate component parts.

By “measured” paintings Smith described works having a calculated grid substructure. Events and intervals arising from the overlapping of lines in a grid structure, or the coincidence of pathways between selected intersections, were resolved as the basic forms of circle, square, triangle, and

rectangle. Assuming the tensile relations of cross-rhythms within monochromatic fields, the fundamental Euclidean forms were regulated into perceivable patterns, or merged into continuums of irregular amalgamated shapes that transcended optical provocation, to achieve configurations of extraordinary pictorial range—from multi-tonal zest and playfulness to works of menace and enigma.

The comparative flatness of tone and surface, in the measured paintings of the 1970s, surrendered during the early 1980s to the animation of explosive multi-colored

brushwork at strategic points and within decisively chosen shapes. Departing from the surface reduction of hard-edge painting, Smith perceived the visual field as dimensionally complex and portentous. The interruptions to flatness are certainly no mere decoration, but are integral to the dynamic of pictorial space, arousing the observer to scan both across and forwards and backwards. Though clearly disciplined by the order of a measured plane, the perception of the observer experiences no sense of containment but accedes to an uplifting liberation. It is the interplay between precise shapes and impassioned brushwork that animates the sense of spatial movement.

Subsequently, the balance of this interplay veered irrevocably, as the 1980s proceeded, toward what might be considered, at a glance, an extreme of randomness. In fact, moving at great speed into the dimensional possibilities of planar space, Smith’s color and brushwork fragmented the visual field, literally overwhelming all vestiges of measured strategies. The paintings of the late 80s and 90s, in their flight from Euclidean shapes and underlying compositional order, where the energetic application of paint determines pictorial space, are a sustained and varied dialogue between the material substantiality and perceptual mutability of the painted surface. Vortices of clustered multi-tonal strokes grow and diminish within fields of thinly tinted canvas, at moments revealing broad expanses of open space, then closing, uniting, colliding in tense combustions that both confront and absorb the observer’s gaze. The sense of travel is unmistakable, the allure of the painting consisting in the simultaneous confirmation of planar solidity and the invocation of spatial infinitude.

The consensus that has emerged in recent decades, magnetized to conceptualism and anesthetized by permutations of virtual reality, is noticeably empty of individuals possessing Duchamp’s subversive sense of mission. Paradoxically, what has evolved is a new form of

academicism in which the position of the conceptualistrealist has become convenient to the apparatus of the many new dimensions of the contemporary global industry of art.

Today the visual artist, the maker of non-referential painting, has been marginalized as a kind of outsider, perhaps an anachronism. Within this airless context the art of Hassel Smith is a refreshing antidote. The survival of his reputation, attested by the recent publication of a full monograph (Hassel Smith: Paintings 1937–1997, Prestel, 2012), challenges the conviction that observation is irrelevant to the formulation of ideas and that the retinal appreciation of art is intellectually void. The enduring charisma of the outsider art of Hassel Smith is the projection of a sustained high-wire endeavor that continually sidesteps the certitudes of recognition guaranteed by stylistic repetition. Smith derived inspiration from a wideangle perspective upon the history of painting, European and American. As a reflection of historical continuum, the achievement of Hassel Smith is a unique manifestation of change and transformation, reaffirming the potency of artistic independence and the vitality of visual intelligence.

Above: Hassel Smith, Wiegand Gallery exhibition, College of Notre Dame, Belmont, California, 1988; Opposite page: Hassel Smith in his studio, Sebastopol, California, 1964.

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Fashions (HS0037) 1945 Oil on canvas Recto: 14½ x 13½ inches Verso: 11½ x 10½ inches

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Verso

Untitled (HS0064) 1948 Oil on canvas on board 16 x 12 inches

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Untitled (Abstract Composition in Tones of Gray) 1961 Gouache, ink, and crayon on paper 19 x 23他 inches

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Untitled (HS0063) 1959–60 Oil on canvas 20¼ x 22 inches

Untitled (HS0040) 1963 Oil on canvas 18 x 48 inches

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Jimmy Witherspoon 1965 Oil on canvas 18 x 48 inches

Untitled #15 1961 Oil canvas 68 x 48 inches

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The Houston Scene 1959 Oil on canvas 69 x 118 inches

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Homage to SFBM 1971, overworked 1973 Acrylic on canvas 48 x 68 inches

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1-2-3-4-1 Painting (HS0055) 1974–75 Acrylic on canvas 68 x 68 inches

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Untitled (HS0074) 1972 Acrylic on canvas 68 x 68 inches

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1-2-3-4-1 Painting (HS0069) 1975–76 Acrylic on canvas 68 x 68 inches

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From 1 to 9 1975–76 Acrylic on board on canvas 68 x 68 inches

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1-2-3-1 Painting 1976 Acrylic on canvas 68 x 68 inches

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Untitled (HS0068) 1975 Oil and acrylic on canvas 71½ x 70 inches

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I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls 1975 Acrylic on canvas 68 x 68 inches

About #9 1979 Acrylic on canvas 68 x 48 inches

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Not About 9 1979 Acrylic on canvas 68 x 68 inches

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Cosmatiana 1982 Acrylic on canvas 68 x 68 inches

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About #99 1980 Acrylic on canvas 68 x 68 inches

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Untitled (HS0072) 1985, overworked 1986–87 Acrylic on canvas 68 x 68 inches

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For Clyfford (#2) 1984 Acrylic on canvas 68 x 68 inches

Untitled (HS0005) 1987 Acrylic on canvas 68 x 48 inches

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Untitled (HS0007) 1989–90, overworked 1992 Acrylic on canvas 68 x 48 inches

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Untitled (HS0003) 1992 Acrylic on canvas 68 x 48 inches

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Untitled (HS0020) 1990 Acrylic on canvas 68 x 48 inches

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At One Go 1995 Acrylic on canvas 56 x 56 inches

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Untitled (HS0025) 1996 Acrylic on canvas 48 x 48 inches

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Untitled #94 (HS0036) 1996 Acrylic on panel 16 3/8 x 1111/16 inches

Untitled (HS0062) 1996 Acrylic on panel 16 3/8 x 1111/16 inches

Mission Control to Sojourner: “Return to Earth!”

1997 Acrylic on canvas 68 x 32 inches

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Self-Portrait (HS0035) 1995 Acrylic on Board 19他 x 16 inches

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Chronology 1915 Born on April 24, Sturgis, Michigan, to Hassel and Helen Adams Smith, Sr.

Los Angeles. Meets artists Peter Voulkos, John Altoon, Billy Al Bengston, Edward Moses, and others of the L.A. scene. June Meyers Smith dies.

1918–23 Due to his mother’s tuberculosis, the family moves to Denver, Los Angeles, San Mateo, and Mill Valley, CA, then eventually back to Sturgis.

1959 Marries Donna Raffety, who has two sons, Mark and Stephan.

Their son, Bruce, is born in 1960.

1929–32 Returns to San Mateo and graduates from San Mateo Union High School.

1962 Lives in Mousehole, England, for one year teaching and painting. Shows at André Emmerich Gallery, New York; Ferus Gallery, Los Angeles; and Dilexi Gallery, San Francisco.

1932–36 Attends Northwestern University, in Evanston, IL, outside of Chicago, where he studies chemistry initially. But he turns his attention to art history and English literature. Is influenced by the World’s Fair, the Art Institute, and jazz.

1963–65 Teaches at UC Berkeley. Shows at Gimpel Fils, London.

1936 Following graduation he spends the summer in San Francisco at the California School of Fine Arts (now the SF Art Institute).

Decides to change his plans from graduate study in art history at Princeton to a career in art.

1966 Accepts a position at the Royal West of England College of Art in Bristol, England, where he will remain until 1978.

1941 Receives a traveling grant for independent art study. Moves to the California Gold Country and paints en plein air.

1942–44 Works for the Farm Security Adminstration. Meets June Meyers, whom he marries. Their son, Joseph, is born in 1947.

1945–51 Begins to work as an instructor at the CSFA, under its influential director Douglas MacAgy. Except for a one-year stint at the University of Oregon, he teaches there until 1951. During this rich period, he is first exposed to Clyfford Still’s work, which will have a lifelong influence on him. He will also work alongside artists such as David Park, Elmer Bischoff, Edward Corbett, Richard Diebenkorn, Claire Falkenstein, Mark Rothko, and others.

1953 Acquires an apple orchard in Sebastopol, in Sonoma County, where he builds a studio to continue to paint. Exhibits at the East-West Gallery and the King Ubu Gallery, both in SF.

1965–66 Teaches at UCLA.

1967 Receives a National Endowment for the Arts award.

1973–75 Visiting professor at UC Davis.

1974 Solo exhibition Hassel Smith in Houston, University of Houston.

1975 Solo exhibition Hassel Smith: Paintings: 1954–1975, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. 1977–80 Visiting instructor, SFAI; principal lecturer, Bristol Polytechnic, England, and Cardiff College of Art, Wales.

1980–97 Moves from Bristol to Rode, where he begins a prolific period of painting until illness requires that he stop working in December 1997.

1981 Solo exhibition Hassel Smith, Oakland Museum of California.

1955 Included in later-legendary curator Walter Hopps’s exhibition at the Merry-Go-Round Building on the Santa Monica Pier.

2002 Solo exhibition Hassel Smith: 55 Years of Painting, Sonoma County Museum, Santa Rosa, CA; travels to Laguna Art Museum.

1958 Part of the first exhibition at the influential Ferus Gallery in

2007 Dies in England on January 2nd.

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Public Collections

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Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY Berkeley Art Museum, University of California, Berkeley Civic Art Collection, San Francisco International Airport Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA Dallas Museum of Art Federal Reserve Bank, San Francisco Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Stanford, CA Los Angeles County Museum of Art The Menil Collection, Houston Midwest Museum of American Art, Elkhart, Indiana Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University, St. Louis The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, Utah State University, Logan Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, CA Oakland Museum of California Palm Springs Art Museum, CA Peter J. Shields Library, University of California, Davis Phoenix Art Museum, Arizona The Poetry Collection, State University of New York, Buffalo Portland Art Museum, OR Saint Louis Museum of Art San Francisco Museum of Modern Art San Jose Museum of Art, CA Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. Snite Museum of Art, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN Sonoma County Museum, Santa Rosa, CA Tate Modern, London University of New Mexico Art Museum, Albuquerque Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

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