Frederick Hammersley was an American abstract painter and educator. He painted geometric abstractions with humorous, clever titles that are puns, accompanying them.
Background
Mr. Hammersley was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, United States, on January 5, 1919. Some time later, Frederick Hammersley's father, who served as a Department of the Interior employee, moved the family to Blackfoot, Idaho, and then to San Francisco.
Education
Frederick Hammersley took his first art classes in San Francisco. After two years of undergraduate work at the University of Idaho in 1936-1938, he fully devoted himself to art, studying at Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles (now part of the California Institute of the Arts) starting from 1940. There he attended classes of Rico Lebrun. However, his education was interrupted by military service from 1942 to 1946. But as an Army sergeant, he was stationed in Paris, then the center of the art world. "That was marvelous for me, really," Hammersley told in 1999. "One day, the USO posted a sign offering trips to Picasso's studio." He went to the studio, visited Picasso four more times and, as the war wound down, he took the opportunity to attend the École des Beaux-Arts in 1945. During his studies there, Frederick Hammersley also met Georges Braque and Constantin Brâncuși, frequently visited their studios, and created sketches.
When Hammersley returned home, the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944 (also known as the G.I. Bill) subsidized a year of study at Chouinard, now California Institute of the Arts, 1946-1947, and three years at Los Angeles' Jepson Art Institute, 1947-1950.
Career
Hammersley made his living as an art professor in Southern California for about 20 years, teaching at the experimental Jepson Art Institute in Los Angeles (1948-1951), and then began a long career as a teacher at these schools and at Pomona College in Claremont (1953-1962). Between 1956 and 1961 he worked at the Pasadena Art Museum.
However, he achieved his prominence as one of the four Los Angeles "abstract classicists" in 1959. He appeared in an exhibition together with Karl Benjamin, Lorser Feitelson and John McLaughlin, which was organised by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. It traveled successfully to San Francisco, Belfast and London (where it appeared at the Institute of Contemporary Arts) and was praised for its presentation of cool abstractions which were very different from the emotional ones of the established abstract expressionist movement. Creating initially more hard-edge paintings, he gradually expanded his repertoire, dividing his art into three categories: "hunches" (1953-1959), "geometrics" (1959-1964, 1965-mid 1990s), and "organics" (1964, 1982-2000).
Hammersley joined the staff of the California Institute of the Arts in 1964, and held the post of a professor there till 1968, migrating to Albuquerque, New Mexico. The same year he started his professorship at the University of New Mexico, leaving it in 1971 so that he could concentrate on painting.
Frederick Hammersley's works were characterized by a noted variety, nevertheless, there were certain features that repeated throughout his career: areas of bright, unbroken colour, a complex and uncertain attitude to pictorial space and, above all, a playfulness proved by the suggestive titles - Persuasion (1960), Cool de Sac (1977) and Tango (1980). In addition to paintings, Hammersley also produced photographs, computer-generated art, prints and drawings.
Among his later exhibition were: at the Graham Gallery, Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 1989; at the The Mulvane Art Museum, Washburn University, Topeka, Kansas, and at the Richard Levy Gallery, Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 1993; Visual Puns and Hard-Edge Poems, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 1999.
Views
Quotations:
"Hard-edge is often very hard to take, coming to it cold - or, even to the practiced eye."
"My painting begins with a hunch, no plan, no theory, just a feeling to make a shape. That shape dictates what and where the next will go, and so on..."
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
Leah Ollman: "[Frederick Hammersley] proved himself more a soft-hearted humanist than a hard-edged purist."
Leah Ollman: "Hammersley takes several steps toward making his work more accessible, less aloof. For one, he uses titles as invitations in, catalysts to closer looking. ... [P]unning, free-associative title ideas ... mimic the formal dynamics enacted by the shapes... They joust, contradict, tease, echo and conspire."