Smith became a student of Northwestern University, Chicago, in 1932. In 1936 he received a Bachelor of Science degree with a double major: art history and English literature.
Gallery of Hassel Smith
800 Chestnut St, San Francisco, CA 94133, USA
Smith studied at the California School of Fine Arts (now San Francisco Art Institute) from 1936 till 1937.
Smith became a student of Northwestern University, Chicago, in 1932. In 1936 he received a Bachelor of Science degree with a double major: art history and English literature.
Hassel Smith was an American artist and educator. Smith was associated with the styles of Abstract Expressionism and Abstract Art.
Background
Smith was born in Sturgis, Michigan, United States, on April 24, 1915. He was the child of Hassel and Helen Adams Smith, Sr. Later the family adopted a boy, Lewis, of the same age.
During his childhood and adolescence, Hassel Smith's family alternated between their homes in Michigan and the West Coast, due to the poor health of his mother; she contracted tuberculosis. As the artist recalled later, "I have done a lot of travelling back and forth across the United States by every known conveyance except horse... I think it is a significant part, a pattern of my life that I have constantly moved, from one place to another."
Education
After one year of high school in Michigan, Hassel Smith returned to San Mateo, California, in 1929. He attended San Mateo Union High School there, graduating in 1932. Besides, Smith became an Eagle Scout when he was 15.
Smith became a student of Northwestern University, Chicago, in 1932. In 1936 he received a Bachelor of Science degree with a double major: art history and English literature. He intended to go to Princeton to do graduate work in art history but decided to return to the Bay Area, enrolling at the California School of Fine Arts (now San Francisco Art Institute).
Hassel Smith was accepted to Maurice Sterne's elite painting and drawing classes, where he remained for nearly two years. "Sterne's approach to drawing from the model (nature) was a revelation. I have no hesitation in saying that to whatever extent my intellect has been engaged in the joys and mysteries of transferring visual observations in three dimensions into meaningful two-dimensional marks and shapes, I owe to Sterne." In 1937 Smith finished his studies at the institute.
In 1991 Smith received his Honorary Doctorate from the San Francisco Art Institute.
At the beginning of his artistic career, Smith moved in with Jack Wilkinson, an American artist, in 1937. They lived in the San Remo Hotel, San Francisco, and then moved into a studio in the Montgomery Block previously occupied by Maynard Dixon. They painted together outdoors a lot. In 1939 he was employed by the California State Relief Administration, living with his brother in a boarding house in the Haight-Ashbury district.
Hassel Smith received an Abraham Rosenberg Fellowship for independent study in 1941. He moved to the Motherlode region of northern California. His works until the end of 1942 were mainly made plein-air with a focus on town and landscape.
In 1942 Smith started to work for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) of the US Department of Agriculture. In 1944 the FSA was phased out by Congress, and he was transferred to the Forest Service, spending the remainder of the war as a timber scaler on the McKenzie River in Oregon.
Once the war over, Hassel Smith returned to the Bay Area where he worked as an assistant to Ray Bertrand in the lithography workshop at the California School of Fine Arts (now San Francisco Art Institute). In 1945, along with Robert McChesney and Edward Corbett, Smith co-founded the Artist's Guild, a first postwar artist-run gallery in North Beach.
Douglas MacAgy was appointed director of the California School of Fine Arts and re-organized the staff as well as its program. Hassel Smith worked alongside Clyfford Still, Dorr Bothwell, Edward Corbett, Clay Spohn, David Park, Elmer Bischoff, Walter Landor, Claire Falkenstein, Ansel Adams, Richard Diebenkorn, and other significant artists, filmmakers and designers. Summer visitors included Mark Rothko, Ad Reinhardt, Stanley William Hayter, and others.
Among Smith's students were James Kelly, Sonia Gechtoff, Frank Lobdell, Jack Jefferson, Roy De Forest, Lilly Fenichel, John Hultberg, Ernest Briggs, Deborah Remington, Julius Wasserstein, and Madeleine Dimond (Martin), etc.
The artist became deeply influenced by Clyfford Still's 1947 exhibition at the Palace of the Legion of Honour. "It had a tremendous effect on me and various other people as well ... Rothko and Clyfford Still were at the time great friends and they had a lot of influence on the younger people, including myself." The two formed a friendship with that lasted until Still's death in 1980. In 1947 Smith held his first museum solo exhibition at the California Palace of the Legion of Honour in San Francisco, California. Later he moved to Eugene, Oregon.
In 1948 the artist returned to the Bay Area and went back to work at the California School of Fine Arts. Later that year he took part in the Group exhibition together with David Park, Hassell Smith, Elmer Bischoff at the San Francisco Museum of Art (now San Francisco Museum of Modern Art).
Smith was dismissed from the California School of Fine Arts by the new Director, Ernst Mundt, in 1952. He started to teach Arts and Crafts at Presidio Hill School, children's art classes at Mission Community Center, as well as weekly seminars at his Potrero Hill district home. Concurrently, he painted in his 9 Mission Street studio. In Smith included his Mission Street students in Jess and Robert Duncan's inaugural exhibition for King Ubu gallery, Large-scale Drawings.
From 1953 until late 1965 Hassel Smith lived in an apple orchard outside Sebastopol, Sonoma County, where he built a studio and continued to paint. His artworks from these years referred to by critic Allan Temko as the "Thunderbolt period", had a substantial impact on artists along the entire West Coast. By the mid-1950s Hassel Smith achieved an entirely independent stylistic language. In 1955 he participated in "Merry-Go-Round" or Action show at Santa Monica Pier, which was jointly organized by The Six Gallery and Walter Hopps' Syndell Gallery in Los Angeles.
In 1958 Smith held his first exhibition at the Ferus Gallery founded by Walter Hopps and Edward Kienholz in Los Angeles. There he met Peter Voulkos, Edward Moses, John Altoon, Billy Al Bengston, and others. During the same period, he began exhibiting at Jim Newman's Dilexi Gallery in San Francisco. The following year, he became a participant of the exhibition at New Arts, Houston, which was curated by director Kathryn Swenson. His paintings were also shown in New York, Milan, and London, and were acquired widely in both private and public collections.
The artist went to England in 1962. There he lived for one year in Mousehole, a Cornish fishing village. In 1963 he returned to California and worked as a lecturer in the art department at the University of California at Berkeley, holding this post until 1965. Later that year he moved to Los Angeles, serving as an associate professor in the art department at the University of California at Los Angeles.
As for his oeuvre, from 1964 to 1970 Hassel Smith returned to representational painting with a series of large-scale figure compositions and street scenes. His paintings of the late 1960s formed a pivotal transition from abstract-expressionism to a cool hard-edged aesthetic.
Hassel Smith was offered a position at the Royal West of England College of Art in Bristol in 1966, which he accepted and moved permanently to England, where he was a senior lecturer until 1978. Concurrently, from 1973 till 1975 he served as a visiting professor in the art department at the University of California at Davis. Between 1977 and 1980 he held the position of an Instructor at San Francisco Art Institute, and from 1978 to 1980 he was a principal lecturer at Bristol Polytechnic (today University of the West of England), England, and the Cardiff School of Art and Design, Wales.
In 1980 Smith moved from Bristol to Rode in Somerset. The following year he became a guest artist of the San Francisco Art Institute. During 1986-1987 he worked on lithographs and monotypes at Magnolia Press, Oakland, and also exhibited at the Smith Andersen Gallery. All in all, the period of 1980-1997 was extremely prolific for the painter; he worked a lot at the studio in Rode, until his was forced to stop work due to poor health in December 1997.
Quotations:
"To put it very briefly, it means as far as I'm concerned I'm bringing the painting into much closer relation with music, the dance with verse, and the various discursive art forms in which rhythmic sequences play a role."
"In auditory terms SILENCE is discernible only in relation to NOISE, the reverse being equally true. The two states are functions of one another. The corners of a canvas are events with a necessary dimensional 'interval' between them but that does not imply that the interval is without 'eventfulness,' is in other words, 'nothing.'"
Personality
Hassel Smith was a keen collector of Native American artefacts as well as old bottles. Also active as an amateur geologist. In 1980, a life-long philatelist, Smith sold his stamp collection to finance studio renovations to the outbuildings of an eighteenth-century rectory.
Quotes from others about the person
Walter Hopps: "I'm sure you know a good deal about Hassel Smith, painter, man, legend as a renegade, teacher and leading free spirit of art here in the Far West. Hassel has caused some furious storms and is in my opinion among the four finest artists to come out of the West, Diebenkorn, Lobdell, Corbett, Smith."
Connections
In the early 1940s, Hassel Smith met and married June Meyers. She was a social worker in the migratory labour program. The marriage produced one child, Joseph. June Meyers died in 1958.
Smith married Donna Raffety Harrington, his second wife, in 1959. She had two sons from her previous marriage, Mark and Stephan. Their son Bruce was born in 1960.
Spouse:
June Meyers
Spouse:
Donna Raffety Harrington
Son:
Joseph Smith
stepson:
Mark Harrington
stepson:
Stephan Harrington
Son:
Bruce Smith
References
Hassel Smith: Paintings 1937-1997
This book on the Abstract Expressionist painter Hassel Smith illustrates all periods of the artist's many-faceted career.
2012
Hassel Smith
Catalog for October 27-December 5, 2012 exhibition. Includes color plates and a number of photograph of Smith.
2012
Art of California
Book by Alfred C. Harrison, Janet B. Dominik, Bruce A Nixon, Susan M. Anderson, Mary Ann Toal, Lauri Hoffman, Hollis Speir.