Hassel Smith

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Hassel Smith
Hassel Smith in his Sebastopol studio (Northern California), c. 1964 (Photograph by Bob Kalbaugh)
Born	Hassell Wendell Smith Jr. (1915-04-24)April 24, 1915 Sturgis, Michigan, United States
Died	January 2, 2007(2007-01-02) (aged 91) Wiltshire, England
Alma mater	California School of Fine Arts Northwestern University
Movement	Abstract expressionism, Figurative painting
Spouse(s)	June Myers (m. 1942–1958, her death), Donna Raffety Harrington (m. 1959–2007, his death)
Children	Bruce Smith Mark Harrington (stepson)

Hassel Smith (born Hassell Wendell Smith Jr.; April 24, 1915 – January 2, 2007) was an American painter.

Hassel Smith was born in 1915 in Sturgis, Michigan to Hassel Wendell Smith Sr, a sales manager for the Kirsch drapery hardware company, and later working in advertising, and Helen Adams Smith, both college graduates.^[1] During childhood, because of his mother’s tuberculosis and the consequent search for a suitable climate for her health, Smith’s family moved home regularly. From Michigan they went to Denver, Colorado, and then Los Angeles, San Mateo and Mill Valley in California before returning to Michigan and then going back to San Mateo, where Smith attended San Mateo High School. He became an Eagle Scout at 15.^[2]

Smith attended Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, from 1932. He was initially a Chemistry major but was defeated in learning German, then a requirement for a science career. He changed to Art History and English Literature, the art course requiring the practise as well as the study of art. He later claimed that at this point began "my actual art career, my love affair with painting".^[2] In 1936 Smith graduated B.S. cum laude with majors in History of Art and English literature.

While in Chicago, Smith was excited by the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo under Léonide Massine on their visit to the city. "I had never seen anything like it," wrote Smith later, "and became a balletomane, missing no performances, entranced by the dancing, the music ... the marvellous costumes and scenery."^[2] More crucially, during 1932-34 he was exposed to paintings and sculptures exhibited at the World's Fair in Chicago. "The effect upon me of this experience was instantaneous and everlasting, a revelation", he wrote. "Lautrec, van Gogh, Gauguin, Seurat, Monet, Cézanne ... Miró, Brâncuşi, Léger, Duchamp, Matisse, Picasso, Mondrian, Dalí ... I was wowed by them all."^[2] His experiences in Chicago were turning points in his development.

In 1936 Smith won a scholarship to Princeton University for graduate studies in the history of art but after the summer that year spent taking courses at the California School of Fine Art (now San Francisco Art Institute) he decided to continue studying there despite finding it to be, in his words, "a debutante kind of place ... just crawling with socialites."^[3] There he studied under the artists Otis Oldfield, Spencer Macky, and Lee Randolph,^[4] and crucially he was also permitted to join the "elite"^[2] painting and drawing class of his mentor, Maurice Sterne, who exerted a considerable influence on him.^[5] Smith stated in 1987 in a brief memoir: "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."^[2] Smith maintained that Sterne "so aroused my interest in painting that I dropped my plans for study in history in favor of a professional career in painting."^[2]

On leaving the School of Fine Arts in the late 1930s Smith began to paint professionally, working outdoors in San Francisco and in the Bay Area, but had few prospects of selling his paintings. Along with other San Francisco painters he showed and sold some of his work at the Iron Pot restaurant at 639 Montgomery Street.^[6] Short of money he took paid work with the California State Relief Administration working with derelict and alcoholic men on skid row in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco.^[2] He described the task as "shattering"^[7] and became active in left-wing politics. In 1941 he held a group exhibition with Lloyd Wolf at the San Francisco Museum of Art^[8] and the same year he obtained an Abraham Rosenberg Foundation Traveling Fellowship for independent study, and moved to the Mother Lode region in the Sierra Nevada of California. His work there until the end of 1942 was mostly made en plein air (outdoors) painting landscapes,^[5] though here he also did his first figurative painting.^[9]

In October 1940 during peacetime military conscription Smith registered as a conscientious objector but when the United States joined World War II Smith's physical examination classified him as 4-F and deemed him not acceptable for military service so his conscientious objection petition was not ruled upon.^[1][10] Fearing reclassification he worked alternative service as a Farm Security Administration (FSA) camp supervisor at the Arvin Migratory Labor Camp (made famous as "Weedpatch Camp" in the John Steinbeck novel The Grapes of Wrath) and other camps nearby in the Central Valley of California.^[6] The camps had been set up as government rescue centres for distressed migrant workers. There, while not on duty, he made powerful, rapid, documentary portraits of the rural poor picking cotton and other crops.^[7] Smith's experiences in Arvin so altered his views on American society that he joined the Communist Party.^[11] In Arvin, too, he met June Dorothy Myers, a social worker for the migrant labour program, and they married in September 1942.^[12][13] In 1944 the FSA was phased out and Smith was transferred to the United States Forest Service and assigned as a log scaler at the headwaters of the McKenzie River in Oregon where he worked until the end of the war.^[5] Bruce Nixon in his 1997 essay on Smith observed that the experience of work, in the labor camps, in the forests, and earlier on Skid Row, exerted a great "transformative" impact on Smith whose life up to that time had been shaped by "a secure, entirely sheltered, middle class existence".^[5]

In the summer of 1945, as the war ended, Smith was released from his community service and returned to the Bay Area. Almost immediately, a month after the Japanese surrender, he was given a five-week one man show at the Iron Pot café and simultaneously found a post at the California School of Fine Arts as a substitute instructor in a lithography class.^[9] The School at this time was in a state of transition after years of decline.^[14] Douglas MacAgy had become Director of the School and in a process of revitalisation^[15] invited Smith to remain on the staff, but now as one of a distinguished group of instructors in the painting department. The newly progressive faculty included Clyfford Still, Edward Corbett, David Park, Elmer Bischoff, Jean Varda, Walter Landor, Dorr Bothwell and Ansel Adams, among many other significant artists, filmmakers, photographers and designers.^[5] Mark Rothko and Ad Reinhardt also put in appearances as visiting instructors. Students like Frank Lobdell and Richard Diebenkorn, just returned from the war and benefitting from the G.I. Bill, progressed to membership of the faculty during Smith's time at the School.^[4]

Since his student years Smith had painted mostly in a "figurative, Post-Impressionist" style^[5] but he was deeply influenced by a 1947 exhibition by Clyfford Still at the Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. Smith later said his "conversion" to Abstract Expressionism had been "instantaneous" when he saw Still's work.^[9] He immediately began to develop what the San Francisco critic Thomas Albright described as "violently physical, improvisatory, jazz-related action painting ... rooted in certain aspects of Clyfford Still's abstraction, but ... recast as mercurial, exuberant, sometimes flamboyantly improvisational events".^[9] Amid the hotbed of postwar West Coast talent at the School of Arts, Smith "emerged as one of the leading abstract painters in the San Francisco Bay Area".^[16] The writer Bruce Nixon, in one of his biographical essays on Smith, claimed that the artist's work in the postwar decade revealed "an idiomatic stylist whose energy, insouciance, and lively intelligence very nearly encapsulate[d] the character of San Francisco painting in those years".^[16]

Late in 1947 Smith's son Joseph was born and the small family moved to Eugene, Oregon where Smith taught at the University of Oregon. But he found he disliked the university and found its art faculty to be complacent so he was there for only a year and in 1948, following an invitation from Douglas MacAgy, returned to the CSFA.^[1]

Back in San Francisco, Smith became the first artist to work in a studio in the Audiffred Building (also known as 9 Mission Street) on the corner of The Embarcadero and Mission Street in San Francisco. Smith and fellow artists from the School occupied lofts on the two upper floors of the building which otherwise was a club for homeless sailors. The artists had no electricity on their floors, and the poet and painter Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who took over Smith's studio when he left, describes there being no heat except for a small pot-bellied stove. "It was a marvellous studio," Ferlinghetti wrote, "a big third-floor loft looking out on the Bay."^[17][18]

CSFA records show that Smith's classes at the school had the highest enrolment. The long list of his students incudes names recognisable from their long professional careers, such as Deborah Remington, James Kelly, Roy De Forest, John Hultberg, Ernest Briggs, Lilly Fenichel, and Madeleine Dimond.^[1]

Smith resigned from the CFSA on 25 January 1952.^[19] There has always been speculation about the exact causes of his departure. He had for a long time been a member of the Communist Party USA and was also well-known for a confrontational nature. When Douglas McAgy resigned from the CSFA Ernest Mundt became Director in his place and he was out of sympathy with Smith's strong leftist politics and his style of teaching. He informed Smith that his services were no longer needed.^[1][20] When the School announced its plans to fire Smith, Elmer Bischoff and David Park threatened to resign in protest. Smith then resigned pre-emptively rather than be fired and Bischoff and Park made good on their threat.^[21]

From 1953 until late 1965 Smith lived in an apple orchard outside Sebastopol, Sonoma County in California, 55 miles north of San Francisco. There he painted in a self-built redwood-sided studio. His work from these years, referred to by critic Allan Temko as the "Thunderbolt period", had a significant impact on artists along the entire West Coast of the United States. Smith was one of the few artists, along with Sonia Gechtoff, Jay DeFeo and Bruce Conner, then based in northern California, to be exhibited in Los Angeles by Irving Blum and Walter Hopps at the Ferus Gallery during the late fifties and early sixties. Smith's shows at Ferus ensured his singular influence on southern California painters. His paintings were also shown in San Francisco, New York, London and Milan, and were acquired widely for both private and public collections.

June Myers Smith died of cancer at the age of 40 in August 1958.^[22] Smith subsequently married Donna Raffety Harrington in 1959 (their son Bruce was born in 1960 - adding to Donna's sons Mark and Stephan, and Hassel and June's son Joseph). In 1962–1963 Smith moved for one year with his family to Mousehole in Cornwall, England, working in a studio on the quays at Newlyn.

During 1963-65 Smith taught part-time at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1965 he moved his family to Los Angeles, teaching at the University of California, Los Angeles. He had contact with several southern California artists, most notably the painter John Altoon.

Smith moved permanently to England in 1966, accepting a tenured teaching position at the Royal West of England Academy Art Schools in Bristol (later the West of England College of Art, now part of the Department of Creative Industries, University of the West of England).

Having returned to representational painting in 1964, Smith began the series of hard-edged "measured paintings" in 1970, which continued into the late eighties. He returned as guest professor to the West Coast periodically during the seventies, at UC Davis and SFAI. Major retrospectives followed at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1975, and at Oakland Museum in 1981.

Smith retired from teaching in 1980 and moved to an eighteenth-century rectory at Rode, north Somerset. The following seventeen years were a prolific period with output in painting, drawing and printmaking. The final decade of work saw two significant stylistic shifts characterized by aspects of gestural abstraction.

Illness forced suspension of work in late 1997. Hassel Smith died nine years later on January 2, 2007, in Wiltshire, England. Smith’s widow, Donna Raffety Smith, a family therapist, died in August 2024.^[23]

A British charitable organisation, the Hassel Smith Foundation, was set up in 2024 with the aim of establishing and maintaining a major collection of Smith’s work in order to exhibit it in a wide range of galleries, museums and public collections, and to enable access to digital images and original work for research and educational purposes.^[24]

Smith’s son Bruce Smith is a prolific musician, playing with a number of bands who made a mark on the British post punk music scene.^[25]

Hassel Smith exhibited extensively on both coasts of the US, and in western Europe, from the late 1930s onwards. His first noted solo exhibition was curated by Jermayne MacAgy^[26] at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco, in 1947.

Group exhibitions with Elmer Bischoff, David Park, Richard Diebenkorn and Ed Corbett followed swiftly, during the late 1940s and early 1950s. Smith was included in the significant 1955 exhibition, Action Painting, at the Merry-Go-Round Building in Santa Monica, California curated by Walter Hopps. Five years later, Smith's first retrospective was curated by Walter Hopps at the Pasadena Art Museum (1961).

Smith joined the Los Angeles-based Ferus Gallery in 1958 and received four solo exhibitions over a five-year period. His work was featured in the Ferus retrospective at Gagosian in New York in 2002. Smith had regular exhibitions at the Dilexi Gallery^[27] in San Francisco from the late 1950s until the gallery's closure in 1969. From the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s Smith exhibited at The New Arts in Houston, and at galleries in New York, London and Milan. In 1964 Smith was invited to participate in the Whitney Annual exhibition in New York and received a second retrospective at San Francisco State University. Major retrospectives followed at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) (1975) and the Oakland Museum (1981). Smith's work was included in the pivotal 1996 exhibition, The San Francisco School of Abstract-Expressionism, curated by Susan Landauer, at the SFMOMA.

Some of these paintings either tend to be or are about games, rules of the game and the strategies required to win without cheating. ALL of the paintings are about building, being in or getting out of cages, whether gilded or not. About being in and getting out of a cage while leaving the cage intact - Houdini stuff! The images include painting oneself into the middle of a room, papering over doors and windows, sitting on a limb while sawing it off next to the trunk.^[28] (January 1977)

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."^[29] (1980)

[...] as far as I am 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. (1988)^[30]

• Petra Giloy-Hirtz (ed.), Hassel Smith. Paintings 1937-1997, Munich/London/New York: Prestel Publishing, 2012.
• Exhibition catalogue Hassel Smith, San Francisco: Weinstein Gallery, 2012.
• Kirk Varnedoe (et al.), Ferus, New York: Rizzoli, 2002.
• Susan Landauer, The San Francisco School of Abstract Expressionism, Berkeley/ Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996.
• Laura Whitcomb, DILEXI: a Gallery & Beyond, Los Angeles: Label Curatorial, 2021.

• Official website
• aaa.si.edu