• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

FREDERICK HAMMERSLEY BY THE BOOK A traveling exhibition about Frederick Hammersley’s work on and off the canvas spends the summer at the New Mexico Museum of Art. By James Glisson FTER NEARLY TWENTY years in Los Angeles, and to establish a basic color scheme, which he returned to Frederick Hammersley (1919–2009) moved to later as he mixed and applied paint. Although he still had to AAlbuquerque in 1968 after accepting a teaching posi- make choices as he executed the paintings, the studies in the tion at the University of New Mexico. By his own account, the Notebooks, like a set of instructions, largely guided him. By move to New Mexico was the best decision he ever made. The figuring out the big decisions before he began the paintings, change of location did him good, and he soon embarked on Hammersley could sit down and focus on applying the paint what would be his most productive decade, the 1970s. with a palette knife to achieve his fantastically crisp edges, Frederick Hammersley: To Paint without Thinking is the first which he did by hand without the aid of masking tape. With exhibition to take advantage of a trove of archival materials, the “geometrics,” as he called these paintings, he could “paint including notebooks, sketchbooks, and voluminous lists, without thinking” because the thinking, so to speak, had been to reconsider his lifelong interest in systems and rules for done in the Notebooks. The question of what to paint was creating his art. While organized by The Huntington Library, settled, and he had to worry only about the how. Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens in California, the When I first saw the Hammersley archival material at the exhibition’s homecoming will be at the New Mexico Museum Getty in January 2014, I immediately wanted to organize an of Art (co-curated by Merry Scully) when it opens on May exhibition around it. On that afternoon I looked, in a rush, 26, 2018, in the state which was Hammersley’s home for fifty through hundreds of small lithographs, examined dozens of years. The following article is a condensed and revised version color swatches, leafed through the artist’s Notebooks, and of the introduction to the exhibition catalog I edited, Frederick passed my eyes over his sheets of titles. The sheer quantity Hammersley: To Paint without Thinking (The Huntington, 2017), of materials and the evident care the artist had lavished on which accompanies the exhibition and is available for purchase creating and preserving them impressed on me that they at the Museum of Art’s bookstore. were neither mere records nor material ancillary to his paint- Frederick Hammersley is best known for his geometric ings. This exhibition is the first to highlight the archival “hard edge” paintings. Their elegant simplicity, however, is the trove Hammersley left in his home/studio at the time of his result of a rigorous process of refinement, worked out in a set death, and to argue from its abundant evidence that the of sketchbooks and other archival materials now at the Getty artist was profoundly concerned with the process by which Research Institute. The Notebooks, as Hammersley desig- nated them, reveal him running through possibilities until he happened upon the solution. The page where he tests out Opposite: Frederick Hammersley, studies for Adam & Eve, #2, 1970 and options for the composition of Adam & Eve shows that he used Seedling, #4, 1967. Page 25 of Composition Book. Sketchbook with graphite 7 the Notebooks to resolve the precise geometric composition and colored pencil, 10 ⁄8 × 8 ¼ in. Getty Research Institute. 56 El Palacio FREDERICK HAMMERSLEY El Palacio 57 FREDERICK HAMMERSLEY Frederick Hammersley, Adam & Eve, #2, 1970. Oil on linen on Masonite, 44 × 44 in. Collection Palm Springs Art Museum. Gift of L. J. Cella and museum purchase with funds derived from deaccession funds. 58 El Palacio FREDERICK HAMMERSLEY he created artworks—the technical elements he used (canvas, of the paints needed to suggest the fall of a shadow or to articu- paints, and varnishes) and the decision-making—all the late the line of a neck. He narrowed his options, set down choices that, little by little, bring an artwork into the world. constraints, and then, according to the rules of his game, so to After a stint at Idaho State University in Pocatello, in the late speak, got on with art-making. He did not stop thinking but 1930s, Hammersley moved to Los Angeles, where he studied at rather limited what he had to think about and thought about the Chouinard Art Institute. He then served in the U.S. Army it in a different way. This breakthrough moment reverberated during World War II, stationed first in England and later in throughout his career. Paris and Frankfurt. He returned to Los Angeles, where he Hammersley’s account, like any story of epiphany, elicits reenrolled at Chouinard in 1946 before going on to Jepson skepticism. He used grids to organize his compositions before Art Institute, studying and teaching there from 1947 to 1951. his First hunch painting. In 1948, in a series of paintings, After nearly a decade of art school and the time he spent in Hammersley used a step-by-step process to abstract a still Europe imbibing the Western artistic canon and meeting such life. Hammersley also used a grid format in making a set modern masters as Constantin Brancusi and Pablo Picasso, whose studios he visited, he was ready to end his long artistic apprenticeship. That proved difficult, however. Having completed a traditional course of study and having learned to fulfill the needs of the clients who commissioned him to do graphic design, he found the freedom of noncommercial work inhib- iting rather than liberating. He was lost: “…I didn’t know what the hell to do, so I did a lot of self portraits.” As the artist recounted, he broke through this impasse with his First hunch painting on September 15, 1950. He had begun the work assuming he would produce yet another self-portrait, but something else happened. “I thought about the last element [of a self-portrait]—the eye, which in fact dictates the position of the head that supports it. I thought it would be interesting if instead, I painted that square entirely blue.” From there, he painted from square to square, choosing colors “just by feeling,” by hunch. He filled in the grid, and something clicked: “I said, ‘Boy if I can paint without thinking, that’s for me.’” Pick a color, fill in a square, repeat. This meant making fewer choices than were required to reproduce the complex geometry of a Frederick Hammersley, First hunch painting, September 15, 1950. Oil on canvas, 12 × 9 ½ in. nose or hairline, and much less mixing (unstretched). Getty Research Institute. El Palacio 59 FREDERICK HAMMERSLEY of lithographs beginning in 1949. This exhibition opens with forty-five litho- graphs chosen from hundreds that utilize a grid format. What Hammersley called his Painting Books and Notebooks are key parts of this exhibition. In the late 1950s, he began keeping the Painting Books, which are essentially illustrated inventories of each step he took when he produced a painting, from stretching the canvas to applying the varnish coat at the end. These inventories, which specify the formulas the artist used for the mixtures of ground, paint, and varnish, are a boon to the co-curator of this exhibition, Alan Phenix, a scientist at the Getty Conservation Institute, who examines the intricacies of the painting process as well as Hammersley’s fastid- ious attention to his materials. In the Notebooks, he tweaked compositions for his geometric paintings in a two-step process. First, he tried out compositions, generally with color pencil, although ball- point pen, black electrical tape, and oil paint appear, too. Then, often in oil, he enlarged those he found satisfactory in “composition books.” Finally, from those oil-on-paper studies, he chose composi- tions to enlarge further on canvas. From the mid-1960s to 1996, when he stopped Above: Frederick Hammersley, Entry for Couplet #15, 1965 (1968). Painting Book #2, Spiral-bound making geometrics, these studies were a stenographer's notebook with pen, graphite, and colored pencil. 9 ¼ × 6 in. Getty Research Institute. wellspring, and the tinkering and refine- Opposite: Frederick Hammersley, TEA TALK & NINE, #64, 1969. From one incomplete set of the series ments in them bring to light the labor of 72. Computer-generated drawing on paper, 11 × 15 in. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and hidden by the serene finished canvases. Botanical Gardens. Gift of the Frederick Hammersley Foundation, 2015 (10.32.68). In 1968, when Hammersley moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, he seized the opportunity to learn the computer program ART 1 and made the province of highly trained scientists at universities and what he dubbed “computer drawings.” Though hardly user- government research facilities. Although Hammersley’s excur- friendly by today’s standards, the program was among the sion into computer art did not change the look of his geometric first designed for visual artists without coding skills. In the paintings, his documentation of their production became far late 1960s, when Richard Williams, the UNM faculty engineer more complete. Indeed, starting in the 1970s, the Painting who invented ART 1 in collaboration with Katherine Nash, Books break down a painting’s creation into a series of steps, explained that the program “does not require a computer with dated entries for each and details of every application programmer to hold the artist’s hand,” computers were still of paint as well as the paint mixture applied.

Load more

  11

Copy Link