FREDERICK HAMMERSLEY BY THE BOOK A traveling exhibition about Frederick Hammersley’s work on and off the canvas spends the summer at the 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 , 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.

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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 . 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 , 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. A computer

60 El Palacio FREDERICK HAMMERSLEY program is nothing more than a set of instructions, and as thinking.” By this phrase, he did not mean becoming a machine, the artist struggled to master the complex protocols of ART 1, but working within constraints. Like chess, with its inflexible perhaps he began to regard the process of paintings as following rules but vast number of possible games, Hammersley’s art is a set of instructions, like those on the punch cards fed into one of variations and play within boundaries. ■ the IBM mainframe that printed the drawings. As this exhi- bition catalog excerpt suggests, the apparent simplicity of James Glisson is the Bradford and Christine Mishler Associate Curator of Hammersley’s belies a complicated creative process. American Art at The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. His art was not a spontaneous, all-at-once act, but the outcome He and Alan Phenix, a recently retired scientist at the Getty Conservation Institute, of a systematic approach that allowed him to “paint without were the co-curators of the exhibition at the Huntington.

El Palacio 61 FREDERICK HAMMERSLEY In the contemporary period there is but one record: the notebooks of the abstract classicist Frederick Hammersley. For Thompson and Phenix, it’s nothing so banal as a gold mine; rather it’s like finding a particularly talkative unicorn. Leonardo da Vinci wrote in his own note- books that “light and shade [should] blend without strokes and borders but looking like smoke.” There may be no bit of advice that Hammersley would have been less likely to follow than that. Hammersley (1919–2009) did almost precisely the opposite, and his striking geometric abstractions with rich, plenteous color fields and strong visual symmetry became known as West Coast Hard-Edge. There were no smoky borders— just circles, unwavering lines, and, yes, hard edges. A SKETCH IN TIME Hammersley was born in Salt Lake City, and as a teen moved to San Francisco, where he took his first painting Frederick Hammersley’s Notebooks lessons. By the time the war arrived, he had the beginnings and the Conservation of Couplet of a reputation. In 1959, that modest reputation grew immensely when he by Peter BG Shoemaker participated in the traveling Four Abstract Classicists show, which graced museums in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Belfast, HEY ARE WORDS—jaw-dropping, amazing, wondrous—one and London. doesn’t usually hear from science-minded professionals. T After teaching for a number of years at area schools, and with Particularly those who spend their days with Van Goghs and his work slowing and inspiration flagging, Hammersley under- Pollocks and other apex denizens of the art world, for whom, took “the best move [he] ever made” and came to Albuquerque let us be honest, such expressions are mostly passé. And Alan in 1968. There he joined the faculty at the University of New Phenix and Tatyana Thompson—the former a conservation Mexico, and established what would turn out to be a lifelong scientist at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and the latter a relationship with the New Mexico Museum of Art. conservator at her eponymous firm in Santa Monica—aren’t The museum holds a number of Hammersley works, among even talking about a painting. them one titled Couplet, #15, a painting of two half-black, half- Because in the world of painting and painting conserva- white intersecting circles with the area of intersection—and tion there is something even more rare than the work itself: the background overall—a field of blue. Hammersley painted firsthand accounts of what the artist was up to when he or she three versions of this painting: the first in 1965, the second in was making the work. And, should the painter in question be 1968, and the third in 1973. beyond questioning, those thoughts are lost. That is, unless the It’s that second one—held by the museum—that needed painter in question kept detailed records of how and often why to be restored before it joined Frederick Hammersley: To Paint he or she did the things he or she did when creating. without Thinking, first at the Huntington in Los Angeles and now at the Museum of Art in Santa Fe. Above: Frederick Hammersley, Couplet, #15 1965 (1968), oil on canvas, Thompson describes a scuff on the second Couplet, with a 36 × 50 in. Collection of the New Mexico Museum of Art. Gift of Frederick little paint loss in the middle of the painting; bulges and ripples Hammersley, 2008 (2008.24.2). © Frederick Hammersley Foundation. (planar deformation), as well as some vertical cracks that one

62 El Palacio FREDERICK HAMMERSLEY might expect from the painting’s removal from its stretcher COLOR, FINISH, STRUCTURE Firstly, the notebooks reveal nearly 40 years ago, and its subsequent rolled-up storage. that Hammersley almost always used the highest-quality artists Working with the Frederick Hammersley Foundation in oils, like Winsor & Newton, Talens, Grumbacher, and Lefèbvre- Albuquerque, Museum of Art Curatorial Director Merry Scully Foinet. And we know—explicitly in some cases, and generally in obtained funds for its restoration. others — how he mixed those paints to get the effect he was going And that gets us back to those extraordinary notebooks. for. For the first and thirdCouplet s, he recorded the paints and their admixture. For the second, for whatever reason, he didn’t — INFORMATION SYSTEMS From the early- to mid-1950s, at least not in a notebook. Instead, he just jotted down Manganese Hammersley jotted memoranda down here and there, occa- Blue and Cerulean Blue on the frame. sionally adhered to the back of paintings, giving little hints Which would be fine; except those blues, when combined, of what he’d done and in what order. But in 1959 he began create what’s called a metameric pair. And for conservators, to systematize and formalize his recordkeeping—and so the that’s a potential problem: a metameric pair reflects light differ- notebooks were born. ently depending on the angle and the sort of light. This makes He kept three sorts. The first contains sketches wherein inpainting—that is, replacing the paint loss from cracking or he played with various ways to arrange shapes and color; scratching—a matter of tedious trial and error. the second, his efforts to work up—in color—those initial Phenix, who’s working on transcribing all of the notebooks, sketches. It is with the third sort of notebook, those that combined his reading of Hammersley’s entries on Couplet and Hammersley called his Painting Books, that people like Phenix other paintings with spectral analysis to identify the pigments and Thompson find their hearts racing. There are fourPainting and confirm Hammersley’s frame notation. Books, spanning from 1959 to 2008. Secondly, Thompson also had to contend with the use of These notebooks capture almost every creative and artistic varnish on Couplet. Most of Hammersley’s contemporaries—and decision and effort Hammersley undertook for most of his in fact many modern and contemporary artists—don’t bother with geometric paintings. Early entries, like this one from 1963, varnish; they regard it as too finished, too classical. “Knowing were like inventory records: what sort of varnish he used meant that cleaning, and of course the inpainting, went much more smoothly,” Thompson says. approx. 5 ¾ × 5 ¾ rough side Finally, Hammersley was hands-on all the way through the of Masonite, ground: 4 coats production of a painting—from concept to hanging—and that gelvatex, drawing start 11 April included making his own stretcher bars (the wooden supports 1963, painting start 12 april 1963. finish onto which the painting was affixed) and frames. July 1963 Title: Part Two With Couplet, Hammersley records the unusual use of 1-inch collection—Florence Arnold 10 July 68 $45 half-rounds (imagine a wooden dowel, cut lengthwise) at the edges of these. “We could have maybe figured it out based on By the late 1960s, Hammersley was recording paint types deformation of the canvas,” Thompson suggests, noting some and brands, mixing ratios, the number of times a canvas was really obvious bulges. But Hammersley’s description made that stretched, what sorts of canvas he was using, types of glue, deduction unnecessary. number of coats, as well as recording experimental results in Thompson made a mock-up of the stretcher bars and then found technique and color mixing. But why? a firm that could do the necessary custom work. When she put it “I don’t know,” Phenix says, “whether Hammersley was all together, it fit, Thompson says, “like a glove.” particularly interested in letting conservators in on what he was Phenix notes that the soft edge of the canvas hardens the edges doing, but it’s very clear that he was concerned with his legacy.” of the composition itself—which of course was the point. “The And it is for conservators that the notebooks are the most useful. difference it makes in how you see the painting,” Phenix says, “is Conservation in the case of this sort of damage is straight- extraordinary.” n forward, but there are inevitable obstacles. And that’s where Hammersley’s hypergraphia and those notebooks dance into Peter BG Shoemaker is Tbilisi-based writer and frequent contributor to the spotlight. El Palacio on conservation matters

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THE SCIENCE BEHIND FREDERICK HAMMERSLEY’S MODERN ART By Joseph Traugott

MET FREDERICK HAMMERSLEY in the early 1980s. with himself in one section (see first column below drawings We bonded quickly around our shared penchant for on page 63) goes “mirror / mirror mirror / on the wall / complete I making bad puns in public, and never apologizing to with our / hand is to you / tootsie roll / square / uptight / yellow those who suffered from them. After making a particularly pages . . . .” obnoxious pun, Hammersley would respond after a long pause, I’ve written about the range of Hammersley’s images, and “Yes . . . okay.” Our friendship lasted until his death in 2009. curated the breadth of his artmaking in Visual Puns and Hard- Puns dominate the titles he chose for many of his works, Edge Poems: Works by Frederick Hammersley (Museum of Fine such as his computer drawing DO YOU Z (a play on the words Art, Museum of New Mexico, 1999), but I never got it quite “Do you see.”). He kept lists of words and phrases that could right, until now. I never understood he was tipping his hat describe the actions of the forms in his art. Often Hammersley to science, not art, with his compulsive activities. Hammer- included small sketches of pieces alongside potential titles to sley fused together three seemingly contradictory aesthetic keep the image in front of him as he freely associated words approaches in his studio: 1) He used science-like controlled and images. When a phrase worked with a specific piece, he experimentation to clarify ideas; 2) He then foiled them with circled it, or underlined others. The freewheeling exchange his freewheeling “hunch” paintings, and 3) He finally empha- sized his Modernist outlooks by enclosing his smaller works with funky frames that feign a lack of sophistication. Perhaps his pseudo-scientific approach jelled in the late 1940s when Hammersley taught himself to make lithographs, no mean feat. He printed an extended series of three-inch square images that explored the nature of modernist compo- sitional ideas he discovered while a soldier in Europe at the end of World War II. Hammersley’s notes foil the freewheeling title pages that act like free verse. But the compulsion in his written notes

Left: Frederick Hammersley, Open, #3, 1950. Lithograph in artist-made frame, 3 × 3 in. (frame: 8 × 8 in.), Frederick Hammersley Foundation. One of the artist’s series of late-1940s 3-inch lithographs based on tic-tac-toe squares. Above: Hammersley with his composition notebook of small oil paintings in 2004. Note that the oil from the painting on the previous page bled through to the back of the sheet. A classic Hammersley organic painting hangs on the wall behind him. Courtesy of Frederick Hammersley Foundation.

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Frederick Hammersley, Sheet of titles, 1970s. Ink and pencil on letter-size paper, 11 × 8 ½ in., Getty Research Institute.

El Palacio 65 Left: Frederick Hammersley, Entry for Four awhile, #1, 1974. Painting Book #2, Spiral-bound stenographer's notebook with pen and marker, 9 ¼ × 6 in. Getty Research Institute. Below: Frederick Hammersley, Board & room, #7, 1986. Oil and linen on Masonite in artist-made frame, 10 × 14 in. Private collection.

allowed him to repeat materials and images, and reject events that were unsatisfactory, just like a scientist. His note from a stenographer’s pad makes this point as he described Four awhile, a large square oil painting from 1974 with a punny title. After his meticulous production of experimental lithographs during the late 1940s, Hammersley moved in the opposite direction: his hunch drawings and paintings. With these works, he would draw a line or paint a shape in color, and then wait for a hunch before making the next move. In some ways Hammersley’s hunch paintings were like playing chess with himself. Sometime his hunch worked well, and other times the next element had to correct a previous mistake. Hammersley continuously flipped between science and his intuition, both based on years of visual thinking: small scientific lithographs, large hunch paintings, large geometric works noted for their pristine “hard edges,” organic paintings that moved from hunch to hunch, a series of computer drawings created through punch cards directing a mainframe computer, and then back to the hunches with a long series of small organic works. You may have already noted Hammersley’s unusual frames; they look like something an outsider artist might make from found objects. Aesthetically, these handmade frames were diametrically opposed to his sophisticated imagery. But this unique synthesis made his jewel- like small prints, paintings, and photographs sing in a harmony that is difficult to realize. An incredible achievement. Or as Hammersley would say, “Yes, okay. . . . Marrrvelous.” ■

Joseph Traugott is the former curator of twentieth-century art at New Mexico Museum of Art, and a member of the Frederick Hammersley Foundation board of directors.

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