HASSEL SMITH HASSEL SMITH PAINTINGS 1937–1997 Edited by Petra Giloy-Hirtz Paul J. Karlstrom, Susan Landauer (Co-authors) With contributions by Petra Giloy-Hirtz, Robert C. Morgan, Peter Selz, Allan Temko PRESTEL MUNICH – LONDON – NEW YORK Dedicated to the Family of Hassel Smith CONTENTS 6 FOREWORD 8 Paul J. Karlstrom AN ITINERANT LIFE IN MODERN ART 32 Susan Landauer HASSEL SMITH AND THE POLITICS OF STYLE 56 Peter Selz THE FIGURATIVE PAINTINGS OF HASSEL SMITH 62 Robert C. Morgan HASSEL SMITH AND THE STRUCTURE OF ABSTRACT PAINTING 68 Allan Temko HASSEL SMITH: PAINTINGS, 1954–1975 74 Petra Giloy-Hirtz “MORE AND MORE COSMIC FUNK” HASSEL SMITH’S LATE PAINTINGS 85 PLATES DOCUMENTATION 217 CHRONOLOGY 222 LIST OF WORKS 224 EXHIBITIONS 225 COLLECTIONS 226 BIBLIOGRAPHY 230 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS FOREWORD Hassel Smith (1915–2007) was an innovative and widely appreciated West Coast-based artist during the significant early phases in the development of Abstract Expressionism in the United States. Primarily a painter, he was also active in drawing, printmaking, sculpture, assemblage, collage, poetry, and wrote assorted critical texts from the late thirties to the end of 1997. Smith was a highly influential teacher; from the mid-forties to the early fifties he taught at the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute), then considered to be the “center of experimental abstraction,” together with, among others, Clyfford Still, Richard Diebenkorn, and summer visiting professors such as Mark Rothko and Ad Reinhardt. In 1966 Smith moved permanently with his family to England where he taught at the Royal West of England Academy of Art in Bristol. He returned to California on several occasions, exhibiting and teaching—at the campuses of the University of California at Berkeley, Davis, and Los Angeles, and at the San Francisco Art Institute. Smith’s most important solo exhibitions took place on the West Coast, but he is represented in prominent museum and private collections across the United States and Europe. Hassel Smith was known as a “West Coast underground legend,” “a leading free spirit of art,” “one of the most vigorous and imaginative Western pioneers of the modern movement in painting,” mentioned by art critics in the same breath as Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Robert Motherwell. Nevertheless his work has been overlooked in recent decades. Although essays and books devoted to broad surveys of the West Coast art scene after World War II agree that Hassel Smith’s work of the fifties and early sixties was important and influential, the artist’s career has not been represented by a compre- hensive monograph. While there were three retrospective exhibitions during Smith’s lifetime—at the San Francisco Museum of Art in 1975, the Oakland Museum of Art (Oakland Museum of California) in 1981, and the Sonoma County Museum in 2002—a major survey of his artistic output has yet to be mounted. Significantly, the complete arc of Smith’s achievements over a period of more than thirty years (1965 – 97) is hardly known. Despite the artist’s early success and the positive reception to his paintings in London in the early sixties, Smith never fit easily into England’s national scene and his work was often neglected. A limited response was provoked by periodic exhibitions in, chiefly, Northern California during the seventies, eighties, and nineties, but it is clear that he worked in increasing isolation from the time of his 1975 retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Art (SFMOMA). The present monograph offers an overview of the entire lifework of the artist for the first time and compiles a selection of important pieces from all phases of his creative output. In their broad range, the varied texts by six writers, devoted to diverse aspects and periods of the artist’s work, offer a critical appraisal of Hassel Smith’s entire oeuvre, positioning the artist’s achievement within the history of American painting during the second half of the twentieth century. Paul J. Karlstrom, who established the West Coast Archives of American Art for the Smithsonian Insti- tution (from 1973), is a prominent art critic and oral art historian. Susan Landauer, a writer and curator specializing in West Coast American art, has contributed importantly to the reassessment of artistic innovation on the West Coast after World War II. Peter Selz was chief curator at the Museum of Mod- ern Art in New York (MoMA) from the late fifties to the mid-sixties, where he pioneered a legendary series of retrospective exhibitions. He is Professor Emeritus in the History of Art (UCB) and was the first director of the Berkeley Art Museum. Robert C. Morgan is a renowned critic, writer, and professor of art history based in New York City whose publications have focused on contemporary art in North America, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. 6 .|. 7 The text by Allan Temko (1924–2006, awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1990) has been included as a contemporary voice of the seventies and was first published in the exhibition catalogue for Smith’s retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Art in 1975. This monograph has benefited from the dedication and deep engagement of the Estate of Hassel Smith, represented by the artist’s wife Donna Smith and Mark Harrington, his stepson. In their desire to encourage appreciation and understanding of the life work of Hassel Smith, they could have little idea of the challenges that would confront them as they developed plans for a serious publication. Paintings from the latter stages of the artist’s productivity were stored in England and Northern California, but where were the paintings and related works from the earlier years to be found? Several years of archival research and organization lay ahead. The financial and managerial contribution of Dr. Joachim and Dagmar Kaske, representatives of the Christoph and Stephan Kaske Foundation and prominent collectors of the later works of Hassel Smith in Germany, has been essential to the art-historical research, the writing of the essays in this volume, and the creation of a Hassel Smith database. Thanks to a curatorial grant from the Getty Foundation in 2008, the artist’s irreplaceable trove of writings, correspondence, catalogues, articles, rare photo- graphs, and reproductions of works, housed at the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, have been made available for the historical record. Private collectors and museums across the United States have kindly collaborated. The research assistance and expertise of Larissa Spicker have been crucial to the formation of the Hassel Smith database, as well as to the gathering of images reproduced in this book. Hassel Smith’s paintings are assembled here for the first time as a coherent oeuvre. The monograph has evolved as a beautiful and scholarly book with fine reproductions that allow the reader a sense of intimate access to the artist’s work. This accomplishment is thanks to the engage- ment of Prestel Publishing, especially to the enthusiasm and competence of editor in chief Katharina Haderer, editor Anja Paquin, and the production team in Munich. Christian Schmid has created the appealing graphic design of the book. Hassel Smith explored varied and contrasting possibilities in painting. We hope that this publication will invite its readers to discover or to explore afresh the work of this important artist with the advantage of new insight. Hassel Smith’s painting is an art of movement full of extraordinary energy, a painting of exuberant color, masterful brushwork, explosive and vital—evoking the dynamics of rhythm, music, contemplation, and dance. As the critic Roberta Smith wrote in 2002, Hassel Smith’s painting is “contemporary,” fresh, and surprising. It is hoped that this book may serve as inspiration for further research into Smith’s achievement and ultimately a comprehensive retrospective. Petra Giloy-Hirtz Munich, Spring 2012 AN ITINERANT LIFE IN MODERN ART Paul J. Karlstrom Hassel Smith described himself in a 1978 interview as an itinerant: “I have done a lot of traveling back and forth across the United States by every known conveyance except horse.... I think it is a significant … pattern of my life that I have constantly moved, from one place to another. It’s a curious fact that the twelve years my wife and I and our family have spent in Bristol represent the longest period of time that any of us have ever lived in one place. So that gives you an idea of how itinerant we have been.”1 Hassel could not have known it at the time, but his itinerancy was to cease in England—in Bristol and nearby environs. In 1966 Hassel Smith and his second wife, Donna, made the decision to move from Southern California to Bristol to accept a teaching position at the Royal West of England College of Art. The move turned out to be permanent, which to outside observers seemed to represent a conscious career gamble. Smith had an established reputation in the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles; in both cities his work had gallery representation and many admirers. 1 // Hassel Smith, Denver, 1920 His earlier work included the most beautiful and pictorially coherent Abstract Expressionist painting being done anywhere. Despite fairly frequent trips to the Bay Area to visit friends and colleagues, and guest teaching at the University of California at Berkeley and at Davis, and at the San Francisco Art Institute, Smith never returned to the West Coast art world that had formed his ideas and nurtured him professionally. Many believe that his career was all but sacrificed, a harsh judgment but one that seems borne out by the almost visible fading of his former prominence on the Cali- fornia scene.