Hassel Smith

Hassel Smith (24 April 1915 – 2 January 2007) was an American artist and teacher. He is considered to have been one of the USA's foremost West Coast artists, emerging in the decade after World War II as an innovative, potent, witty and often challenging exponent of Abstract Expressionism. He was a "generous and gregarious" teacher of great influence at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco and subsequently at the University of California and in later years at the Royal West of England Academy Art Schools in Bristol, England. His work was exhibited widely, particularly in California, and he is represented in prominent museums and found in private collections around the world. A strongly left-leaning iconoclast, well-known for a confrontational nature and as a drinker, he was at the same time loving, caring and shy. Art critics revered him as a "West Coast underground legend".

Early life and education

Hassel Wendell Smith Jr. was born on 24 April 1915 in Sturgis, Michigan to Hassel Wendell Smith Sr., a sales and advertising executive for the Kirsch-Rod drapery hardware company, and Helen Adams Smith, both college graduates.

Student at Northwestern University

Smith went to 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. There he studied under the artists Otis Oldfield, Spencer Macky, and Lee Randolph, and crucially he was also permitted to join the "elite" working outdoors during both day and night in San Francisco and in the Bay Area. He and other artists with whom he was associated continued to attend night schools both at the CSFA and WPA art classes but they had few prospects of selling their paintings. Smith shared a "magnificent" Along with other San Francisco painters Smith showed and sold some of his work at the Iron Pot Restaurant at 639 Montgomery Street.

Short of money, Smith took paid work with the California State Relief Administration. After an in-service training course of only two weeks he found himself helping as a case worker with derelict and alcoholic men on the so-called Skid Row in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco. Partly as a result of this experience he became active in left-wing politics.

While working in the Tenderloin district, Smith continued to paint and in 1941 he held a group exhibition with Lloyd Wulf at the San Francisco Museum of Art. In the same year Smith won an Abraham Rosenberg Foundation Traveling Fellowship for independent study, worth $750. With this award (worth some $16,000 in 2025), Smith ceased working on skid row and with a fellow artist from the CSFA, Richard Hackett, moved to paint in the Mother lode region in the Sierra Nevada of California. There they stayed mostly in Angel's Camp, Columbia and Mokulumne Hill. "With Richard Hackett," Smith much later recalled, "I painted out of doors very much in the spirit of the great peasant painters, Van Gogh, Cézanne, Pissaro, and in a countryside very like in climate and appearance that of the South of France."

World War II

When the United States entered World War II in December 1941, Smith feared reclassification for military conscription so once again sought employment in socially significant work while keeping his draft board informed of his activity. The art historian Peter Selz has described him as "an intrepid member". In Arvin, too, Smith met June Dorothy Myers, a Home Management Supervisor for the migrant labour program, and they married in Pasadena, California in September 1942. Myers joined Smith as a member of the CPUSA. Soon after Smith's arrival Douglas MacAgy became Director of the School and in a process of revitalisation invited Smith to remain on the staff as one of a distinguished group of instructors in the painting department, teaching drawing. The artists had no electricity in their studios, and the poet and painter Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who took over Smith's studio when he left, describes there being no heat, either, except for a small pot-bellied stove. "It was a marvellous studio," Ferlinghetti wrote, "a big third-floor loft looking out on the Bay."

Also in 1946, during the summer break from the CFSA, Smith joined the artist Charles Surendorf in returning to Columbia to set up the Mother Lode Art School. It was not successful and soon petered out because of inadequate housing for students.

In May 1947 Douglas MacAgy's wife, Jermayne MacAgy, curated Smith's first major solo exhibition – Paintings – at the Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. Approximately 25 oil paintings were shown, all of them recent works. One reviewer considered the show "bounce with vitality and good humour", but felt that Smith needed "to develop more fully his unquestioned, warm understanding of the people he paints." Smith's figurative painting, however, was soon to replaced by abstract images.

Since his student years Smith had painted mostly in a "figurative, Post-Impressionist" style 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 the character of San Francisco painting in those years". And as well as teaching at the CSFA, Smith also taught at a lot of the community centres in San Francisco, including the left-wing California Labor School, and at the African–American Booker T. Washington Community Center in San Francisco. Smith and six other artists contributed the lino block illustrations, all of which were available for sale in issues of 100 at $1 each. For his contribution Smith used the name "H Walter Smith".

The summer of 1948 saw Smith's canvases in a group exhibition entitled Elmer Bischoff, David Park, Hassell [sic] Smith at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It had a large impact on Abstract Expressionism painting in and around San Francisco. In Smith's work some maintained they saw "erotic imagery – phallus, breasts, and buttocks – in his shapes" though Smith insisted he never intentionally painted such things.

Taking leave of the CSFA later in 1948, Smith moved to Eugene, Oregon where he joined the faculty of the school of architecture and allied arts at the University of Oregon to teach painting and drawing. In November 1948 he staged a solo exhibition of recent paintings in the art school's gallery. Smith, however, found he disliked Oregon and considered the art faculty there to be too complacent, so he was there for only a year and in 1949, following an invitation from Douglas MacAgy, returned to the CSFA. But another San Francisco newspaper critic found the paintings on show to have "communicated a fabulous richness and energy ... what they had to say was at least important and at best profound".

Smith resigned from the CFSA on 25 January 1952. There has always been speculation about the exact cause of his departure. He had joined the Communist Party USA when working for the Farm Security Administration during World War II and was also well-known for a confrontational nature. When Douglas MacAgy resigned from the CSFA in the spring of 1950 Ernest Mundt became Director in his place later that year. 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 ("It was a question of 'you can't fire me, I quit'," recalled Smith 26 years later. Mundt later argued that "Hassel represented the kind of influence I appreciated least. He represented the least attractive side of the [Clifford] Still mystique." He also taught at Mission Community Centre in Capp Street, San Francisco, and informally at his studio in the Audiffred Building. At first, he had nowhere appropriate to paint, so while he worked the orchard he built himself a studio from redwood. He then started painting again and the orchard work was contracted out. Smith later recorded that in Sebastopol he started to use what he called "curious decorators' colors for painting walls that have funny names. I remember that I started making some paintings with something known as 'Desert Sand'."

Smith's work began to be increasingly noticed. Sales improved and there were more exhibitions. In May 1955, along with 24 of his San Francisco students, and members of the CSFA faculty, he was part of the significant Action: Paintings, Collages, Lithographs; Contemporary Music of the West Coast, what Smith himself described as a "famous"

1957 saw the publication of On the Road, a semi-autobiographical novel by Jack Kerouac which sensationalised the art community of San Francisco. Smith never forgave Kerouac for using his given name (along with that of Elmer Bischoff) as the pseudonym "Elmer Hassel" for the real-life drug addict, thief and street hustler, Herbert Huncke.

Smith began to have regular showings at the "smart" new Dilexi Gallery in San Francisco from 1957 until the gallery's closure in 1969 and from 1958 to be exhibited in Los Angeles at the Ferus Gallery on La Cienega Boulevard to "immediate critical success". Smith's shows at Ferus ensured his singular influence over the painters of Southern California, and on artists along the entire West Coast of the United States. He became even more well known when he showed further afield in a sell-out exhibition at The New Arts gallery in Houston, Texas in 1959. A year later, in 1959, he married Donna Raffety Harrington, aged 27 and of Berkeley, California. She was a divorced mother of two children. She and her boys had come with to live with Smith and his son in Sebastopol. and invited him to show in a solo exhibition in April 1960 at the Gimpel Fils gallery, then in South Molton Street in London, England. This was Smith's first exhibition outside the United States. He was welcomed by the art critic of The Sunday Times of London as "an American of fine quality", and by The Times of London as "extremely accomplished". An untitled painting in this show was acquired for the Tate Gallery in London through the American Friends of the Tate.

After success in London and with the help of Gimpel, Smith was introduced to New York in February and March 1961 at the André Emmerich Gallery on East 64th Street, Manhattan. This was Smith's first show on the US East Coast and art critics nationally began to take a significant interest. "A savagery the more remarkable for being concocted with brilliance", maintained the New York Herald Tribune, and The New York Times declared it was "a pleasure to regard the deftness and dash of this virtuoso artist." Work from this exhibition sold steadily. It met with considerable approval by critics. "Hassel Smith's exuberance is contagious and his skill and authority are evident," wrote Henry J Seldis in The Los Angeles Times. A new solo exhibition by Smith was staged later in 1961 at The New Arts in Houston.

Smith held a further exhibition of paintings at the Emmerich gallery in New York in March 1962 but the same New York Times critic who had discovered pleasure in Smith's show the year before found failings in the power of his paintings over the imagination. "Perhaps failure lies in the extreme incoherence of his compositions", wrote Stuart Preston.

Year in England

In 1962 Charles Gimpel suggested that Smith take his family – his wife Donna and now four sons – to England for a year and paint there. Gimpel promised that his gallery would exhibit his completed English canvasses. The Smiths agreed to the idea and left Sebastopol in the early summer of 1962. They settled for a year in the small village and fishing port of Mousehole in Cornwall in the far south west of England, the location chosen mainly because of its name. "We saw an advertisement for a house in this place called Mousehole, and we thought, 'My God! We've got to go there.'" and in March and April 1963 Gimpel Fils staged a second solo exhibition in London, this time showing work done in the previous few months in Cornwall. A few of Smith's new figurative works were featured. The art critic of The Times of London described the new paintings as "a striking combination of toughness and elegance", but The Observer'''s critic noted that in his view "A few forays into subject-painting show that the way back from abstraction is hard and long".

University of California, Berkeley and Los Angeles

At the end of summer 1963 the Smith family returned to California and the apple orchard at Sebastopol, and An Exhibition of Painting Done in Cornwall During a Year's Stay in England 1962–1963 appeared at the André Emmerich Gallery in New York.

Seeking teaching work, in September 1963 Smith joined the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley as a Lecturer in the Art Department. This was a non-tenure-track role, inevitable even in the mid-1960s for a former member of the Communist Party USA. He was regarded as a guest, which limited his job stability and opportunities. Nonetheless he stayed for the maximum two academic years, leaving in June 1965. but praised by the San Francisco Chronicle's critic, Alfred Frankenstein, as "an event of special interest and importance". Other solo exhibitions appeared in 1964 at the Worth Ryder Memorial Gallery in the University of California, Berkeley, where Smith showed figurative paintings carried out from 1960 to 1964, the David Stuart Gallery in Los Angeles (the first of four over the next ten years and welcomed as "outstanding" by the Los Angeles Times ), and the University of Minnesota Art Gallery in Minneapolis. Smith yet again had a solo exhibition at the Dilexi Gallery, featuring figurative work.

Despite spending most of his professional career to this point amid the artists of Northern California, Smith in the mid-sixties found himself becoming more attracted to the artistic community associated with the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles. He would return to California occasionally for guest teaching posts, major retrospective exhibitions, and some work in temporary studios but otherwise he remained in England until his death, thirty years later. He finally retired from teaching in 1981. Most of Smith's work was still figurative at the time he moved to England and remained so for some years but from about 1970 he began to embrace abstraction again and in a formalised style. and then often at the Gallery Paula Anglim in San Francisco from 1977 to 1987. He had solo exhibitions at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in 1968, the Tortue Gallery in Los Angeles (1980), the San Jose Museum of Art (1983), the John Berggruen Gallery in San Francisco (1985), and the Blum Helman Gallery, Santa Monica (1987).

By 1987 the precision of the measured paintings had progressed into the beginnings of urgent gesturalism. Smith found a new freedom. As one obituarist recalled: "the formality was abandoned, the palate widened, and the brush regained a flighty supremacy as Smith recaptured his wit and vividness". Hassel Smith: Selected Works, 1945–1981 appeared at the Oakland Museum in 1981. Again, critics balked at the measured paintings on show. " ... the paintings look bland," mourned The Berkeley Gazette but another critic found in the later paintings "very real elegance and balance and intelligence". There were 34 images on show. 1988 saw Hassel Smith: Selected Works, 1948–1963 at the Wiegand Art Gallery at the College of Notre Dame, Belmont and Hassel Smith: Measured and Figurative Paintings, 1964–1985 at the Monterey Museum of Art.

Solo exhibitions of Smith's latest work continued to appear in California as he moved into his mid-seventies and onwards towards his eighties: Gallery 44, Oakland (1988), the Iannetti Lanzone Gallery, San Francisco (1988), the Natsoulas-Novelozo Gallery and the John Natsoulas Gallery, Davis (1989 and 1991), Robert Aichele Fine Arts, San Francisco (1995), and the Mendenhall Gallery, Pasadena (1997).

Smith ceased painting and drawing in 1998, at the age of 83.

A retrospective was mounted in 2002-3, four years before Smith's death. Hassel Smith: 55 Years of Painting appeared at the Sonoma County Museum, Santa Rosa, California and later at the Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, California.

Smith died in Sutton Veny, Wiltshire, England on 2 January 2007.

Hassel and Donna Smith's son is Bruce Smith, the post-punk, alternative rock musician who was a drummer for The Pop Group, The Slits , the New Age Steppers and Public Image Ltd. He was formerly married to the Swedish singer Neneh Cherry.

A charitable organisation, the Hassel Smith Foundation, was set up in England in 2024 with the aim of establishing and maintaining a major collection of Smith's work 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.

Honours

In 1968 Smith received an award worth $5,000 from the National Endowment for the Arts, based in Washington DC, "For Distinguished Service to American Art".

In 1990 the Peter & Madeleine Martin Foundation for the Creative Arts presented their first "Distinguished Career Award", worth $20,000, to Smith, celebrating his "magnificent, intelligent, witty, and lyrical paintings and drawings", and his "brilliant and dynamic" career as a teacher.

In September 1991 the Art Commission of the City & County of San Francisco presented Smith with its Award of Honour for "Outstanding Achievement in Painting".

Also in 1991, the San Francisco Art Institute, formerly the California School of Fine Arts, conferred upon Smith the degree of "Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts".

Selected exhibitions, 1941–2003

1941 Paintings by Lloyd Wolf and Hassel Smith, San Francisco Museum of Art, San Francisco, California. East & West Gallery, San Francisco, California.

1955 Action: Paintings, Collages, Lithographs, Santa Monica Pier, Santa Monica, California

1958

Ferus Gallery, Los Angeles, California.

1963

Gimpel Fils, London, England. Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco, California. Hassel Smith: Figurative Paintings, Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco, California. Blume Helman Gallery, Santa Monica, California.

1997

John Natsoulas Gallery, Davis, California. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Art Institution, Washington, DC Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, California Oakland Museum of California, Oakland, California Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, Arizona, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, California San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, California Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC Tate, London, England Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City