Frederick Hammersley
American, 1919-2009

In the pink, 1964
Oil on panel, artist made frame
26 7/8 X 23 7/8"

Gift of Frederick Hammersley Foundation

COMMENTS

Frederick Hammersley’s paintings are abstract, richly colored and “classical,” to use the term applied to them in 1959; but they do not sit silently on the wall. The paintings possess an insistent presence and a quietly resolute determination that rewards extended looking. They do not represent anything in the traditional sense; rather they suggest a rich range of emotional states, patterns of thought, and a unique engagement with painting. Their seemingly clear and simple compositions belie their pictorial richness. An understanding of the maker of these abstractions provides some insight into their plenitude. ...

Hammersley’s abstractions came out of drawing. A fascination with the essentials of line and form had captivated Hammersley during his last two years at Jepson, where he used “a delicious stone” to create intimate lithographic prints based on a grid structure of 4 by 4 squares. He introduced elements one by one, altering line, form, color, etc. to discover how each would react to the other. “I learned a lot about painting doing these things.” For Hammersley, shape was the most important of seven elements that made up a painting — “The good ones are good because the structure is clear” — the others were line, value, form, pattern, color and texture. He liked to refer to these elements as “actors.” Indeed, he gave several of these lithographs titles such as Act 3 and Act 2, stage 2. In the company of these actors, Hammersley embraced and celebrated his role as director. ...

After leaving Jepson in 1950, he found himself at an impasse: “I didn’t know what the hell to do, so I did a lot of self-portraits, and that’s where I bumped into hunch painting by accident, by seeing the shape.” Indeed, throughout his life, Hammersley maintained the practice of drawing, and repeatedly drew from the model, after Old Masters, as well as creating numerous self-portraits. These works have been rarely exhibited, but were vital to the development of his art; the practice of drawing became his salvation and a source of inspiration during creatively fallow times. The hunch paintings began in 1953: “I felt so wonderful doing these things, because there was no restriction…” “The beginning hunch paintings taught me faith. I don’t have to worry about what the teacher says or what you would say. It felt right… A hunch is the beginning of the impulse (…) the act of satisfying it is the faith…” “The whole thing came without me thinking. I said ‘My god, if I can paint without thinking, that’s for me.’” These paintings were a liberation for Hammersley: In their development, he was not beholden to rules, formal structure, or a pre-meditated plan; rather he began with shape and color and from there the paintings grew, each element inspiring the one that followed.

The hunch paintings drew the attention of critic and curator Jules Langsner, who included him in the now famous exhibition Four Abstract Classicists that debuted at the San Francisco Museum of Art, and was seen at the Los Angeles County Museum before traveling to London and Belfast. Hammersley’s paintings were exhibited alongside those of his (then) more famous peers: Karl Benjamin, Lorser Feitelson and John McLaughlin. While the exhibition garnered little attention at the time, it has since been recognized as the exhibition that put West Coast abstraction on the map, offering a bold alternative to the East Coast Abstract Expressionists, and paved the way for the “cool” art of Larry Bell, John
McCracken, Helen Pashgian and others.

Following on from his intuitive hunches, Hammersley changed the conversation, and in 1959 began his first geometric paintings. “I would see an idea or a corner of an idea, and I’d come home and think out loud in a book… Sometimes I can make another idea that that first idea breeds. It produces this child. And that child has some brothers and sisters, and two or three of those sisters I could use.” Hammersley applied paint to canvas with a palette knife, and created the hard-edge line freehand without the use of tape. The geometrics were planned, carefully thought out, “right-brain thinking” paintings. He used as few as two colors in these works, and never more than four. Pigments were dense, opaque, flat and resolute; geometric forms include the circle, square, oblong and diagonal. ... sides of the canvas adds further dimension.

The 1960s was a decade of change for Hammersley, both in his work and in his life. In 1964, “something happened here where the hard-edge painting stopped. I don’t remember why or how… I did organic paintings in 1964, maybe thirty or forty of them, one a day.” Following this intense year of organic activity, the geometrics reemerged. Based on the grid format that he had developed from his 1949-50 lithographs, “they were fatter and stronger and bigger.”...

Approaching his eighth decade, Hammersley turned exclusively to the intimate “loving” organics. His painting slowed over the years that followed: He was caught up in the daily rituals of life and enjoying increased attention from museum and gallery exhibitions. In his final years, Hammersley’s visual world may have focused increasingly on the one he had created in the intimacy of his own home, but his acuity remained strong. The partially complete paintings he left behind reveal a series of rich, unfinished conversations.

- Excerpted from Elizabeth East, "Frederick Hammersley Catalog, L.A. Louver, Venice, CA, February, 2012


SBMA CURATORIAL LABELS

Frederick Hammersley, along with Karl Benjamin, Lorser Feitelson, and John McLaughlin, was included in the landmark exhibition Four Abstract Classicists in 1959 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Curator Jules Langsner brought the four artists together to assert a distinctively Southern Californian style of abstraction. The cool flatness of their work, dubbed “hard-edge,” offered a counterpoint to the emotive gestures of New York Abstract Expressionism. Langsner commented, “Frederick Hammersley presents a poetic attitude towards shapes as growing things.”

In 1965, Frederick Hammersley was the focus of a solo exhibition at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art comprised of forty-one paintings, including Left Field #8, which the artist gave to the Museum at the exhibition’s close. In the pink was also included in this exhibition and was recently donated to the Museum by the late artist’s foundation.

- Contemporary to Modern, 2014