Hassel Smith
Hassel Smith 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. During childhood, because of his mother’s tuberculosis and the consequent search for a suitable climate for her health, Smith’s family moved home regularly. When Smith was three they moved to Denver, Colorado where they stayed for two or three years, and then to Los Angeles briefly, before San Mateo and then quickly on to Mill Valley in California before returning to Michigan. They stayed in Michigan until 1930, when Smith was fifteen, before going back to San Mateo, where Smith attended San Mateo High School.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. He changed to Art History and English Literature, the art course requiring the practise as well as the study of art. He later claimed that at this point began "my actual art career, my love affair with painting". In 1936 Smith graduated B.S. cum laude with majors in History of Art and English literature.While in Chicago, Smith was excited by the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo under Léonide Massine on their visit to the city. "I had never seen anything like it," wrote Smith later, "and became a balletomane, missing no performances, entranced by the dancing, the music... the marvellous costumes and scenery." More crucially, during 1932-34 he was exposed to paintings and sculptures exhibited at the World's Fair in Chicago. "The effect upon me of this experience was instantaneous and everlasting, a revelation", he wrote. "Lautrec, van Gogh, Gauguin, Seurat, Monet, Cézanne... Miró, Brâncuşi, Léger, Duchamp, Matisse, Picasso, Mondrian, Dalí... I was wowed by them all." His experiences in Chicago were turning points in his development.
Student at the California School of Fine Arts
In 1936 Smith won a scholarship to Princeton University for graduate studies in the history of art but after taking courses that summer at the California School of Fine Arts he decided not to take up his Princeton place but to continue studying at the CSFA despite finding it to be, in his words, "a debutante kind of place... just crawling with socialites." There he studied under the artists Otis Oldfield, Spencer Macky, and Lee Randolph, and crucially he was also permitted to join the "elite" painting and drawing class of his mentor, Maurice Sterne, who exerted a considerable influence on him. Smith stated in 1987 in a brief memoir: "I have no hesitation in saying that to whatever extent my intellect has been engaged in the joys and mysteries of transferring visual observations in three dimensions into meaningful two-dimensional marks and shapes, I owe to Sterne." Smith maintained that Sterne "so aroused my interest in painting that I dropped my plans for study in history in favor of a professional career in painting."Career in painting
Post-graduate activity
On leaving the School of Fine Arts in the late 1930s Smith began to paint professionally, "largely under the spell of the post-Impressionists", 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" studio at 727 Montgomery Street with a fellow artist from Sterne's class who he reckoned to be a "star performer", Jack Wilkinson. The studio had been a well-known location for artists since the late 1800s. 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 and after an in-service training course of only two weeks 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. Coming from his "well-to-do" financial background he found the task "shattering". Partly as a result of this experience he became active in left-wing politics.
In October 1940, in reaction to World War II in Europe, the United States began the first peacetime conscription which required the registration of all men between 21 and 35. Smith's number came up on the first day the draft was instituted. He registered as a conscientious objector but his physical examination classified him as 4-F, deeming him to be unfit for military service, so his conscientious objection petition was not ruled upon.
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, 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. Smith's work there until the end of 1941 was generally made en plein air painting landscapes, though here he also did his first figurative painting. "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. He found a post with the Farm Security Administration and was sent to the Arvin Migratory Labor Camp and other camps nearby in the Central Valley of California. The camps had been set up as government rescue centres for distressed, non-state resident migratory farm workers. There, while not on duty driving all over the region in his Ford Model A, distributing food stamps, he made powerful, rapid, documentary drawn portraits of the rural poor picking cotton and other crops. He later maintained that he had wanted to transmit as accurately as possible the actual conditions he had observed. Richard Cándida Smith in his 1995 study of Californian art, poetry, and politics writes that the people Smith "was employed to help were literally starving to death before his eyes in the richest agricultural region of the United States. He wanted to bring their situation to the attention of the world." The drawings were exhibited in five cities, reprinted in popular journals and newspapers and bought by the San Francisco Museum of Art for its permanent collection.Having already become involved in left-wing politics, Smith's experiences in Arvin so altered his views on American society that he joined the Communist Party USA. 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.
In 1944 the FSA was phased out and Smith was transferred to the United States Forest Service to serve as a firefighter in Oregon but instead was almost immediately reassigned as a log scaler stationed in a small trailer at the head of the McKenzie River where he worked until the end of the war. Bruce Nixon in his 1997 essay on Smith observed that the experience of work in the labor camps, in the forests, and earlier on Skid Row, exerted a great "transformative" impact on Smith whose life up to that time had been shaped by "a secure, entirely sheltered, middle class existence". Smith maintained that "all of those experiences affected me a great deal".
Faculty of the California School of Fine Arts
In the summer of 1945, as the war ended, Smith gave up his community service and returned to the Bay Area. Almost immediately, a month after the Japanese surrender, he was given a five-week solo show at the Iron Pot Restaurant in North Beach where he exhibited some of his typical work of this time, such as semi-Surrealist images of American flags and Native American paraphernalia, and simultaneously found a post at the California School of Fine Arts assisting Ray Bertrand in the lithography workshop. The School at this time was in a state of transition after years of decline. 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 newly progressive faculty included Clyfford Still, Edward Corbett, David Park, Elmer Bischoff, Jean Varda, Walter Landor, Dorr Bothwell and Ansel Adams, among many other significant artists, filmmakers, photographers and designers. Mark Rothko and Ad Reinhardt also put in appearances as visiting instructors in summer courses. Students like Frank Lobdell and Richard Diebenkorn, just returned from the war and benefitting from the G.I. Bill, progressed to membership of the faculty during Smith's time at the School.Smith said in a later interview about the 1945-1952 period at the CSFA that "it certainly was a very remarkable period for all of us... the experience was as much, or even more, a learning experience than a teaching one." Because of World War II and the subsequent G.I. Bill many of the students were the same age as the instructors. "The situation of being an instructor at the school at that time and/or being a student was virtually interchangeable" recalled Smith. "A lot of people got together and learned various things from each other." As well as Lobdell and Diebenkorn, among Smith's students at this time were Deborah Remington, Adelie Landis, James Kelly and his later wife, Sonia Gechtoff, Lilly Fenichel, Roy De Forest, Ernest Briggs, John Hultberg, Julius Wasserstein, Jack Jefferson and Madeleine Dimond. Smith later described the student body as "quite a remarkable company".
In 1946 Smith became the first artist to work in a studio in the historic Audiffred Building on the corner of The Embarcadero and Mission Street in San Francisco. Smith and - largely at his instigation - some fellow artists from the School, together with writers and musicians, occupied lofts both for studios and living quarters on the two upper floors of the building which otherwise was a club for homeless sailors. 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 but in July 1947 he was deeply influenced by an exhibition by Clyfford Still at the Palace of the Legion of Honor. This show of thirteen artworks was organised by Douglas MacAgy's wife and the CSFA faculty were able to view the paintings privately before the exhibition was open to the public. "It had a tremendous effect on me," recalled Smith. He returned several times to view the exhibition repeatedly and he later said his "conversion" to Abstract Expressionism had been "instantaneous" when he saw Still's work. He immediately began to develop what the San Francisco critic Thomas Albright described as "violently physical, improvisatory, jazz-related action painting... rooted in certain aspects of Clyfford Still's abstraction, but... recast as mercurial, exuberant, sometimes flamboyantly improvisational events".
As a result, amid the hotbed of postwar West Coast talent at the School of Arts, Smith "emerged as one of the leading abstract painters in the San Francisco Bay Area". 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".
Smith's move into abstract impressionism caused a division into two groups within the faculty at the CSFA. Some, like Frank Lobdell and Ernest Briggs, were as deeply affected by Still's work as Smith was, whereas others like David Park, Elmer Bischoff, and Richard Diebenkorn, who had previously been abstract impressionist and were moving back into representational figurative painting, were not keen. "There was a good deal of discussion," Smith later remembered, "and some of it quite acrimonious... I think that we didn't mind yelling at each other a bit."
CSFA records show that Smith's classes at the school at this time had the highest enrolment. He taught most of the drawing courses.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.
In 1948 Smith edited The Communist Manifesto in Pictures with an introduction by the State Chairman of the Communist Party of California. It was published by the International Book Store 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 Smith at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It had a large impact on Abstract Expressionism painting in and around San Francisco. One critic wrote of this show that "Smith leapt into the fray with a series of alarmingly tasteless abstractions... the show caused a great commotion." Another critic described the art displayed by all three artists as "loud and smeary and meaningless." 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.
March 1950 saw a two-man exhibition, Paintings and Sculpture by Richard Diebenkorn and Hassel Smith at the Lucian Labaudt Art Gallery in Gough Street, San Francisco. Smith's sculpture was viewed with some contempt by one critic who described them as "concoctions of dismal old wood, dismembered cheap furniture parts, rusty wire, assorted old electric bulbs, etc." 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. Mundt was out of sympathy with Smith's strong leftist politics and his style of teaching. He informed Smith that his contract would not be renewed. 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 and Bischoff and Park made good on their threat. Mundt later argued that "Hassel represented the kind of influence I appreciated least. He represented the least attractive side of the Still mystique."
Now lacking a regular income, Smith spent 1952 and some of 1953 teaching arts and crafts from kindergarten to the sixth grade at Presidio Hill School, an independent establishment which welcomed diversity in race, faith, nationality, and politics. He also taught at Mission Community Centre in Capp Street, San Francisco, and informally at his studio in the Audiffred Building. His home on Kansas Street, Potrero Hill became a popular social centre for friends and fellow artists.
In November 1952 Five Years of Painting and Sculpture by Smith was the inaugural exhibition at the short-lived but influential King Ubu Gallery in Fillmore Street, San Francisco. The Post Enquirer critic described it as "sensational".