Hassel Smith

American, 1915 - 2007

BiographyHassel Smith was born in 1915 in Sturgis, Michigan.Smith attended Northwestern University (Chicago) 1932-36. Initially a chemistry major, he graduated BSc cum laude with majors in History of Art and English Literature.Smith worked with derelict and alcoholic individuals on skid row in San Francisco during the late thirties, becoming active in leftwing politics. He received a Rosenberg Traveling Fellowship in 1941 for independent study, moving to the Motherlode region of northern California. His work until the end of 1942 was made plein-air with a focus on town and landscape.From 1953 until late 1965 Smith lived in an apple orchard outside Sebastopol, Sonoma County, painting in a self-built redwood-sided studio.Smith married Donna Raffety Harrington in 1959 (their son Bruce was born in 1960 - adding to Donna's sons Mark and Stephan, and Hassel's son Joseph). In 1962-63 Smith moved for one year with his family to Mousehole in Cornwall, England, occupying a studio on the quays at Newlyn.

During 1963-65 Smith taught part-time at UC Berkeley. In 1965 he moved his family to Los Angeles, teaching at UCLA. He had contact with several southern California artists, most notably the painter John Altoon (a close friend since the fifties).

Smith moved permanently to England in 1966 accepting a tenured teaching position at the Royal West of England Academy of Art (later Bristol Polytechnic, Faculty of Fine Art).

Having returned to representational painting in 1964, Smith began the series of hard-edged "measured paintings" in 1970, which continued into the late eighties. He returned as guest professor to the West Coast periodically during the seventies, at UC Davis and SFAI. Major retrospectives followed at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1975, and at Oakland Museum in 1981.

Smith retired from teaching in 1980 and moved to an eighteenth-century rectory at Rode, north Somerset. The following seventeen years were a prolific period with output in painting, drawing and printmaking. The final decade of work saw two significant stylistic shifts characterized by aspects of gestural abstraction. Illness forced suspension of work in late 1997. Hassel Smith died nine years later.

(wikipedia)

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