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"Bruce Nixon, "Hassel Smith", John Natsoulas Press, Davis, California, 1997, . 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,Paul J Karlstrom, "An Itinerant Life in Modern Art", Hassel Smith, Paintings 1937–1997, Ed. Petra Giloy-Hirtz, Prestel Publishing Limited, Munich/London/New York, 2012, . he was at the same time loving, caring and shy.Donna Smith interviewed by Paul J Karlstrom, published in Paul J Karlstrom, "An Itinerant Life in Modern Art", Hassel Smith, Paintings 1937–1997, Ed. Petra Giloy-Hirtz, Prestel Publishing Limited, Munich/London/New York, 2012, . Art critics revered him as a "West Coast underground legend".Art in America, quoted in Rowland Weinstein, Kenny Genovese, "Hassel Smith – Here and Now", Weinstein Gallery, San Francisco, California, USA, 2012.
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.Hassel Smith, Biographical Sketches, 1960s–1987, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, US.Hassel Smith and Paul Karlstrom, Interview with Hassel Smith, 5 September 1978, Hassel Smith papers, circa 1900–2004, bulk 1930–1995, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, US.
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 led by 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 (CSFA) 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."Mary Fuller McChesney, A period of Exploration: San Francisco, 1945—1950, The Oakland Museum, Oakland, California, 1973, p9. There he studied under the artists Otis Oldfield, Spencer Macky, and Lee Randolph,"Hassel Smith (1915—2007)", Sullivan Goss, Santa Barbara, California, US, 2011. 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",Bruce Nixon, Hassel Smith, John Natsoulas Press, Davis, California, USA, 2006, . 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.Thomas Williams, The Bay Area School: Californian Artists from the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, Lund Humphries, Farnham, Surrey, UK, 2013, . Along with other San Francisco painters Smith showed and sold some of his work at the Iron Pot Restaurant at 639 Montgomery Street.Jesse Hamlin, "Hassel Smith – influential Bay Area artist and teacher", San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco, California, 20 January 2007.
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. Coming from his "well-to-do" financial background he found the task "shattering".Robin Houston, "Hassel Smith: Exuberant Abstract Expressionist", The Independent, 19 April 2007, p40. 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. It 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. As a result his conscientious objection petition was not ruled upon."Hassel Wendell Smith", US, World War II Draft Cards Young Men, 1940–1947, San Mateo, California, 16 October 1940.
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."Exhibitions", Hassel Smith, Paintings 1937–1997, Ed. Petra Giloy-Hirtz, Prestel Publishing Limited, Munich/London/New York, 2012, . In the same year Smith won an Abraham Rosenberg Foundation Traveling Fellowship for independent study, worth $750.Hassel Smith, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Fellowship application, 1964, Hassel Smith papers, circa 1900–2004, bulk 1930–1995, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, US. 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. Smith's work there until the end of 1941 was generally made en plein air (outdoors) painting landscapes, though here he also did his first figurative painting.Thomas Albright, Art in the San Francisco Bay Area: 1945—1980, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, California, 1985, . "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."Hassel Smith, "Personal Account of a Career as a Creative Artist", Hassel Smith Archives, December 1987.
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 (FSA) and was sent to the Arvin Migratory Labor Camp (made famous as "Weedpatch Camp" in the John Steinbeck novel The Grapes of Wrath) 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 (CPUSA).Susan Landauer, "Hassel Smith and the Politics of Style", Hassel Smith, Paintings 1937–1997, Ed. Petra Giloy-Hirtz, Prestel Publishing Limited, Munich/London/New York, 2012, . The art historian Peter Selz has described him as "an intrepid member".Peter Selz, "The Figurative Paintings of Hassel Smith", Hassel Smith, Paintings 1937–1997, Ed. Petra Giloy-Hirtz, Prestel Publishing Limited, Munich/London/New York, 2012, . 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.California, County Marriages, 1830—1980, California Department of Public Health."Hassel Smith's Honeymoon at Beach", Metropolitan Pasadena Star-News, Pasadena, California, 25 September 1942, p6. Myers joined Smith as a member of the CPUSA.