43 Facts About Hassel Smith

When Hassel 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.

Hassel Smith went to Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, from 1932.

Hassel Smith was initially a Chemistry major but was defeated in learning German, then a requirement for a science career.

Hassel Smith changed to Art History and English Literature, the art course requiring the practise as well as the study of art.

Hassel Smith later claimed that at this point began "my actual art career, my love affair with painting".

On leaving the School of Fine Arts in the late 1930s Hassel Smith began to paint professionally, working outdoors both day and night in San Francisco and in the Bay Area, but had few prospects of selling his paintings.

Hassel 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.

Short of money, Hassel 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.

Hassel Smith described the task as "shattering" and became active in left-wing politics.

In October 1940 during peacetime military conscription Hassel Smith registered as a conscientious objector but when the United States joined World War II Hassel Smith's physical examination classified him as 4-F and deemed him not acceptable for military service so his conscientious objection petition was not ruled upon.

In 1944 the FSA was phased out and Hassel Smith was transferred to the United States Forest Service and assigned as a log scaler at the headwaters of the McKenzie River in Oregon where he worked until the end of the war.

Bruce Nixon in his 1997 essay on Hassel 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 Hassel Smith whose life up to that time had been shaped by "a secure, entirely sheltered, middle class existence".

Douglas MacAgy had become Director of the School and in a process of revitalisation invited Hassel Smith to remain on the staff, but now as one of a distinguished group of instructors in the painting department.

Hassel Smith later said his "conversion" to Abstract Expressionism had been "instantaneous" when he saw Still's work.

Amid the hotbed of postwar West Coast talent at the School of Arts, Hassel 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 Hassel Smith, claimed that the artist's work in the postwar decade revealed "an idiomatic stylist whose energy, insouciance, and lively intelligence very nearly encapsulate[d] the character of San Francisco painting in those years".

In 1946 Hassel 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.

Hassel Smith and fellow artists from the School occupied lofts on the two upper floors of the building which otherwise was a club for homeless sailors.

Late in 1947 Hassel Smith's son Joseph was born and the small family moved to Eugene, Oregon where Hassel Smith taught at the University of Oregon and staged a solo exhibition in the university's gallery.

In 1951 Hassel Smith appeared in a two-artist show with Edward Corbett at the School of Fine Arts and in 1952 Five Years of Painting and Sculpture by Hassel Smith was the inaugural exhibition at the short-lived but influential King Ubu Gallery in Fillmore Street, San Francisco.

Hassel Smith had for a long time been a member of the Communist Party USA and was well-known for a confrontational nature.

Hassel Smith informed Smith that his services were no longer needed.

Hassel Smith then resigned pre-emptively rather than be fired and Bischoff and Park made good on their threat.

Hassel 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.

Hassel Smith taught at Mission Community Centre in Capp Street, San Francisco, and informally at his studio in the Audiffred Building.

From 1953 until late 1965 Hassel Smith lived in an apple orchard outside Sebastopol, Sonoma County in California, 55 miles north of San Francisco.

Hassel Smith was one of the few artists, along with Sonia Gechtoff, Jay DeFeo and Bruce Conner, then based in northern California, to be exhibited in Los Angeles by Irving Blum and Walter Hopps at the Ferus Gallery during the late fifties and early sixties.

Hassel Smith's paintings were shown in San Francisco, New York, London and Milan, and were acquired widely for both private and public collections.

June Myers Hassel Smith died of cancer at the age of 40 in August 1958.

Hassel Smith had contact with several southern California artists, most notably the painter John Altoon.

Hassel Smith moved permanently to England in 1966, accepting a tenured teaching position at the Royal West of England Academy Art Schools in Bristol.

Hassel Smith returned as guest professor to the West Coast periodically during the seventies, at UC Davis and SFAI.

Hassel Smith retired from teaching in 1980 and moved to an eighteenth-century rectory at Rode, north Somerset.

Hassel Smith died nine years later on January 2,2007, in Wiltshire, England.

Hassel Smith's son Bruce Hassel Smith is a prolific musician, playing with a number of bands who made a mark on the British post punk music scene.

Hassel Smith exhibited extensively on both coasts of the US, and in western Europe, from the late 1930s onwards.

Hassel Smith's first noted solo exhibition was curated by Jermayne MacAgy at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco, in 1947.

Hassel Smith was included in the significant 1955 exhibition, Action Painting, at the Merry-Go-Round Building in Santa Monica, California curated by Walter Hopps.

Hassel Smith joined the Los Angeles-based Ferus Gallery in 1958 and received four solo exhibitions over a five-year period.

Hassel Smith's work was featured in the Ferus retrospective at Gagosian in New York in 2002.

Hassel Smith had regular exhibitions at the Dilexi Gallery in San Francisco from the late 1950s until the gallery's closure in 1969.

In 1964 Hassel Smith was invited to participate in the Whitney Annual exhibition in New York and received a second retrospective at San Francisco State University.

Hassel Smith's work was included in the pivotal 1996 exhibition, The San Francisco School of Abstract-Expressionism, curated by Susan Landauer, at the SFMOMA.