HASSEL SMITH
Hassel Smith: The Measured Paintings By Bruce Nixon In 1970, when Hassel Smith began work on the first canvases that he would soon call the measured paintings, he was in his mid-fifties, a mature artist, and by almost any standard, settled into a secure career. In the 1940s and early 1950s, he had emerged as one of the leading abstract painters in the San Francisco Bay Area — the only city outside New York to develop a significant abstract expressionist group in the postwar decade — and his work there reveals an idiomatic stylist whose energy, insouciance, and lively intelligence very nearly encapsulate the character of San Francisco painting during those years. In 1966, Smith had accepted a teaching position in England, where he found himself embraced as an eminent practitioner of the American style. He also began making figurative canvases in the mid-1960s, and while they are not really determined by an expressionist technique — as we might say of former colleagues in the Bay Area such as David Park or Elmer Bischoff — neither are they so far afield that they would readily suggest an artist’s revolt against his own history. The measured paintings, on the other hand, just a few years later, seem to declare the sudden, willful repudiation of a reliable past, and indeed, the earliest instances of this series, compositions based on quilt designs and gameboards, drawn in clean, intrepid color, must have seemed inexplicable. In the mid-1970s, when the measured paintings were first shown in the United States — in San Francisco, as it happened — they met with uncertainty or, at best, uneasy acceptance. In most critical efforts to account for them, they were associated, incorrectly, with concurrent developments in abstract painting in New York. Although Smith continued to show on the West Coast on an almost annual basis, clearly some of the air had gone out of his career there. Such is the background to the series as we encounter it now. The measured paintings are still not widely known, but after so many decades we can at last see them as they are, the largest, most sustained single body of work in Smith’s long career — some two hundred canvases — and arguably his most developed
work. It is the work, too, in which, crucially, he breaks free from affiliations with any manner or movement that might have assisted in explaining his goals for it, the sources of secondary support that can be so helpful in an artist’s public life. With the measured paintings, Smith was on his own, out on a high wire, prepared to meet the risks ahead. From the perspective of the present, the measured paintings also tell us a good deal about Smith’s ambitions as an artist and his thoroughness as a visual thinker. Even during the 1950s, he never really conformed to popular views of abstract expressionist studio practice, never depended on the intuitive heroics attached to that period in art. He was always thinking about painting, or more precisely, about how painting realized, in accord with its particular resources, the terms of our engagement with life in the world and how it could address such matters in depth. By the 1960s and 1970s, many painters were asking what, exactly, constituted painting — the painting itself — stripped to something like essence. Those were apt concerns, certainly, and Smith understood the kinds of visual reductions that had become central to the inquiry. But he wanted to travel further still, to interrogate painting as an order of making, an operative harmony of the reasoning mind, imagination, and mobile hand of the maker in which the full visual means of the canvas mingles easily among concerns we might more typically associate with other areas of the liberal arts. Perhaps painters have always entertained thoughts of this kind as they labored behind the curtains of traditional pictorial narrative. And Smith was fortunate, as he undoubtedly realized, to be working in a historical period when painting was free at last of the demands and cultural obligations of representational description. Modern painting is always grappling with the subject of painting itself, but Smith did not want his own work to be about just that. By the time he neared the close of the measured series, in canvases such as Untitled (1985-87) or Without Hope They Live in Desire (1986), he seemed prepared to follow astronomy — or theology — into the heavens, and as he did so, to test the experiential effects of painting, this silent object on the wall before
us, against our discursive encounters with music, dance, literature, life itself. If these are grand claims for art, Smith believed that painting was equal to the task. Maybe he had always thought so. If we look back from the measured paintings, we can easily locate their connections to the figurative canvases that preceded them, and if we look ahead to the 1990s, to the concluding phase of Smith’s work, we will encounter some of the most scrupulous expressionist canvases in American art, lovely unities of freedom and order, of personality and formal clarity, a drift of forms that seem almost to breathe. The measured paintings are distinguished by their variety and invention. Early in the series, ruthlessly flattened, schematic “gameboards” and “quilts” are common: Untitled (1-2-3-1 Series) (1975), From 1 to 9 (1975-76), or About 9 (1976) are among the former; Untitled (1974) and I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls (1975) among the latter. The compositional bases would open and evolve, but even as the series continued, the sustained elements — the square format, scaled to correspondence with the human body, the use of acrylic paints, and what we might call the inner life of the artist’s formal language as it flows from canvas to canvas with mounting complexity — together assert the presence of an underlying constructive formula, a compositional order developed by the artist as a personal discipline, something that would keep the paintings from falling into pure subjectivity. Is system ultimately the content of the work, manifested in organization, form, gesture? The answers are by no means obvious, and we can begin to approach them by considering Smith’s activities during the several years prior to the start of the series. As it went, 1963 brought the end of the abstract expressionist canvas in oil paint, as Smith began to abandon the mode of working with which he had established his presence as an artist in San Francisco, and in its place, he turned to the figure. At that point, there were, of course, other painters in the Bay Area who had chosen a similar path during the preceding decade, and they suggested a precedent of sorts; indeed, Smith’s earliest work,
Untitled, 1985-87, acrylic on canvas, 68 x 68 in.
Untitled, 1974, acrylic on canvas, 68 x 68 in.
until the mid-1940s, was figurative, canvases that were already compressing pictorial space, squeezing forms together, and tipping perspective. As his figure reemerged in the 1960s, it differed from those canvases, however, and from the muscular, broadly delineated methodology of Bay Area figuration. While Smith bore the influence of his adventures with abstract painting, he had no interest in the brushy expressionism of Park or Bischoff. His figures display little of the characterful warmth we expect from narrative art; their role is chiefly formal. Smith then countered expectation even further, utilizing canted planes, exaggerated spatial proportions, asymmetrical compositions, abrupt shifts in tonal value, and nondescriptive colors, which force us to reassess the nature of our interest in the figure as a subject, and our relationship with figurative painting itself. We can feel the measured canvases on the near horizon. Let us take Leda and the Swan (1969) as a transitional episode. It is composed with compass and straight edge. The figures in the lower right have been assembled in sequences of circles, and they are enveloped in a conspicuously spacious atmosphere created by the wide planes of wall and ceiling around them. It is a formal arrangement relieved of undue complications, and secured by an idiomatic but stable compositional foundation For Smith, the successful integration of pictorial content with a viable organizational system proposed a method for dealing with one issue of great interest to him, the image consciously ordered into networks of interval and event — a terminology he borrowed from music — what we could also call an order of fields and shapes. Composition yields a tightly woven lattice of internal relationships, or interrelationships, combined in such a way that no single form or element can, or should, claim true autonomy for itself. This is a way of thinking about “how” a painting works, its literal means as they built toward a totality of effect. Why does one painting succeed more effectively, or more self-evidently, than another? Can we locate the empirical, measurable elements that could verify its ordering principle? They are the same kinds of questions that would have occupied the Ancients as they carved their tranquil
Leda and the Swan, 1969, oil on canvas, 68 x 46 in.
figures, or the Renaissance painters who were applying mathematics to perspectival compositions, or to the constructivists searching for elementality, the minimal quantity of information capable of conveying maximal pictorial effect. We are now well into the territory of the measured paintings, and with those issues in mind, Leda and the Swan points directly at the next step: a reliable code, intrinsic to the artist, whose particulars are cloaked behind the visible image itself. In Leda, the depiction of the human subject is hardly empathetic — the painting might be described as figuresque — and in this respect Smith steps decisively away from a correspondent figure, “like” us. As a customary locus of visual gravity, it is off-kilter, having deserted
its familiar relationship with the center of the compositional frame. At the same time, Smith’s handling of space also seems to have the measured paintings already in mind. In Leda, “wall” and “ceiling” fail to “fold” at an “accurate” angle. They open, rather, like a theater set, and the doorway, too, proposes a theatrical utility, peculiarities that nonetheless achieve visual logic apart from the concerns of realism. The view “through” such spaces can tilt our position before the canvas, and when we turn to the measured paintings, where an ordering sensibility is even more clearly inferred, we will be similarly disconcerted as we search for the reassurance of a visual “grid” as an explanation for the image. Indeed, the forthright modality of the square canvas seems to suggest it, but let us not cling to terminology. The measured paintings are not “grids” at all, not, that is, repeating, serial images. Smith’s system has plenty of flex. While many of the measured paintings suggest a frontal view — a distinct orientation of bottom and top — this is not always the case, nor is it required to be so, nor should we assume that it is an exclusive visual situation even in paintings that at first appear to align themselves to our upright posture. Simply put, Smith was contriving a formal system that is communicative as art. Yet the system never overwhelms the painting as a painting. Smith remains an artist to the end, and good paintings are always the goal. But as a structural foundation — a rationale, really — it allows him to exercise individuality of style without succumbing to style alone, or to the kinds of signature gestures that often take charge of the expressionist canvas. As a basis for making paintings, it enabled Smith to invent without the need to make every canvas “new,” and it could support a visual language resistant to the kinds of stylistic tics that can become a false claim on originality. The full scope of this project was not evident in the very first measured paintings, of course, but Smith had enough to proceed with confidence. The measured paintings raise questions typical of their cultural period, questions that are still worthwhile: how do we identify a painting as “art”? How and when does it become art, and how, exactly,
does this action separate it from gameboards, flags, or quilts? Can those visual systems also constitute art? A gameboard must be readily comprehensible. Quilts, on the other hand, are among the most intricate of vernacular designs. Both offer fruitful insights into how we read visual data. Art, we might say, has no function other than to be looked at, but if any twodimensional visual system can suggest itself as art, how will we go about differentiating one from the other? On what basis does art make its unique claim upon our attention? And how does a painter transform utilitarian imagery into an unmistakably artistic event? In the 1970s, system-driven art forms of all kinds were among the voices that pressed such questions amid the increasingly pervasive visual landscape of advertising and mass media. Were such images just a prosaic mode of visuality, routine, ordinary? Or was an entirely different set of questions pertinent? Could they — should they — be approached — and remade — as a visual order capable of beauty? At that moment, those issues were by no means as settled as they are now, and Smith, for one, was extending his own inquiry, in his own way. In the measured paintings, he turned to an imagery of forms that represent only themselves, events on the canvas. He wanted to bring as little as possible from the objects of the world, which carried extraneous meanings into the painting like so much luggage. Here we find only a bounteous dispersion of refined shapes and fields rendered in the artist’s supple, often dazzling colorism. How should they be read? Our lives, individual and communal, are full of such patterns and systems. Nature as well, and art. Why regard them only as latent or embedded, beyond reach? They are intrinsic, absorbed into our consciousness, eminently human. Let us consider them squarely. Thus we find ourselves venturing into the seemingly closed system of an artist determined to develop a way of building paintings that is not “about” the familiar, identifiable objects of the world or their narrative freight. Smith is now looking at the internal, often unconscious systems by which we comprehend those objects, and in this context, the canvas represents a kind of notational setting or matrix inscribed in, granted texture, presence, and
visual excitement, through the means of painting. Such work has the character of a community, one whose inhabitants, in all their diversity, have been created by the artist and turned loose within the boundaries of the frame to act and develop as they will. Smith had recognized a trap of the abstract expressionist canvas, its potential to devolve from spontaneity into repetition, from authentic creativity into reliability, from individuality into signature, and so the measured paintings can be seen, if in part, as a route of escape from those suffocating hazards. With that said, his system is not mechanistic, but might be more appropriately described as a means of navigation. Smith was establishing coordinates across the canvas surface as he advanced toward a way of “doing” painting that would ultimately verify the virtues of a dependable architectonic logic, one that could provide a consistently satisfying aesthetic container for his thoughts and ideas, manifested in the dissemination of imagery. After settling on a fixed field, the square, as a constant, he reduced his formal vocabulary to variations on the circle, triangle, and rectangle, which are modified in turn by position, sub-division, relative proportion, size, color, and brushstroke — the most basic compositional substances. Their “fit” is not always perfect. A certain tolerance can occur, often as a “space” along one or more of the edges, a narrow band that is not out of place but, at the same time, does not quite account for itself compositionally. The appearance of the canvas — the paint surface in all its exacting literality — would necessarily be critical. Smith worked in acrylic, but he made his own paints, mixing pigment into a liquid polymer that he acquired from a small company in London. This practice gave him complete control over his colors. He could obtain purity of hue or mix at will, which enabled him to produce an idiomatic palette, the tempered blues, greens, and yellows that he adjusted to the requirements of any given image; he could also modulate the concentration of his pigments, producing paint films of great density as well as nearly transparent glazes. Witness, as examples, the creamy grays of Untitled (1980) or Untitled (1983), the brash pink of For Clyfford (1982-83), or the inky, nocturnal blacks of Day of the Dead (1985) and Untitled (1985).
Untitled, 1983, acrylic on canvas, 68 x 68 in.
Color and understated gesture give coherence to even the most extensive fields, and indeed the sweep of Smith’s colorism is among the hallmarks of the series, and one of its great achievements. The liquidity of the base permitted uniform, flat-looking surfaces that naturally emphasize the spatial effects of color, tone, the nuanced mark, while at the same time acrylic turns from the common tropes of oil paint, the glistening, tactile surface textures that draw the haptic eye and prompt meanings of their own apart from the imagery. Although he wants to deflect some of the obvious affiliations entailed in borrowing from the art-historical past, Smith’s attitude toward his materials had always been fairly heterodox — he used house paint on canvases of the 1950s, for example. Here, as he extricates himself from the august rituals of oil painting, he does so in order to concentrate every aspect of his constructive means on the unity of image and system. Once Smith established his materials, passed through the straightforward early designs, and began to relax his use of space, the series advanced
very quickly. Small spaces can feel immense to us, like windows that open suddenly onto landscapes, or galaxies, while other forms seem to separate themselves from the canvas surface and hover or float, advancing toward us in graceful spatial effects. Of course, Smith realized that our encounter with a painting is, among other things, an act or sequence of acts that could itself be contemplated within a systemic context. The viewer quickly begins to search for a painting’s informing “system,” its intention, and to go another step, to locate the self in relation to clues provided by the art object. For the artist, this may or may not be a problem, a condition largely dependent on the aspirations of the artwork, and Smith was ambitious. He had set for himself the task of developing a pictorial language hospitable with the general course of Western painting, one that would be discernibly “modern,” and yet could bring viewers to an awareness of their own processes of interpretation: it would, in other words, be good painting and, at the same time, “show” how we look at art without being illustrational or explanatory. Images that might be referential — In Berkeley (1979), for example — finally loosen themselves from any kind of specificity, withdrawing into deceptively simple formal arrangements and non-descriptive colors, challenging us to step back from routine procedures of reading and so enter a fresh climate of encounter with the work itself, just as it is. As the series progressed, Smith does indeed seem to offer us a view of his own universe, a place where shapes drift across mysterious, animate spaces governed by their own laws of gravity and attraction, whether biological or cosmic. The dynamism of the traditional relationship between center and edge is all but dissolved in this field of play, as the formal elements mobilize in the direction of final form. The artist’s process directs the internal rhythm of the canvases from one to the next, simultaneously arranging and liberating the work, reaching for what we might describe as the freedom of obedience demonstrated as painting — observe the leap from Homage to the Headhunters (1977) to the otherworldly illumination of Untitled (1985), separated from one another by almost a decade.
In Berkeley, 1979, acrylic on canvas, 70 x 49 in.
Homage to the Headhunters, 1977, acrylic on canvas, 68 x 68 in.
This is not the only way to paint, but for the artist who approaches the blank canvas with such concerns in mind, it is a path that may produce very interesting answers to some of the nagging problems of modern art. The measured paintings, as a group, would fit comfortably into almost any moment in the past century in art, from the first forays of modernist formalism until yesterday, and this itself is a compelling affirmation of Smith’s program — the impartial harmonies so satisfying to the deep, unvoiced strata of eye and mind that it eludes strict historical temporalities. We can now admit frankly that Smith is an artist well-disposed toward the painting tradition in which he works: here, however, tradition must refer to issues and concerns continuous in the history of art, not to a material gathering of techniques or images from the past. In 1987, then, after some seventeen years and having brought the series an immense distance, the measured paintings fragment before our eyes, blasted away, or disintegrated, by an urgent gesturalism that washes over them. First, we see the brush agitating particular forms in paintings such as Untitled (1983) or Untitled (1985). The artist grows more aggressive in Untitled (1985-87), and finally tosses aside all restraint in Without Hope They Live in Desire (1986). In a practical sense, Smith was always acquiring studio information, and the measured series had been generous in this respect. He was ready to shift his means again, to address his various interests from another direction, and in the “expressionist” canvases that followed, the spaces feel nearly sentient — vast, geological, even cosmic. And yet, how can we look at the grand fields and clambering forms of some of the untitled canvases of the 1990s and not recall Untitled (1980) or In theValley of the King (1983), their comfortable, sympathetic proximity of large and small, their mutual caress of the billowing and jagged? Smith never entirely disclosed the secrets of his measurements, his proportional means, the rules of endless play. At some point in the future, perhaps, an enterprising art historian may send a selection from the series to some vaunted intelligence agency, and the master code-breakers will at last extract Smith’s
system from among them. Or not. Although the outcome of such an investigation might be intriguing, the originality of the series would remain unchanged, the enduring mark of its creator.
Untitled, 1985, acrylic on canvas, 68 x 68 in.
Without Hope They Live in Desire, 1986, acrylic on canvas, 68 x 68 in.
In theValley of the King, 1983, acrylic on canvas, 68 x 68 in.
Untitled, 1991, acrylic on canvas, 68 x 48 in.
MEASURED PAINTINGS
Untitled 1970 acrylic on canvas 68 x 68 in.
Untitled 1971 oil on canvas 68 x 68 in.
Eyeball to Eyeball 1972 oil on canvas 46 x 46 in.
Circles Etc. #2 1971 acrylic on canvas 68 x 48 in.
Untitled 1973 acrylic on canvas 68 x 68 in.
Untitled 1974 acrylic on canvas 68 x 68 in.
Quilt Pattern 1974 acrylic on canvas 68 x 68 in.
Untitled 1974 acrylic on canvas 67 3/4 x 67 5/8 in.
From A - B 1976 acrylic on canvas 68 x 68 in.
More and More Cosmic Funk 1976 acrylic on canvas 68 x 68 in.
Untitled 1975 acrylic on canvas 68 x 67 3/4 in.
Untitled 1976 acrylic on canvas 68 x 68 in.
I Dreamt, I Dwelt in Marble Halls (1-2-3-4-1 series) 1975 acrylic on canvas 68 x 68 in.
From 1 to 9 1976 acrylic on canvas 68 x 68 in.
Untitled 1976-1977 acrylic on canvas 68 x 68 in.
Homage to the Headhunters 1977 acrylic on canvas 68 x 68 in.
Military 2-Step 1977 wood construct 48 x 68 in.
Untitled 1977 wood construct 68 x 68 in.
Untitled 1978 acrylic on canvas 68 x 68 in.
Untitled 1978 acrylic on canvas 68 x 68 in.
King Clone 1978 acrylic on canvas 67 3/4 x 67 1/2 in.
In Berkeley 1979 acrylic on canvas 70 x 49 in.
About 9 1979-1980 acrylic on canvas 90 x 68 in.
316 Revisited 1980
Signed verso, "Hassel Smith 1979-80, 316 Revisited"" acrylic on canvas 68 x 68 in.
Untitled 1980 acrylic on canvas 68 x 68 in.
Untitled 1980 acrylic on canvas 68 x 68 in.
More and More about 9 1980 acrylic on canvas 68 x 68 in.
About 99 1980 acrylic on canvas 68 x 68 in.
Untitled 1980 acrylic on canvas 68 x 68 in.
9000 and 9 Nights 1981 acrylic and graphite on canvas 68 x 68 1/8 in.
Arezzo Revisited 1982 acrylic on canvas 68 x 68 in.
Flys Expect to be Swatted - #9 Painting 1982 acrylic on canvas 68 x 68 in.
Untitled 1982 acrylic on canvas 68 x 68 in.
In the Valley of the King 1983 acrylic on canvas 67 1/2 x 68 in.
Untitled 1983 acrylic on canvas 68 x 68 in.
Untitled 1983 acrylic on canvas 68 x 68 in.
Superwallah 1983 acrylic on canvas 68 x 68 in.
Alone with the Killer #2 1983 acrylic on canvas 68 x 68 in.
Untitled 1983-1984 acrylic on canvas 67 7/8 x 68 in.
Untitled 1983-84 acrylic on canvas 68 x 68 in.
Untitled 1983-1984 acrylic on canvas 68 1/4 x 68 in.
Untitled 1984 acrylic on canvas 68 x 68 in.
Untitled 1984 acrylic on canvas 68 x 48 in.
Untitled 1985 acrylic on canvas 68 x 68 in.
The Kiss of Deaf 1985 acrylic on canvas 68 1/8 x 68 1/8 in.
Untitled n.d. acrylic on canvas 68 x 68 in.
Chambord Revisited n.d. acrylic on canvas 68 x 68 in.
LATE PAINTINGS
Untitled 1987 acrylic on canvas 84 x 108 1/4 in.
Untitled 1987 acrylic on canvas 68 x 48 in.
Untitled 1987 acrylic on canvas 68 x 48 in.
Untitled 1988 acrylic on canvas 68 x 48 in.
Untitled 1990 acrylic on canvas 68 1/8 x 48 in.
Untitled 1991 acrylic on canvas 68 x 48 in.
Untitled, 109-84 1991 acrylic on canvas 67 5/8 x 68 in.
Untitled 1989 acrylic on canvas 68 x 48 in.
Untitled 1996 acrylic on canvas 54 x 54 in.
Untitled 1996 acrylic on canvas 68 x 48 in.
Untitled n.d. acrylic on canvas 68 x 48 in.
Untitled n.d. acrylic on canvas 68 x 48 in.
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