A MATTER OF RECORD
THE ART OF FREDERICK HAMMERSLEY
Generally, when you think of painting without thinking, you don’t imagine an obsessive attention to detail. You might think of automatic painting, action painting, or Abstract Expressionism. But if a painter works within specific limitations, he or she is still free to explore as much variation as those parameters allow. To Paint
without Thinking, an exhibition of works by Frederick Hammersley (1919-2009) that premiered at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, in October 2017 and opens at the New Mexico Museum of Art on Friday, May 25, presents viewers with a conundrum: that Hammersley’s meticulous practices also allowed him ample room for freedom of expression. In addition, a documentary on the artist,
Frederick Hammersley: By Himself, airs on New Mexico PBS (KNME) at 4:30 p.m. on Saturday, June 2.
Hammersley, who is associated with the hardedge painting style that came to prominence in California in the late 1950s and ’ 60s and who lived in Albuquerque from 1968 until his death in 2009, was fanatical in recording his processes in his notebooks, whether he was making lithographs and other types of prints, drawings, or paintings. His scientific approach combined intensive acts of research and experimentation in which he rigorously documented how and when he mixed and layered paint, applied finishes, stretched his canvases, and constructed his frames. Like a scientist, he could predict the outcome of his experiments as they were tested and retested.
“Part of the inspiration for this exhibition was a set of painting journals and notebooks that the Hammersley Foundation gave to the Getty Research Institute i n California,” said Merry Scully, t he Museum of Art’s in-house curator for the exhibition. “The pages of those books are pretty amazing. There are sheets of possible titles that he would go through. He would make notes about what materials he used, how often he let it dry, who the manufacturer was, what day he did it — very methodical.” All of this planning and tracking gave Hammersley the ability to approach a canvas with an almost intuitive sense of what was needed to create an effective composition. Perhaps painting itself became a matter of rote action for him. “Although he still had to make choices as he executed the paintings, the studies in the Notebooks, like a set of instructions, largely guided him,” writes James Glisson, who curated the exhibition at the Huntington, in his introduction to the catalogue. “In the ‘geometrics,’ as he called his geometric paintings, he could ‘paint without thinking’ because the thinking, so to speak, had been done in the Notebooks,” he writes.
Hammersley was originally from Salt Lake City. After attending Idaho State University, he went to Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles in 1940 and studied under sculptor and muralist Rico Lebrun, learning figurative painting techniques. War interrupted his progress, and he served as a sergeant in the army, stationed in Europe from 1942 until 1945.
In Paris, after receiving his military discharge, he studied at the École des Beaux-Arts and began his first explorations into abstract imagery, perhaps inspired by artists such as Pablo Picasso, Constantin Brâncusi, and other modernists whose studios he visited. When he returned to Los Angeles, he attended Jepson Art Institute from 1947 through 1950 and was an instructor there from 1948 until 1951. By this time, he had mostly abandoned figurative imagery for compositions made with flat planes of color and reductive geometry. Hammersley became a pioneer of West Coast abstraction.
He was included, along with artists Karl Benjamin, Lorser Feitelson, and John McLaughlin, in a landmark 1959 exhibition, Four Abstract Classicists, organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and mounted at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. “There was something radical happening at the time,” Scully said. “They’re making these hard-edge paintings with clean lines, very methodical. You think about what’s happening on the East Coast at that time — very expressive, very emotional — this is the exact opposite. For somebody trained in classical techniques, this is a big jump. The West Coast was working in sort of isolation at that point, which was freeing.”
The term “hard- edge” as it relates to painting — clearly delineated, abrupt transitions between areas of color — was, in fact, coined by art historian Peter Selz and art critic Jules Langsner, who curated the
Four Abstract Classicists exhibition. It is a descriptive term for some of the work being produced in California throughout the 1960s. “Now people look back at the things that happened, that were celebrated in Pacific Standard Time, and see there was a lot of innovation happening in postwar California,” Scully said. Pacific Standard Time, organized by the Getty in 2011, was a monumental collaboration between major West Coast cultural institutions that highlighted the postwar artists of LA.
Among the works in the exhibition — which draws from the Getty Research Institute’s collection, as well as the Huntington, the Frederick Hammersley Foundation, and the New Mexico Museum of Art — is a little-known series of lithographs that offer insight into his artistic process. Made while the artist was at Jepson, the lithos are sets of four squares, each with slight variations of similar linear compositions rendered primarily in black and white and, sometimes, with minimal color. He experimented with the paper he used, which included printed and colored papers, along with even surfaces with photographic imagery. Each print is given a rustic frame. On the back of each print, Hammersley recorded the date, as well as when he made the frames. Some of the lithos are among the works in the Museum of Art’s own collection.
“I think there’s a corollary here with music,” Scully said, noting the similarity between the execution of the lithographs and the framework used in composing musical notation. “He’s really thinking through that and embracing abstraction. He did literally hundreds of these in different variations,” she said. Similarly, studies in multiples exist in his Notebooks, on pages that form part of the exhibition. The Notebooks show postage stamp- sized studies, often made for larger works on canvas, rendered in stages from simple geometric configurations to more complex ones, all of which explore different color relationships. He also created what he called Painting Books, which document the l arger compositions based on the smaller studies.
Hammersley moved to Albuquerque in 1968 and taught at the University of New Mexico until 1971. During these years, he was an early proponent of computer drawing, using program writer Richard Williams and artist Katherine Nash’s Art1, which relied on punch cards to generate imagery. He used Art1 to make hundreds of prints. “The working area of each computer drawing was a grid comprising 50 vertical elements and 105 horizontal elements, and each element in the grid required a code to create the image, which necessarily occupied the entire working area,” writes Kathleen Shields, executive director of the Hammersley Foundation, in an
accompanying catalogue essay. “This process suggests a similarity to Hammersley’s approach to painting in that the square or rectangular format of the canvas was his predetermined ‘ working area’ and starting point for each composition,” she writes. Shields notes the similarities between the computer drawings and Hammersley’s earlier explorations of variations on themes, including his investigations into black-and-white imagery, citing as an example a painting called See saw, #3, that he made in 1966.
As See saw exemplifies, Hammersley often gave his major works titles that showed his penchant for playing with words and coming up with titles that reflected some visible aspects of the compositions. His Light
switch, a lithograph from 1988, for example, has the basic shape of a light switch. But it also employs a sharp contrast between black and white trapezoidal forms in the center of the painting, where one of the forms seems to shadow or mirror the other in a reverse configuration. Optically, the work appears to flip (or switch) back and forth between positive and negative space due to the contrasting elements.
One painting called Couplet, #15 1965, made in 1968, is part of the Museum of Art’s collection. Because it needed conserving, it has never been publicly shown until the Huntington started planning the exhibit. To
Paint without Thinking represents the first time the work has been exhibited in Santa Fe. The painting features prominently in Getty Conservation Institute scientist Alan Phenix’s catalogue essay on Hammersley’s process and use of materials. He discusses the challenges that face conservators, such as working from small paint samples to glean a chemical analysis — because a chemical analysis is only as good as the sample used, it isn’t necessarily indicative of the artist’s overall use of materials. He laments that conservators are often faced with the question, “Wouldn’t it have been easier if artists just wrote down what they used and how they had gone about using it?”
He adds, “Frederick Hammersley quite often did just that.” One can only speculate, but it is as if Hammersley recognized the importance of keeping records for posterity. Perhaps he figured that, one day, people would want to know. He was, as Phenix calls him, “the arch-documenter of painting practice.”