Hassel Smith

Hassel Wendell Smith Jr. was born on April 24, 1915, in Sturgis, Michigan, to Hassel Wendell Smith Sr. and Helen Adams Smith. He entered Northwestern University in 1932, where a required course in German drove him out of chemistry and into a double major in Art History and English Literature, earning a B.S. cum laude in 1936. He won a scholarship to Princeton for graduate study in art history that year but declined it, returning to California to enroll at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco, where he studied in Maurice Sterne's advanced painting and drawing class.

In 1941 he received the Abraham Rosenberg Fellowship for independent study and moved to the Sierra foothills to paint. His 1949 solo exhibition of small landscapes and seascapes at the California School of Fine Arts caused what his biographers describe as "a great commotion" and helped shape the emerging Abstract Expressionist scene in the Bay Area. He taught at the school for many years while continuing to paint and exhibit, moving between gestural abstraction and, in the early 1960s, a body of figurative paintings. He was among the few Bay Area artists shown regularly at Los Angeles's Ferus Gallery beginning in 1957, had his first New York exhibition in 1961 and his first London exhibition in 1960, and was selected for the Whitney Museum's 1962 Biennial. Further retrospectives followed in 1975 and 1981.

Smith later relocated to England, living for many years in the village of Rode in Somerset. In December 1997, failing health forced him to stop painting. He died on January 2, 2007, at Sutton Veny Nursing Home, near Warminster, Wiltshire, England.

Smith's reputation rests on his standing among the first generation of Bay Area Abstract Expressionists and on the critical attention his exhibitions drew from the start. His inclusion in the Whitney's 1962 Biennial and his standing as one of the few Bay Area painters shown regularly at Los Angeles's Ferus Gallery placed him at the center of two of the era's most closely watched scenes. Interest in his work has been periodically renewed through later surveys, including the 2002 to 2004 traveling exhibition "Hassel Smith: 55 Years of Painting," which moved through the Sonoma County Museum, the Laguna Art Museum, and a Munich venue, and through reassessments in art criticism describing him as a painter of "persistent challenges" whose combination of intuitive, gestural force and intellectual rigor set him apart from his contemporaries.

Public auction activity for Hassel Smith is limited. Bonhams sold Untitled Yellow (1960) for USD 53,750 in Los Angeles on April 2, 2007, which the house described at the time as a record for the artist at auction. A later Bonhams Los Angeles sale, Untitled (1954), realized USD 61,400 according to a HENI market report, a higher price than the 2007 sale, though the exact sale date has not been independently confirmed. Some market aggregators cite even higher realized figures for his paintings, but without a specific work, sale house, or sale date attached, those figures cannot be independently confirmed and are not treated here as the auction record. The relatively small number of public sales means that any single result should be read with caution.

Hassel Smith's market combines deep museum credibility, including holdings at the Tate, the de Young Museum, the Crocker Art Museum, and the Hirshhorn, with a very thin record of public sales, so pricing data should be treated as indicative rather than precise. No catalogue raisonne has been confirmed, which places added weight on documentation from Sullivan Goss, the gallery most active in his market, and from the Hassel Smith Foundation, which maintains the estate's biographical record. Collectors should also be aware that market databases show inconsistent claims about his highest realized price, and any headline figure should be checked against a named work, sale house, and sale date before being relied upon.