Frederick Hammersley

1919-2009

BiographyFrederick Hammersley (1919-2009) first gained critical recognition in 1959 as one of the "Four Abstract Classicists" along with Karl Benjamin, Lorser Feitelson, and John McLaughlin, whose paintings were featured that year in an exhibition of the same name. Curated by critic Jules Langsner and organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the exhibition opened at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and traveled to the Institute of Contemporary Art in London and Queen's University in Belfast, Ireland.

"Four Abstract Classicists” has since been recognized as an important factor in putting West Coast abstraction on the map and as a significant counterpoint to Abstract Expressionism then particularly prominent on the East Coast. Langsner explained in his catalogue essay that as self-described “classicists” and in contrast to “expressionists,” these artists aspired to “balance—thought and feeling, intelligence and intuition, reason and emotion.” Feeling, far from absent in their art, is “distilled, rather than transferred in its primal state."

https://www.hammersleyfoundation.org/index.php/frederick-hammersley

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