News Release - Exhibition to Reveal Abstract Painter Frederick Hammersley's Unique Creative Process, Meticulously Outlined in Personal Archives

“Frederick Hammersley: To Paint without Thinking”
On view Oct. 21, 2017 – Jan. 22, 2018 in The Huntington’s Virginia Steele Scott Galleries of American Art, Susan and Stephen Chandler Wing

SAN MARINO, Calif.— A fall exhibition at The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens on the American abstract artist Frederick Hammersley (1919-2009) showcases his sketchbooks, notebooks, inventories, and vibrant color swatches to illuminate the painstaking process the artist used to create his hard-edge geometric paintings. “Frederick Hammersley: To Paint without Thinking” is on view in the Susan and Stephen Chandler Wing of The Huntington’s Virginia Steele Scott Galleries of American Art from Oct. 21, 2017 to Jan. 22, 2018.

To accompany the exhibition, The Huntington is publishing a fully illustrated catalog with several scholarly essays revealing new research on the topic.

“Frederick Hammersley: To Paint without Thinking” features about 50 objects pairing items from Hammersley’s archives (a recent gift to the Getty Research Institute) with five paintings, including The Huntington’s See saw (1966), and dozens of other works, including lithographs, silkscreens, and works of digital art from the collections of The Huntington, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, New Mexico Museum of Art, Palm Springs Art Museum, and Santa Barbara Museum of Art.

Highlights of the Hammersley archives include his notebooks and sketchbooks, in which the artist developed compositions over a period of decades. In these books, he generally used a two-stage process, first composing postage stamp-sized images—sketched out in pencil, colored pencil, or ballpoint pen—then selecting some compositions for sizing up to a larger scale, sometimes in oil paint. “These sketchbooks served as a forum for exploration and a wellspring from which he drew throughout his long career,” said James Glisson, Bradford and Christine Mishler Associate Curator of American Art at The Huntington and co-curator of the exhibition. “It is like peeking over his shoulder to see him at work, altering a color or two, adding or subtracting a line, then moving on.” In the exhibition, pages from Notebook #3 and a composition book give of a sense of how Hammersley might have worked out See saw.

“Painting Books”

Hammersley, who lived in Los Angeles until 1968, entered the spotlight in 1959 as one of the artists in the international exhibition “Four Abstract Classicists.” He was unique among his peers in that the elegant simplicity of his paintings stemmed from a rigorous process of refinement that he tracked in extreme detail. His “Painting Books,” two of which are on view in the exhibition, contain dated entries for every step of the painting process, from stretching a canvas and applying paint to varnishing and touching up. These invaluable records outline the process and materials used in more than 150 of his geometric paintings. Such a level of record-keeping was a boon for exhibition co-curator Alan Phenix, scientist at the Getty Conservation Institute, whose essay in the exhibition catalog unpacks Hammersley’s paintings from the technical perspective. Phenix observes, “I doubt there exists anywhere such a large group of paintings that is so fully described from the material and technical point of view.” For example, Phenix discovered during his research that Hammersley, who nearly always used traditional high-quality artists’ oil paints, occasionally adopted unconventional materials, such as exterior paints made for houses and factories.