Santa Monica

Long overshadowed by Ellsworth Kelly, Leon Polk Smith is a major figure in the hard-edged abstraction school that emerged in the 1950s. Born in Oklahoma in 1906, he worked first in a figurative style and subsequently under the heavy influence of Mondrian before breaking away in the mid ‘50s to create a signature style of fluidly interlocking color fields in rectangular or tondo (circular) formats.

Smith’s paintings from the past four decades hold up well as a group. Cross-breeding ovals with rectangles, circles with squares, pure primaries with decorator variants, he made form and color tango in snappy ways. Works from the late ‘60s and ‘70s are “constellations” of small canvases intersecting with independent large-scale patterns of bold color.

The best pieces look like fragments from two separate universes whose paths happen to intersect for an instant. In “Constellation Black-Orange” (1972), an orange arc sweeps through two black square canvases with rounded corners, one overhanging the other. Some observers have seen the big skies of the Southwest as the source of the attenuated, curving silhouettes Smith has favored, but ultimately the work is purely self-referential.

Paintings from the ‘80s are bigger and simpler--like “Yellow Green,” a green house silhouette on a yellow rectangle. What they lose in spatial elasticity they gain in iconic, coloristic presence. (Meyers/Bloom Gallery, 2112 Broadway, to Nov. 22.)