A Hammersley Retrospective, With the Edges Softened

Painter Frederick Hammersley has had the vexed privilege of being classified, canonized and more or less shelved. One of four artists anointed “Abstract Classicists” in a landmark 1959 exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Hammersley has seldom been heard from since without the prefix “L.A hard-edge painter” attached to his name. That, even though he’s lived in Albuquerque for the last 30 years, made prints, drawings and photographs in addition to paintings and generally proved himself more a soft-hearted humanist than a hard-edged purist.

Definitions can help position an artist within the spectrum of art historical possibilities; but, as in Hammersley’s case, they can also stifle his reception. A delightful and revelatory retrospective now at the Laguna Art Museum tells the fuller story: Over his long, fruitful career Hammersley has courted hybridity more than purism, and a spirited play of organic forms figures in his work at least as prominently as a rational and orderly classicism.

The exhibition, “Visual Puns and Hard-Edge Poems: Works by Frederick Hammersley,” was organized by Joseph Traugott of the Museum of Fine Arts in Santa Fe, where it first appeared. It’s a show of modest scale for a retrospective (fewer than 50 works in all), but it touches at least briefly upon the different bases Hammersley has covered.

Born in Salt Lake City in 1919, Hammersley studied art first in San Francisco, then in Los Angeles, at Chouinard Art Institute and the Jepson School of Art. Five tiny lithographs from 1949 and 1950 represent his first confident works, playful little arrangements of vertical and horizontal lines, sometimes printed as overlays atop photographic reproductions or printed text. Hammersley’s titles--”Four Play,” “Act Three,” “Scene One”--reinforce his sense of the two-dimensional surface as a stage for an experimental theater of pure form. His paintings from the next two decades play out the notion of Hammersley as a director, blocking the positions of his cleanly articulated, flatly colored geometrical characters.

Aware, as he writes in a statement within the show, that “hard-edge is often very hard to take, coming to it cold--or, even to the practiced eye,” Hammersley takes several steps toward making his work more accessible, less aloof. For one, he uses titles as invitations in, catalysts to closer looking. Several pages from his notebook of punning, free-associative title ideas are on display. In many of the phrases--”Square Won,” “Quest Shun,” “Know Know”--the words themselves mimic the formal dynamics enacted by the shapes in Hammersley’s paintings. They joust, contradict, tease, echo and conspire.

Another savvy and refreshing move Hammersley makes is to counter the clean, impersonal precision of hard-edge painting with the amusing presence of his own personality, his own hand. He signs many of his works right in the middle of the canvas, interrupting the smooth, austere surface by incising his looping signature directly into wet paint. Most brilliantly of all, he contains each of his works within wooden frames that he makes by hand, each with its own funky, not-quite-regular patterns of notches, extrusions and fingerprint-like depressions. Artificially distressed and self-consciously homey, the frames offset the neat balances of the images within. They nudge the works into a stylistic no-man’s-land, which is all the richer for its internal contradictions and resistance to cut-and-dried uniformity.

By reinforcing a connection to the familiar world of touch, the frames also scuttle the notion that abstraction belongs to a rarefied superstratum of experience. Hammersley consistently keeps his feet on the ground and his gaze on the world around him, a world where abstractions are a functional part of the mix.

A spunky arrangement of drawings, prints, photographs and paintings spanning five decades of Hammersley’s work and that hang together in his home has been re-created here on one wall, making an instructive case for the artist’s range and elasticity. A life-drawing from 1987 neighbors a Berlin street photograph from 1945; a geometric print from 1988 hovers above an organic abstraction painted two years later. Such miscegenation of methods and materials has acted as a generative force in Hammersley’s career; it should put the lie once and for all to his reputation as a hard-edged purist.

Hammersley’s paintings of the 1980s and 1990s are the easiest yet on the eye. Intimate in scale and filled with curving forms and tones softened by gradation, they suggest tendrils and lobes, plant forms and life forms in continuous mutation. The shapes don’t slice through space with geometric precision but spread through it slowly, viscous puddles of color curling around one another--persimmon, emerald, lemon yellow.

A closely cropped photograph Hammersley made of a woman’s crossed knees hangs among these paintings, absolutely congruent with them and providing yet another hint of Hammersley’s fluid talent.

The Laguna Museum has supplemented the show with a selection of paintings from its own collection by Hammersley’s fellow Abstract Classicists, Lorser Feitelson, Karl Benjamin and John McLaughlin, as well as Florence Arnold and Helen Lundeberg. Though the group offered an appealing alternative in the 1950s to the emotional angst of Abstract Expressionism, and they laid the foundation for the Southern California Finish Fetishists who came after, hard-edge painters in L.A. have been overshadowed by both. In his account of West Coast art written in the early 1970s, critic Peter Plagens called the hard-edge movement “acutely minor” ever since the 1959 L.A. County Museum show (whose members, incidentally, are reunited in a show through Feb. 25 at L.A.’s Tobey Moss Gallery).

A 1991 magazine article about Hammersley was titled “Paintings From Left Field,” in reference as much to his distance from the center as to the state of mind/mindlessness he cultivates while working; a recent show at L.A. Louver Gallery in Venice was called, by the artist’s own request, “I’ve Been Here All the While.” Hammersley’s declining recognition since the 1960s gives the current retrospective an air of unlikelihood. It was unlikely, perhaps, that he would get such a large dose of attention now, but it’s certainly not undeserved.

* “Visual Puns and Hard-Edge Poems: Works by Frederick Hammersley,” Laguna Art Museum, 307 Cliff Drive, Laguna Beach, (949) 494-8971, through March 26. Closed Mondays.