The Huntington to Reveal Frederick Hammersley Exhibition

Left to Right) Frederick Hammersley, Notebook #3, (1960s), bound fabric-covered sketchbook with colored pencil and ballpoint pen. Composition book sketchbook with graphite and colored pencil (1960s). Frederick Hammersley, See saw, 1966 – oil on linen.
– Courtesy photo

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.

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