Hassel Smith @ Washburn Gallery, New York

Hassel Smith: The Ferus Years
Washburn Gallery, New York
Through December 22, 2017

The Washburn Gallery presents an exhibition of paintings and drawings by HASSEL SMITH  (1915 - 2007) done between 1959 to 1962 when Hassel Smith exhibited at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles. The only New York show of Hassel Smith's works was held in 1961 at the Andre Emmerich Gallery although he exhibited widely throughout his life in this country and Europe.

Hassel Smith is a San Francisco "Bay Area" artist whose work in the late 50s and early 60s was strongly influenced by Clifford Still who taught at the San Francisco Art Institute in the late 1940s. The Hassel Smith exhibition includes seven large works by the artist. A brochure accompanies the show with an introduction by Irving Blum. The following is an excerpt:

"During the run of the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles (1957-1968) we had three exhibitions of work by Hassel Smith…Although he began as a figurative artist he turned early to abstraction. I thought the work to be brilliant. Abstract, but often including a scent of the West, a part of the country that he loved. Hassel continues to be largely unknown due to his decision to live and work in Northern California. The seat of major radical art activity was, of course, New York. I am certain had he worked in New York then the work would be cherished and celebrated."

Hassel Smith was born in Sturgis, Michigan in 1915 and died in Somerset, England in 2007. A major book, Hassel Smith, Paintings from 1937 – 1987, was published by Prestel in 2012 with over 150 reproductions, essays and chronology.

WASHBURN GALLERY
177 Tenth Avenue, New York
(between 20th and 21st Streets), NY 10011
www.washburngallery.com

Lorser Feitelson, Washburn Gallery, NYC - 10 Paintings Los Angeles The 1960s

Lorser Feitelson

10 Paintings Los Angeles The 1960s

Washburn Gallery, New York

May 9 – July 21, 2006

The Washburn Gallery presents the first New York exhibition of paintings by the California artist, Lorser Feitelson (1898-1978), since his Whitney Museum Memorial in 1979. Lorser Feitelson's previous New York exhibition was held at The Daniel Gallery in 1925.  The exhibition at the Washburn Gallery concentrates on Lorser Feitelson's linear paintings of the 1960s: their perfect surfaces, technicolors and remote elegance suggest the emerging Los Angeles art scene in those years. James Fitzsimmons wrote about Lorser Feitelson in the 1977 October – November issue of Art International and in particular of the 1960s as follows:

In 1963, Feitelson began the series of minimal line paintings and found himself so intrigued with the quality of the lines as lines rather than as descriptions of form that he decided to concentrate exclusively on the linear element. In the series which followed this decision, a process of minimalization occurred inwhich form and color were greatly simplified. Feitelson did not consider this reduction as an end in itself, but rather as a means of eliminating elements which might otherwise detract from the all-important line.

WASHBURN GALLERY

20 West 57 Street, New York, NY 10019

www.washburngallery.com