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background notes on ..... Frederick Hammersley

    Hammersley's reputation as a painter and teacher began when he was in the Jepson Art School in LA.  It started in 1948 when one of his small paintings was accepted in an annual exhibition at the SF museum of modern art...and the critic Frankenstein singled him out with a brief write up.  The painting was an abstraction of a still life.  From that year on, both his reputation and his painting has slowly and steadily evolved despite the ebb and flow of fashion.
 
    Upon leaving art school - no graduation, no degrees, Hammersley was invited to teach at Pomona College.  During those days the only place to study painting was in an art school.  The length of study was dictated by the size of one's purse, not by a curriculum.  Students were not concerned by graduation per se, rather about learning to draw and paint.  So at this time Hammersley's reputation as a painter,  then as a teache at Jepson's and at the Pasadena Art Museum, brought his to Pomona College.

     While he was at Pomona there occurred a first in the California art world which was against all logic.  At the height of the abstract expressionist movement there appeared and exhibition in two major California museums that was the direct opposite to all the current trends.  It was a show featuring 4 men whose paintings were of flat colored geometric shapes.  It was unexpected, daring, and almost ridiculous, but it was ... good.  The 4 men were the only ones known at this time in southern California painting in this mode.  Their ages ranged from 60 to 30.  Hammersley was 40 at the time.  The show called  "4 Abstract Classicists".  The guiding light and author of the catalog was the LA art critic Jules Langsner.  It was the first time in the history of California that and exhibition of this nature had been shown, and, which produced the now much used term... "Hard edge".

     In 1959 this show first opened in, that now familiar museum, the SF Museum of Modern Art.  Later it moved the the LA County Museum of Art.  Only one painting was sold from that show, to an old time LA collector by the name of David Bright.  It was a painting by Hammersley.

     It was during the LA show that arrangements were made to send a smaller version to the Institute of Contemporary Art in London the following year.  Interest in this show had even extended to the US government, in that the US Information Service provided the transportation to Europe.  Before the show opened in the ICA a discussion was held at the Institute in which the well know English art historian - Herbert Read - and 2 English painters (Roger Coleman & Peter Stroud) participated.  Again, only one painting from the show was sold, this time to an English collector.  It was a painting by  Hammersley.

     From London the show traveled to the  Queen's University in Belfast, Ireland,  then back to the states where the Western Association of Art Museums put it on tour for a year.

     As far as is known another hard edge first happened in 1962 when Hammersley was invited to have a one man show at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor  in SF.  That same year he was invited twice by the Whitney museum in New York ..first for -"Geometric Abstraction in America"-  and, also for  - "Fifty California Artists".

   In the mid 60's Carl Seitz, curator of painting at MOMA in New York