• Visual Art & Museums

    Line on the Loose - A Hassel Smith Exhibition

    Line on the Loose - A Hassel Smith Exhibition Image gallery

    San Jose Museum of Art

    February 23-March 18, 2008

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    Hassel Smith (1915-2007) was one of the most influential Abstract Expressionist painters in San Francisco during the seminal years of the late 1940s and 1950s. Teaching at the California School of Fine Arts (CSFA; now the San Francisco Art Institute) alongside Clyfford Still and Mark Rothko, Smith developed a spontaneous, jazz-inspired style of gestural abstraction. Smith’s approach differed from the solemn sensibility of his peers with an exuberant, lightening-fast draftsmanship that led San Francisco Chronicle critic Allan Temko to describe his canvases as “Thunderbolt Paintings.”
    In 1948, Smith was included in an exhibition of abstractions at the San Francisco Museum of Art (now Modern Art), the first documented group exhibition of Abstract Expressionism in America, spawning (at least in unsympathetic quarters) the term “drip and drool school.” Four years later, Smith was forced to resign from the CSFA for his iconoclastic views and established his own atelier in his Mission Street studio.
    Partly due to his political views, Smith moved permanently to England in 1966, where he taught at the West England College of Art. He went through figurative and geometric phases before returning to his whiplash calligraphic abstractions in the late 1980s and 1990s. These later works, particularly his almost musical graphite drawings— among the last he produced before he died—demonstrate the taut certainty of Smith’s unfaltering hand.

    • Ticket Info

      Tickets: $5-$8
      Children under 6 free
      SJMA Members free

      Info Phone: 408-271-6840

    • Dates & Times

      Dates:
      February 23-March 18, 2008

      Times:
      Tue-Sun: 11am-5pm
      Closed Monday, and all holidays

    • Venue Info

      San Jose Museum of Art

      110 South Market Street San Jose, CA 95113

      Full map and directions

    • Accessibility Info
      • Wheelchair Access

    • NOTE: We do our best to ensure all information is accurate, however it's a good idea to visit the website or call the venue to verify the information.

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