Hammersley (Frederick) sketchbooks, notes, prints, and working materials, 1948-1980

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Summary

Title:

Frederick Hammersley sketchbooks, prints, notes, and working materials

Dates:

1948-1980

Creators:

Hammersley, Frederick, 1919-2009

Abstract:

A set of sketchbooks, notebooks, lithographs, notes, and working materials by California hard-edge abstract painter, Frederick Hammersley.

Extent:

6.5 Linear Feet (7 boxes)

Language:

Collection material is in English.

Preferred citation:

Frederick Hammersley sketchbooks, prints, notes, and working materials, 1948-1980, The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, Accession no. 2013.M.33.

http://hdl.handle.net/10020/cifa2013m33

Background

Scope and content:

Hammerley's hard-edge aesthetic and precise working method appear in a range of media, including notes and lists, sketches in pencil or paint, lithographs, and computer prints. The sketchbooks, notebooks and paint sample charts provide meticulous technical details outlining the materials and processes used for nearly every painting Hammersley produced and document the formal experimentation that preceded many of his paintings. An early lithography project from 1949-50 and set of test prints from the Computer Drawings series of 1968-69, as well as his copious notes on potential titles for his paintings, reveal other facets of his methodical serial formal explorations. The collection also includes a small un-stretched canvas that is considered Hammersley's first hunch painting.

Biographical / historical:

One of the founding members of hard-edge abstraction, Frederick Hammersley was born in !919 in Salt Lake City and moved with his family to Idaho and San Francisco. He studied art at the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles from 1940-42, and from 1946-47, serving from 1942-45 as an army sargeant in World War II, stationed in Paris. From 1945-46 he studied at the Ecole des Beaux Arts. After completing his degree at Chouinard, Hammersley continued his studies at Jepson Art Institute from 1947-50.

Hammersley was an art instructor for more than twenty years. At the same time, he explored a range of media, including oil painting, watercolor, drawing, printmaking, photography, sculpture, mixed media and computer drawings. He first gained critical recognition in 1959 in a show at Los Angeles County Museum of Art titled Four Abstract Classicists. In the catalog for that show, the critic Jules Langsner first used the term "hard-edge" to describe the painters' use of flat, colored shapes with defined edges.

Within the media of painting, Hammersely had three principal series: hunch paintings, which were developed intuitively from an initial shape; organic paintings, composed of curving, hand-drawn shapes outlined in pencil and filled in with color; and geometric paintings, based on a grid, in which complexity is acheived through extensive development of minor variations on a theme. Each geometric and organic painting is assigned a title chosen from pages of phrases Hammersley recorded in a stream of consciousness process in response to a completed canvas. He felt that the titles were an integral part of the work and also increased the viewer's accessibility to the paintings.

Beginning in the mid-1990s, Hammersley's work enjoyed resurgent critical interest and a degree of commercial success. He died in 2009.

Acquisition information:

Gift of Frederick Hammersley Foundation in 2013.

Processing information:

The collection was processed and described by Annette Leddy in 2013. Daniel Powazek enhanced description for the Sketchbook series in 2023.

Arrangement:

Arranged by type of material in rough chronological order.

Physical location:

Request access to the physical materials described in this inventory through the catalog record for this collection. Click here for the access policy.

Rules or conventions:

Describing Archives: A Content Standard

Indexed terms

Subjects:: Painting, Abstract -- California -- Los Angeles
Artists -- California -- Los Angeles
Computer drawings -- California -- 20th century
Lithographs -- California -- 20th century
Sketchbooks -- California -- 20th century
Names:: Hammersley, Frederick, 1919-2009

About this collection guide

Collection Guide Author:: Annette Leddy
Date Encoded:: This finding aid was produced using ArchivesSpace on 2023-10-10 17:08:48 -0700 .

Access and use

Restrictions:: Open for use by qualified researchers.
Terms of access:: Contact Library Reproductions and Permissions.