Suzanne Muchnic summarizes the achievements of Frederick Hammersly in the LA Times:
His place in art history was secured by “Four Abstract Classicists,” a 1959 traveling exhibition organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art featuring paintings by Hammersley, Lorser Feitelson, John McLaughlin and Karl Benjamin. The exhibition, which also appeared at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Institute of Contemporary Art in London and Queen’s University in Belfast, Ireland, offered the L.A. artists’ cool, crisp abstractions as a striking alternative to the reigning, highly emotional Abstract Expressionism.
The label stuck to Hammersley, but as his career evolved, his work defied confinement.
“Hard-edge is often very hard to take, coming to it cold — or, even to the practiced eye,” he wrote in an exhibition catalog.
Frederick Hammersley dies at 90; acclaimed painter (Los Angeles Times)
