Abstract artist
Frederick Hammersley, a critically acclaimed painter who rose to fame in 1959 as one of four Los Angeles-based "abstract classicists" and spent the next 50 years bringing an intuitive, personal touch to hard-edge abstraction, died May 31 in Albuquerque, N.M., where he had lived and worked since 1968, said his sister, Susie H. Stone.
Mr. Hammersley's 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 Mr. Hammersley, Lorser Feitelson, John McLaughlin and Karl Benjamin. The exhibition, which also appeared at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Institute of Contemporary Art in London and Queen's University in Belfast, Ireland, offered the West Coast artists' cool, crisp abstractions as a striking alternative to the reigning emotional style of abstract expressionism.
