Frederick Hammersley (1919 - 2009)

FREDERICK HAMMERSLEY was born in Salt Lake City, Utah in 1919. He attended Idaho State University in Pocatello, ID and then the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles, CA. After a brief stint in Europe, serving in World War II, Hammersley attended the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he met influential figures such as Constantin Brancusi, Pablo Picasso, and Georges Braque. After returning to the United States to finish his studies in Los Angeles at Chouinard, he launched his teaching career at Jepson Art Institute.  

In 1971, Hammersley stopped teaching to focus on his painting. His first major show, which gained national attention, was in 1959 at the Los Angeles Museum of Art’s landmark exhibition, “Four Abstract Classicists”. Along with Karl Benjamin, John McLaughlin, and Lorser Feitelson, Hammersley first established himself as part of the West Coast’s “hard-edge painting” movement, an answer to New York’s abstract expressionism. 

Hammersley’s work can be found in the permanent collections of Albright Knox Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Albuquerque Museum, Albuquerque, NM; Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, OH; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Fogg Museum at Harvard University, Cambridge, MA; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; The Huntington, San Marino, CA; La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, La Jolla, CA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe, NM; Oakland Museum of Art, Oakland, CA; Orange County Museum of Art, Santa Ana, CA; Roswell Museum and Art Center, Roswell, NM; San Francisco Museum of Art, San Francisco, CA; and Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, CA.

Frederick Hammersley died in 2009 in Albuquerque, NM.