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Hassel Smith, Bird Lover, 1957. Oil on canvas. Collection of San Jose Museum of Art. Museum purchase with funds contributed by the Museum’s Collections Committee with additional funds donated by the Starbird Family, in memory of Carolyn Starbird and her amazing service to the San Jose Museum of Art. 2007.23
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.”