''Four Abstract Classicists'' was a landmark exhibition organized by Jules Langsner in 1959. The show featured the work of

Karl Benjamin Karl Stanley Benjamin (December 29, 1925 – July 26, 2012) was an Americans, American painter of vibrant geometric abstractions, who rose to fame in 1959 as one of four Los Angeles–based Abstract Classicists and subsequently produced a c ...

Lorser Feitelson Lorser Feitelson (1898–1978) was an artist known as one of the founding fathers of Southern California–based hard-edge painting. Born in Savannah, Georgia, Feitelson was raised in New York City, where his family relocated shortly after his b ...

, Frederick Hammersley, and John McLaughlin. The term “abstract classicists” was coined in 1959 by Langsner to define these four southern California painters. __TOC__

Exhibition

The exhibition opened at the San Francisco Museum of Art (now the

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) is a modern art, modern and contemporary art museum and nonprofit organization located in San Francisco, California. SFMOMA was the first museum on the West Coast devoted solely to 20th-century art ...

), and then travelled to the

Los Angeles County Museum of Art The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is an art museum located on Wilshire Boulevard in the Miracle Mile vicinity of Los Angeles. LACMA is on Museum Row, adjacent to the La Brea Tar Pits (George C. Page Museum). LACMA was founded in 1961 ...

in Exposition Park (prior to LACMA's existence as an independent art museum). Renamed ''West Coast Hard-edge'', the revised version later traveled to the

Institute of Contemporary Arts The Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) is an modernism, artistic and cultural centre on The Mall (London), The Mall in London, just off Trafalgar Square. Located within Nash House, part of Carlton House Terrace, near the Duke of York Steps a ...

in London and Queen's University in Belfast, Northern Ireland. In the exhibition catalog, Langsner described Abstract Classicist painting as "Hard-edge painting" in which "color and shape are one and the same entity. Form gains its existence through color and color its being through form." "Four Abstract Classicists reveals, in retrospect, not merely four senior moderns who reduced their painting to precise, flat profundities, but a current of sensibility in the esthetic climate of Los Angeles," critic

Peter Plagens Peter Plagens (born 1941) is an American artist, art critic, and novelist based in New York City.Online Archive of CaliforniaPeter Plagens papers, 1938-2014 Retrieved January 18, 2018.Smith, Roberta''The New York Times'', February 7, 2018. Retrie ...

wrote in 1974. As he saw it, the hard-edge style rose from Los Angeles’ "desert air, youthful cleanliness, spatial expanse, architectural tradition".

Artists

(1898, Savannah, GA – 1978, Los Angeles, California) * John McLaughlin (May 21, 1898 – March 22, 1976) * Frederick Hammersley (January 5, 1919 – May 31, 2009) *

(December 29, 1925 – July 26, 2012)

References

{{Reflist American art Contemporary art exhibitions