CALIFORNIA HARD-EDGE PAINTING
Jules Langsner [Director/essay]
Jules Langsner [essay]: CALIFORNIA HARD-EDGE PAINTING. Balboa, CA: The Pavilion Gallery, 1964. Original edition [subtitled An Exhibition Presented by the Fine Arts Patrons of Newport Harbor and Directed by Jules Langsner]. Oblong quarto. Printed and stapled self wrappers. 32 pp. 22 black and white reproductions. Exhibition catalog of 59 works with Artists’ portraits, and short biographies. Uncoated wrappers lightly toned, and mild diagonal crease to upper corner, but a very good copy of this rare, important catalog.
9 x 6 saddle-stitched catalog with 32 pages and 22 black and white reproductions, issued in conjunction with an Exhibition of the same name at the Pavilion Gallery, Balboa, CA from March 11 to April 12, 1964. The abstract classicists painted forms that are, in Langsner’s words, “finite, flat, rimmed by a hard clean edge…not intended to evoke in the spectator any recollections of specific shapes he may have encountered in some other connection. They are autonomous shapes, sufficient unto themselves”—that is to say, pure abstractions.”
Features Artists’ portraits, short biographies and two finely printed halftone plates by Florence Arnold, John Barbour, Larry Bell, Karl Benjamin, John Coplans, Lorser Feitelson, June Harwood, Frederick Hammersley, Helen Lundeberg, John Mclaughlin, and Dorothy Waldman.
“Members of the California Hard-Edge movement weren’t part of an official school or club. They had no manifesto and their works often differed greatly from each other. LA Times art critic, Jules Langsner, was the first to formally label the type of Californian art that emerged in the late 1950s seemingly in response to New York Abstract Expressionism. In his opinion a handful of artists including John McLaughlin and Karl Benjamin, all shared a distinctively “impersonal” approach to paint application. Whereas Abstract Expressionism emphasized the emotional weight of gestural forms, these mid-century California painters regarded this style as too romantic and instead engaged the dramatic interaction of simple color fields and clean lines. While painters across the country began to adopt similar methods, California remained the epicenter for the genre. In 1959, Langsner organized and curated the show Four Abstract Classicists at LACMA, featuring John McLaughlin, Karl Benjamin, Frederick Hammersley, and Lorser Feitelson. The show notarized the movement and drew attention to the ways in which it had descended from the older traditions of Op-Art and Russian Constructivism.” — Peter Loughrey
From the Los Angeles County Museum of Art: “Four Abstract Classicists features hard-edge abstractions from LACMA’s collection by Karl Benjamin, Lorser Feitelson, Frederick Hammersley, and John McLaughlin. The term “abstract classicists” was coined in 1959 by curator and critic Jules Langsner to define these four southern California painters whose work he grouped in a seminal exhibition that year at the Los Angeles County Museum in Exposition Park (prior to LACMA’s existence as an independent art museum). The work exemplified the generational shift in the late 1950s and early 60s from the energetic brushwork of Abstract Expressionism to the cooler aesthetics of Pop Art and Minimalism.
“Following the 1959 show, the term “abstract classicism” (a designation meant to signal these painters’ differences from the abstract expressionism of artists such as Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline) continued to be used in reference to Benjamin, Feitelson, Hammersley, and McLaughlin. Interestingly, however, the question of who actually conceived of the 1959 show and its title has been a subject of some contention.
“In 1975, an innocuous essay by Paul Karlstrom (who was then the West Coast–area director of the Archives of American Art) for LAICA Journal, a magazine published by the now-defunct Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art, mentioned in passing the archives’ acquisition of papers belonging to Jules Langsner, the Los Angeles critic who served as curator of the original Four Abstract Classicists. In response, art historian Peter Selz wrote a letter to Karlstrom asserting it was he, and not Langsner, who initiated the show and suggested its title. Selz’s letter was published in the following issue of LAICA Journal, along with a response by June Harwood, Langsner’s widow (in which she refuted Selz’s claim), and a reprint of a 1959 letter from Benjamin to art critic Sidney Tillim crediting Langsner with forming the idea for the “abstract classicists” group.
“Weighing the various claims and counterclaims about who should get credit, art critic Peter Plagens, writing in the same issue of LAICA Journal, offered his assessment—and, it would seem, a final word on the subject: “Although no one can say for sure who first put the bug in whose ear, especially (and perhaps deliberately) so long after Langsner’s death, it seems “abstract classicism” is nobody’s baby, dating from 1951 or earlier. As to the conception/organization, my understanding is that Karl Benjamin brought Jules Langsner to meet Peter Selz, then teaching at Pomona, and Selz offered the college as a site for the show; Feitelson countered that it ought to be done in a first-class museum in Los Angeles or San Francisco or not at all, the artists agreed, and Selz’s ‘participation’ ended there. As to his conceiving the show, I managed to contact two of the participants, and their answers were, in a word, ‘bullshit!’”
The copy on offer from the library of Peter Selz.