Frederick Hammersley epitomizes hard-edge midcentury Los Angeles painting, his reputation having been established in Jules Langsner’s legendary 1959 show “Four Abstract Classicists.” Hammersley lived in LA until 1968, when he moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico. The following year he learned Art1, a new computer program written for artists by Katherine Nash and Richard Williams at the University of New Mexico. Hammersley used the program—entering designs in early IBM computers via punch cards—to make what he dubbed “computer drawings,” which were realized with line printers. Often consisting of series of ovals and dots, these printouts were appended with the artist’s typically spirited titles (e.g., SLEEPING PILL IT’S NOT, #27, 1969, for a stack of wavy lines composed of dots). These works are a revelation and reason enough for justifying the recent show of some fifty objects at the Huntington. But “Frederick Hammersley: To Paint Without Thinking” did more: The exhibition argued that it was the methodology of the artist’s painting process—ordered by rules delimiting the aleatory possibilities within their enabling strictures—that served as the basis for his apprehension of the nascent technology and allowed him to put it to use with such facility so immediately. These later works on paper evidence a morphologically dissimilar yet structurally continuous line from his earlier and better-known paintings.

In fact, the presentation was precipitated by the Huntington’s 2013 acquisition of the cool and crisp oil painting See Saw, #3,1966, a graphic, quilt-like pattern in black and white that plays surprisingly well with the American collection nearby. Other works from the late ’60s—such as the great Couplet, #15, 1965/1968, an impossible illusion of interlocking planes—were included as well. The curators, James Glisson and Alan Phenix, additionally made extensive use of archival materials from the Getty Conservation Institute (where Phenix works as a conservator). These sketchbooks, notebooks, aggregations of color swatches, and “Painting Books”—illustrated inventories in which the artist detailed his creative system—reveal Hammersley’s means of achieving a composition to have been both formally iterative and materially methodical. Some pages display diminutive images in graphite, colored pencil, or ballpoint pen, all of which he would potentially scale up in oil. Others quite forthrightly show possibilities that proved stillborn, passed over for those he deemed more successful. (One sheet relating to Couplet, #15 bears a small check mark above its template.)

The exhibition also incorporated forty-five stone lithographs printed on colored paper, which Hammersley made in 1949 and 1950 after he was repatriated following his service in World War II. (During this time, he began teaching at the Pasadena Art Museum and nearby Pomona College and Chouinard Art Institute.) There are hundreds of these small three-by-three-inch prints, which he organized on four-by-four-inch grids. These studies feature visually warping and undulating patterns overlaid on grounds ranging from cream to tangerine to rose. The various colored papers on view here suggest an array of potential, even as the appropriation of the grid would seemingly restrict it. That they represent the origin of what Glisson describes in the museum and catalogue as a “rule-based practice” is clear enough—some of the computer works comprise checkerboards made up of symbols of various overlap-effected densities. Taken to a conclusion, what these lithographs propose is what the paintings and computer drawings likewise model—mechanisms of control both bodily and prosthetically initiated and freely yet willfully obeyed. The curatorial decision to forgo chronological installation in favor of a temporally intermixed space emphasized this analogous objective. Rules manifested throughout as authorship. Although the early computer images spatially bracketed the corpus installed at the Huntington, in actuality Hammersley singularly focused on painting in his later years. This might account for why the machine pieces have largely been sequestered into histories of computer art when they are better understood as formative within Hammersley’s painting practice.

—Suzanne Hudson