In late 1954, Hassel Smith was only an intermittent visitor to San Francisco. He had left the California School of Fine Arts in the early 1950s and spent an unhappy year teaching at the University of California Los Angeles, and by the middle of the decade was painting and tending an orchard in Sonoma County. Though he was not a regular physical presence in the city, he was a powerful symbolic one.

Smith is among the most significant figures in Bay Area art after World War II. He taught through most of the '40s at California School of Fine Arts, and was an early supporter and collaborator in the growing Abstract Expressionist movement. Smith was an enthusiastic explorer of both non-objective images and figuration, concerned more with painting itself than with fashions or trends. He was a passionate experimenter, tinkering with collage and assemblage by the early 1950s. Smith was a restless type, immersed in theory and history, sensitive to the present moment and an important role model for many of the artists who followed him.

Much of Smith's work during the mid-1950s continued to explore the techniques of Abstract Expressionism, although the figure appears, disappears and then reappears again. He left the United States in the early 1960s and has been living, teaching and painting in England ever since.

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