PALM SPRINGS, Calif. – Palm Springs Art Museum has announced an exhibition featuring the work of the innovative painter, Leon Polk Smith (American, 1906-1996), whose significant contributions to 20th-century art are becoming increasingly recognized. The exhibition, Leon Polk Smith: 1945-1962, will run from March 26 to August 28 in the museum’s main downtown location.

This presentation focuses on paintings and works on paper from the 1950s when Smith’s mature style began to flourish. Using a vocabulary of brilliant colors and simple, minimal forms, he challenged some of the most fundamental conventions of painting by dissolving the distinction between foreground and background and freeing his paintings from the boundaries of a rectangular format.

Born to half-Cherokee parents, Smith grew up and worked on his family’s farm in Oklahoma. At age 27, Smith became fascinated by art, enrolled in a painting class during his senior year in college and decided to become an artist. In 1952, at age forty-six, Smith moved full time to New York City. Soon afterwards, his groundbreaking paintings attracted the attention of art dealers and several ambitious young abstract artists.

Though Smith was never as widely recognized as some of his peers, he was a pioneer of Hard-Edge Painting, a movement characterized by clean, unvarying, sharply refined fields of color.

Leon Polk Smith: 1945-1962 is an expanded version of Leon Polk Smith: Big Form, Big Space, curated by Nigel Prince and organized by the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver.

The Palm Springs Art Museum presentation is curated by Adam Lerner, JoAnn McGrath Executive Director/CEO. Special thanks to the Leon Polk Smith Foundation. This season’s exhibitions are sponsored by the Herman & Faye Sarkowsky Charitable Foundation and Yvonne & Steve (in memoriam) Maloney.

Visit the website of the Palm Springs Art Museum and see its dedicated page for Leon Polk Smith: 1945-1962.