Hassel Smith was born in in Sturgis, Michigan to Hassel Wendell Smith Sr, a sales manager for the Kirsch drapery hardware company, and later working in advertising, and Helen Adams Smith, both college graduates. He became an Eagle Scout at Smith attended Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois , from He was initially a Chemistry major but was defeated in learning German, then a requirement for a science career. He changed to Art History and English Literature, the art course requiring the practise as well as the study of art.
He later claimed that at this point began "my actual art career, my love affair with painting". I was wowed by them all. In Smith won a scholarship to Princeton University for graduate studies in the history of art but after the summer that year spent taking courses at the California School of Fine Art now San Francisco Art Institute he decided to continue studying there despite finding it to be, in his words, "a debutante kind of place On leaving the School of Fine Arts in the late s Smith began to paint professionally, working outdoors in San Francisco and in the Bay Area, but had few prospects of selling his paintings.
Along with other San Francisco painters he showed and sold some of his work at the Iron Pot restaurant at Montgomery Street. His work there until the end of was mostly made en plein air outdoors painting landscapes, [ 5 ] though here he also did his first figurative painting. In October during peacetime military conscription Smith registered as a conscientious objector but when the United States joined World War II Smith's physical examination classified him as 4-F and deemed him not acceptable for military service so his conscientious objection petition was not ruled upon.
There, while not on duty, he made powerful, rapid, documentary portraits of the rural poor picking cotton and other crops. In the summer of , as the war ended, Smith was released from his community service and returned to the Bay Area. Students like Frank Lobdell and Richard Diebenkorn , just returned from the war and benefitting from the G. Bill , progressed to membership of the faculty during Smith's time at the School. Since his student years Smith had painted mostly in a "figurative, Post-Impressionist" style [ 5 ] but he was deeply influenced by a exhibition by Clyfford Still at the Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco.
Smith later said his "conversion" to Abstract Expressionism had been "instantaneous" when he saw Still's work. The artists had no electricity on their floors, and the poet and painter Lawrence Ferlinghetti , who took over Smith's studio when he left, describes there being no heat except for a small pot-bellied stove.
