The show featured the work of Karl Benjamin, Lorser Feitelson, Frederick Hammersley, and John McLaughlin.
The term “abstract classicists” was coined in 1959 by Langsner to define these four southern California painters.
Renamed West Coast Hard-edge, the revised version later traveled to the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London and Queen's University in Belfast, Northern Ireland.
"[3] "Four Abstract Classicists reveals, in retrospect, not merely four senior moderns who reduced their painting to precise, flat profundities, but a current of sensibility in the esthetic climate of Los Angeles," critic Peter Plagens wrote in 1974.
As he saw it, the hard-edge style rose from Los Angeles’ "desert air, youthful cleanliness, spatial expanse, architectural tradition".