[1] During childhood, because of his mother’s tuberculosis and the consequent search for a suitable climate for her health, Smith’s family moved home regularly.

"Lautrec, van Gogh, Gauguin, Seurat, Monet, Cézanne ... Miró, Brâncuşi, Léger, Duchamp, Matisse, Picasso, Mondrian, Dalí ...

"[3] There he studied under the artists Otis Oldfield, Spencer Macky, and Lee Randolph,[4] and crucially he was also permitted to join the "elite"[2] painting and drawing class of his mentor, Maurice Sterne, who exerted a considerable influence on him.

[5] Smith stated in 1987 in a brief memoir: "I have no hesitation in saying that to whatever extent my intellect has been engaged in the joys and mysteries of transferring visual observations in three dimensions into meaningful two-dimensional marks and shapes, I owe to Sterne.

In 1941 he held a group exhibition with Lloyd Wolf at the San Francisco Museum of Art[8] and the same year he obtained an Abraham Rosenberg Foundation Traveling Fellowship for independent study, and moved to the Mother Lode region in the Sierra Nevada of California.

[12][13] In 1944 the FSA was phased out and Smith was transferred to the United States Forest Service and assigned as a log scaler at the headwaters of the McKenzie River in Oregon where he worked until the end of the war.

Almost immediately, a month after the Japanese surrender, he was given a five-week one man show at the Iron Pot café and simultaneously found a post at the California School of Fine Arts as a substitute instructor in a lithography class.

[14] Douglas MacAgy had become Director of the School and in a process of revitalisation[15] invited Smith to remain on the staff, but now as one of a distinguished group of instructors in the painting department.

The newly progressive faculty included Clyfford Still, Edward Corbett, David Park, Elmer Bischoff, Jean Varda, Walter Landor, Dorr Bothwell and Ansel Adams, among many other significant artists, filmmakers, photographers and designers.

[4] Since his student years Smith had painted mostly in a "figurative, Post-Impressionist" style[5] but he was deeply influenced by a 1947 exhibition by Clyfford Still at the Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco.

[9] He immediately began to develop what the San Francisco critic Thomas Albright described as "violently physical, improvisatory, jazz-related action painting ... rooted in certain aspects of Clyfford Still's abstraction, but ... recast as mercurial, exuberant, sometimes flamboyantly improvisational events".

[9] Amid the hotbed of postwar West Coast talent at the School of Arts, Smith "emerged as one of the leading abstract painters in the San Francisco Bay Area".

[16] The writer Bruce Nixon, in one of his biographical essays on Smith, claimed that the artist's work in the postwar decade revealed "an idiomatic stylist whose energy, insouciance, and lively intelligence very nearly encapsulate[d] the character of San Francisco painting in those years".

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.

"[17][18] In May 1947 Jermayne MacAgy curated Smith's first major one-artist exhibition – Paintings – at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco.

[1] As well as teaching at the CSFA, Smith also taught at the left-wing California Labor School, and at the African–American Booker T. Washington Community Center in San Francisco.

"[11] A two-man exhibition, Paintings and Sculpture by Richard Diebenkorn and Hassel Smith followed at the Lucian Labaudt Art Gallery in Gough Street, San Francisco the next year.

[21] Smith spent 1952 and some of 1953 teaching arts and crafts from kindergarten to the sixth grade at Presidio Hill School, an independent establishment which welcomed diversity in race, faith, nationality, and politics.

His work from these years, referred to by critic Allan Temko as the "Thunderbolt period", had a significant impact on artists along the entire West Coast of the United States.

Smith was one of the few artists, along with Sonia Gechtoff, Jay DeFeo and Bruce Conner, then based in northern California, to be exhibited in Los Angeles by Irving Blum and Walter Hopps at the Ferus Gallery during the late fifties and early sixties.

Group exhibitions with Elmer Bischoff, David Park, Richard Diebenkorn and Ed Corbett followed swiftly, during the late 1940s and early 1950s.

Smith was included in the significant 1955 exhibition, Action Painting, at the Merry-Go-Round Building in Santa Monica, California curated by Walter Hopps.

In 1964 Smith was invited to participate in the Whitney Annual exhibition in New York and received a second retrospective at San Francisco State University.

"[30] (1980) [...] as far as I am concerned I'm bringing the painting into much closer relation with music, the dance with verse, and the various discursive art forms in which rhythmic sequences play a role.