Working quietly at his home in Claremont, California, he developed a rich vocabulary of colors and hard-edge shapes in masterful compositions of tightly balanced repose or high-spirited energy.

[3] With no formal education in art and no thought of becoming an artist, Benjamin married Beverly Jean Paschke, and began teaching in an elementary school in Bloomington, California, in 1949.

He started a family (daughters Beth Marie and Kris Ellen and son Bruce Lincoln), moved to Claremont in 1952, and subsequently taught in Chino for the next 30 years.

Also featuring the work of Lorser Feitelson, John McLaughlin and Frederick Hammersley, the 1959–60 exhibition was viewed as Los Angeles' answer to Abstract Expressionism.

Renamed "West Coast Hard-Edge," the revised version later traveled to the Institute of Contemporary Art in London and Queen's University in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

"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" and an optimistic belief in a refined, spiritually charged art that could fulfill human needs for visual and intellectual pleasure.

Multi Triangles (Untitled # 26) from 1969, in the collection of the Honolulu Museum of Art, demonstrates the artist's hard-edge painting style applied to strict geometric abstraction.