Dave Hickey, the MacArthur award–winning critic and University of Las Vegas professor known for boosting the careers of young artists, has lately been throwing his weight behind Los Angeles–based painters whose hard-edge geometric work was popular way back in the 1950s and 1960s: Karl Benjamin and Frederick Hammersley, both now in their 80s, as well as John McLaughlin and Lorser Feitelson, who died in 1976 and 1978, respectively.

These artists, the so-called Abstract Classicists, were working a few years before Kenneth Noland and Ellsworth Kelly. They all painted with brushes but disguised evidence of the strokes. Whether rendering pristine stripes of primary hues with military precision, as Benjamin did, or tracing serpentine lines of searing color like Feitelson’s, they aimed to convey emotion: joy or discovery, sorrow or bliss. “They were making expressive work, but by means other than those of the Abstract Expressionists,” says Hickey.

As collectors begin to see things Hickey’s way, these works are fetching record prices. Three years ago, a good-size painting from the 1960s by Feitelson sold for $30,000 at most, according to Louis Stern, an art dealer in West Hollywood who now represents the estates of Feitelson and his wife, Helen Lundeberg. The same painting today would be $70,000 to $80,000.

Lundeberg’s paintings, hard-edge abstractions as well, have seen their values shoot up in the past year too, surprising even Stern. Naiad #2, a 1968 acrylic on canvas in shades of aqua and green, was estimated at $1,000 to $1,500 by Christie’s in a June sale last year but went for nearly 20 times that, at $19,200.

Stern also represents Benjamin, who lives in Pomona, California. His brightly colored abstractions were the subject of a retrospective at the nearby Claremont Museum of Art last summer. The largest paintings are now $40,000 to $60,000, and his work sold well when shown at New York’s Washburn Gallery last spring.

Hammersley moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 1968 and is represented by Charlotte Jackson Gallery, in Santa Fe. Jackson says that one of Hammersley’s 30-by-40-inch paintings from the early 1960s would be priced at $80,000, and she has sold his works for $100,000. Three years ago, they would have been $25,000.

Over the years, McLaughlin had the most financial success of the group, thanks to his representation by André Emmerich, in New York. His #21, from 1959, a work of black and white vertical stripes, was estimated at between $20,000 and $30,000 in a sale at Christie’s last February; it went for $57,600.

Certainly, general market inflation is at work here. Yet Hickey claims the artists are drawing attention because of their influence on younger geometric abstractionists practicing today, including his former student Tim Bavington, whose work was recently bought by the Museum of Modern Art.

Says Hickey, “It’s like blues in the ’70s, when the Rolling Stones wanted to play with Muddy Waters.”

"Geometry Class" originally appeared in the January 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's January 2008 Table of Contents.