ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. - Abstract painter Frederick Hammersley, one of the Los Angeles "Abstract Classicists," died May 31 in Albuquerque, his sister said. He was 90.

The work of Hammersley and three other painters called the Abstract Classicists gained fame through a 1959 exhibition organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

The geometric abstract paintings, described at the time as hard-edged, also appeared at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Institute of Contemporary Art in London and Queen's University in Belfast, Ireland.

Interest in his work revived in the last decade. L.A. Louver Gallery in Venice, Calif., showed his paintings in 1999 and 2002; the Laguna Art Museum in 2000 presented a traveling exhibition organized by the Museum of Fine Arts in Santa Fe; and the Pomona (Calif.) College Museum of Art held a retrospective in 2007.

Hammersley was born Jan. 5, 1919, in Salt Lake City and grew up there and in Idaho and San Francisco. He was stationed in Paris with the Army during World War II. As the war wound down, he took courses at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris.

When Hammersley returned to the U.S., he studied for a year at Chouinard, now California Institute of the Arts, and three years at the now-defunct Jepson Art Institute in Los Angeles.

He was an art professor in Southern California for about 20 years. Hammersley moved to Albuquerque in 1968 to take a job as assistant professor of art at the University of New Mexico. He resigned in 1971 to devote himself to painting.