Hassel Smith's 1944 “Self-Portrait,” torn out of a spiral drawing pad, emanates restless energy. Anchored by bursts of calligraphic brushwork that let naked paper peek through, it is both vivid and self-assured. At first glance it appears incomplete; a metaphor for the partial image that art lovers still have of Smith, a protean artist who has been called an “Underground Legend.” According the arts blogger Tyler Green, Smith’s works “...are in the collections of lots of museums you know and love, but they rarely make it out of storage.”

Miraculously, with a few final, dazzling strokes of over-drawing — a dot for an eye, an arching eyebrow and a slashing mouth — Smith managed pull the portrait into focus and endow it with his characteristic intensity. Hassel Smith may have been restless, both as an artist and as a man, but he had a power of character that made him formidable. His stepson, artist Mark Harrington recalls “He had a wonderfully robust moral authority that was leavened by mischievous humor and disciplined by an acute intellectual rigor.”