The exhibition opened at the San Francisco Museum of Art (now the
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art), and then travelled to the
Los Angeles County Museum of Art in Exposition Park (prior to LACMA's existence as an independent art museum). Renamed
West Coast Hard-edge, the revised version later traveled to the
Institute of Contemporary Arts in London and
Queen's University in Belfast, Northern Ireland. In the exhibition catalog, Langsner described Abstract Classicist painting as "Hard-edge painting" in which "color and shape are one and the same entity. Form gains its existence through color and color its being through form." "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". ==Artists==