Beyond The Frame Of Reference: Richard Smith

frame 33 December 2022

Beyond The Frame Of Reference: Richard Smith
by Sam Phillipart

Writer and editor Sam Phillipart visits Bath's Holburne Museum on a mission to discover the uncategorisable artist Richard Smith -- subject of the recent Richard Smith: Artworks 1956 - 2016 (ed. Martin Harrison).

Richard Smith: Kites runs until 17th December at the Edge Gallery, part of the Holburne Museum, Bath (University of Bath, Claverton Down Bath, BA2 7AY)

I was sat quietly considering basic geometry on a chilly train from Cardiff Central to Bath Spa.

My circular glasses, the rectangular window, the triangular prism of a sandwich packet and, crucially, the broad, square pages of Richard Smith: Artworks 1954–2013 – the impetus of my trip and the reason for my abstract musings.

The shape of each these objects conforms to a common-sense rationale: they were the way they were simply because the way they were made them easiest to use. They were that way because, put basically, they were supposed to be. I was to find that Richard Smith and his artworks, some of which bend and contort their frame, some of which exude intense abstraction, others which appear suspended in flight, elude such easy convention.

Indeed, the more I read in those square pages, shuttling on my way past Bristol, the more I found that Smith, thought one of the most celebrated and prodigious artists of his time, had spent his career determined to resist being put in one category or another. Here was a British artist who first made his reputation in America, an abstract expressionist celebrated as one of the fathers of Pop Art, a painter whose works would often appear more like sculptures, a figure whose fame initially surpassed his contemporaries then ebbed away.

Stepping off the train, I concluded that my lesson in basic geometry would do me no good. Sometimes there weren’t little boxes to put everything in. The Black Fox, a little Georgian pub on the journey to the gallery, seemed an appropriate place to re-consider the dimensions at work and get my bearings.

Richard Smith was born in Letchworth in 1924. After national service with the Royal Air Force in Hong Kong, he studied at St Albans School of Art and later undertook a post-graduate at the Royal College of Art in London in the mid-fifties. He counted Peter Blake and Joe Tilson as friends and would, like them, became associated with the British Pop Art. The three shared a fascination with American consumer culture – music, design, movies, fashion (they sported American-style clothes) – trappings still exotic to greyness of post-war Britain. Vibrancy of colour and energetic gesture informed Smith’s early work, conforming, somewhat uncharacteristically for him, to a style described then as ‘action painting’; it seems clear in retrospect that he took inspiration from a Tate exhibition of American Abstract Expressionists in 1956.

His pivot away from the European tradition to the bracing novelty of America was itself a pioneering shift of perspective in British art. Smith would get a close-up view when, in 1959, he was awarded a Harkness Fellowship, spending the bulk of his time across the Atlantic in New York. It was here that the strange convergence of Pop and Abstract arts would make inroads in his work. A piece such as Lee I (1961), named after the clothing label, is an example of the new visual language Smith developed in the crucible of post-war consumption and consumerism. By making subtle, nearing ethereal, strokes of white across a stark blue canvas, reminiscent of the stitching across the coarse denim material, Smith presents us with a close up of a figure, and – at once – abstracts it.

Lee I, 1961 (courtesy of Flowers Gallery, London) © Richard Smith Foundation

By my second Guinness, I had begun to calculate.

Smith, as it happened, had enjoyed early access to Marshall McLuhan’s now-seminal analysis of American advertising The Mechanical Bride, in which the writer sought to make readers ‘observe consciously’ the ways in which new advertising and contemporary culture operated on a collective unconscious.

Perhaps instead of abstracting a recognisable, denim-clad figure, Smith in Lee I is gesturing toward the ephemerality of advertising, of the short flicker of promise that cool-new-jeans offer and the new elevation of popular culture into Culture with a capital-C.

No’, I decided, ‘this is not a picture of a single pair of jeans, but rather a visualisation (if such a thing is possible) of our collective unconsciousness receiving the instruction to buy them’. It is Smith transmitting McCluhan’s message through the medium of paint, rather than the usual billboards, television, or magazines.

Smith neither extoled nor denigrated these insights. He positioned himself as a contemporary consumer, a self-conscious observer of mass culture. He went so far as to state publicly that ‘shopping is my hobby’, and that his interest was ‘not so much in the message as in the method’. This concern with method, precipitated a turn in his focus away from external references like jeans or cigarette packets (e.g., Packet of Ten, 1962) and toward the essential, undying preoccupations of the form of painting: colour, perception, and dimension.

It was time to recalibrate and to resupply. I was pleased with myself.

I returned to the bar.

Sat down again, I took my phone out and pursued Smith online. He appeared to be having something of a ‘moment’ – a concurrent exhibition of his ‘60s work is currently on in London, at the Flowers Gallery in the East End. Featuring a selection of Smith’s three-dimensional canvases, it includes a work titled A Whole Year and Half a Day III (1966). A great example of his focus on colour and perspective, Smith pushes the painting as far out into three dimensions as it will go without quite literally becoming a sculpture. An innovation in postmodern painting that explores the liminalities of the canvas, it seems once again to probe exactly how a ‘painting’ might work. Comparable perhaps to Lucio Fontana’s Buchi and Tagli, paintings that sought to repudiate the virtual space of traditional easel painting through innovative techniques, Smith’s canvasses reach out from across the 2D plane to challenge the exactitude of ‘painting’, and how limited our assumptions about the form can be.

A Whole Year and Half a Day III (1966), courtesy of Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert Photo © Andrew Smart, A.C. Cooper Ltd.

Steeled enough, I was ready now to meet these strange paintings in the flesh. I set off to the Edge Gallery, anxious by now to see the combination of Smith’s early playful pop paintings and his later canvas bending. Smith’s ‘Kites’ found a huge audience between 1975 and 1993, popping up in in numerous airports, corporate buildings and public spaces across America and Britain. The last was, fittingly enough, installed in Hong Kong.

Smith made his kites in the 1970s at his studio in the village of East Tytherton, near Chippenham. Releasing the canvas from its stretcher to make loose, unframed works, the spectacle of seeing them in person is owed as much to gravity itself as it is to colour, dimension, or paint.

Lyrically beautiful and formally inventive, The Shuttle (1975), first shown at Smith’s major retrospective exhibition at the Tate Gallery in 1975, hangs 7 metres high and 9 metres long, and must be one of the largest paintings ever made in the UK. Appropriately enough, I witness its enormity today suspended in the geometrically shaped Edge Gallery.

The Shuttle gave me the impression of the blue whale that hangs above in the Natural History Museum at first glance. I must remind myself that what I am looking at is a painting. My mind pulls in different directions. I want to sit and consider the brushstrokes and the meaning behind the colour, like a Rothko. I want to spend a moment in the suggestion of flight and light-heartedness, like Koons. But ultimately, I am overcome by the subtle breaking of sense, gravity, and geometry.

Richard Smith is not easy to categorise, there is no shape I can neatly fit him in to. I can only think over the words of critic Barbara Rose in her introduction to Smith’s 1975 Tate retrospective:

‘Richard Smith is an odd artist, at once in and out of touch with the currents of the mainstream…his work has in some way contacted every variety of contemporary innovation, yet Smith has sworn no unconditional allegiance to any school or category or style. This duality – the ability to be au courant and aloof at the same time – is typical of Smith’s personality as well of his art. Because of the inherent tension involved in balancing simultaneously two (or more) essentially antithetical attitudes, his work continues to remain mysteriously and provocatively ambiguous.’