Richard Smith, Original Abstract Collage Painting British American Pop Artist Richard Smith, 1976

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Richard Smith, British (1931-2016) Untitled (Abstract Composition) (1976) Gouache, crayon, charcoal and metal staples on Arches paper Hand signed lower … Read more Richard Smith, British (1931-2016) Untitled (Abstract Composition) (1976) Gouache, crayon, charcoal and metal staples on Arches paper Hand signed lower center sheet: 22 x 22 inches frame dimensions: 32 3/4 x 31 3/4 x 1 5/8 inches, wood shadow box frame Richard Smith, CBE (1931 – 2016) was an English painter and printmaker. Smith produced work in a range of styles, and is credited with extending the field of painting through his shaped, sculptural canvases. A key figure in the British development of Pop Art, Smith was chosen to represent Britain in the 1970 Venice Biennale. His explorations of form and color embraced both Pop Art and Color Field painting, making him one of the most distinctive, indefinable artists of the 1960s and ’70s. Richard Smith was born in Letchworth, Hertfordshire, the first of the planned Garden Cities. After national service with the Royal Air Force in Hong Kong, he studied at St Albans School of Art and later undertook postgraduate studies at the Royal College of Art in London from 1954 to 1957. From 1957 to 1958 he was a lecturer at Hammersmith College of Art. He was awarded a Harkness Fellowship in 1959 and travelled to America and spent several years there painting and teaching. A one-man show at the seminal Green Gallery in Manhattan in 1961 put him on the map, and in London he began showing with the Kasmin Gallery, whose other main artist was David Hockney. In 1970 he was the British representative at the Venice Biennale and in 1975 a retrospective exhibition of his work was exhibited at the Tate Gallery in London. He resettled permanently in New York in 1976. Mr. Smith was widely regarded as one of the most original and accomplished British artists of his generation, with a ravishing sense of color and formal restraint that stood in marked contrast to the more emphatic, polemical American style. Like many young British artists in the 1950s, he became entranced by the visual clamor and aggressive packaging of American commercial culture while at the Royal College of Art, where his fellow students included the Pop art pioneer Peter Blake. Influenced by painters like Mark Rothko and Kenneth Noland, he turned toward pure color, often displayed on shaped, three-dimensional canvases. These evolved, in the ’70s and ’80s, into a series of kite-like works, in which traditional wooden stretcher bars were replaced by a support structure of aluminum rods, allowing the painting to be suspended from the wall or ceiling by strings or ribbons. Mr. Smith was given a retrospective exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1966, when he was still in his 30s, and represented Britain at the 1970 Venice Biennale. In 1975 he was the subject of a retrospective at the Tate Gallery, which described him, tellingly, as “an odd artist, at once in and out of touch with the currents in the mainstream.” Smith's early work drew on packaging and advertising, which led to his being associated by some critics to the Pop Art movement. Smith stated that his work was "often physically related to hoardings or cinema screens which never present objects actual size; you could drown in a glass of beer, live in a semi-detached cigarette packet". However, his concerns were largely formal. His works from this period, such as Panatella (1961) can be seen as abstract works whose scale, handling of paint and use of colour show the influence of American colour field painters such as Mark Rothko and Sam Francis, and he tried to integrate their expressive painterly concerns with an exploration of the experience of mass culture. As an attempt to make a connection between 'high' art and popular culture, Smith's work differs from the work of his British Pop contemporaries, who were more concerned with iconography. Smith stated that "My interest is not so much in the message as in the method". Amongst the early artists that shaped the pop art movement along with Eduardo Paolozzi and Richard Hamilton in Britain, and Larry Rivers, Ray Johnson. Robert Rauschenberg and Roy Lichtenstein And Jasper Johns among others in the United States. In 1963 Smith progressed to an examination of the two-dimensional nature of painting. In Vista he added a shaped canvas extension to the rectangular canvas, and in works such as Piano and Gift Wrap progressed to extending the surface of the painting out into three-dimensional space. Despite the three-dimensional element of these works, Smith insisted on their identity as paintings: saying "Since I have always retained a wall, there is no question of a multifaceted sculptural object" Smith never produced any free standing sculpture, preferring to challenge the conventions of painting by working in an area between painting and sculpture. He also did folded, origami type works with paper clips and staples. In 1972 he exhibited the first of what are called the "kite paintings". He is a contemporary of R B Kitaj, Allen Jones, Derek Boshier, Robyn Denny, Malcolm Morley, Joe Tilson, Patrick Caulfield and Peter Phillips. and has exhibited with them. Works by Smith are in the collections of the Tate Britain, London, Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minnesota. See less