Richard Smith, Abstract Minimalist Color Silkscreen Print Richard Smith On The Bowery Pop Art, 1969-1971

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Richard Smith
On the Bowery, 1969 - 1971
silkscreen on Schoeller's Parole Paper, edition of 100 + 20 A.P.
25.5 … Read more Richard Smith
On the Bowery, 1969 - 1971
silkscreen on Schoeller's Parole Paper, edition of 100 + 20 A.P.
25.5 x 25.5 inches, signed, numbered 21/100
Screenprint in color on wove paper
Hand signed, published by Edition Domberger, Bonlanden, West Germany (with their blindstamp)
Provenance: Collection of Tom Levine

On the Bowery, 1971. The portfolio consists of nine screenprints in colors (one with mylar collage), on wove paper, by representative artists of the Pop Art period. Cy Twombly, Robert Ryman, Will Insley, Robert Indiana, Les Levine, John Willenbecher, Charles Hinman, Richard Smith, Gerald Laing, and John Giorno. The ten artists were photographed by Eliot Elisofon (1911-1973), who also lived on the Bowery and was a founding member of the Photo League in 1936.

In the late 40s and 50s Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko, Fernand Leger and Jean Dubuffet, among others, had studios on the Bowery, and Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline and Reginald Marsh worked nearby. In the early 60s, Louise Nevelson took a place on Mott Street just off the Bowery and was joined not long after by other artists attracted by the lofts for reasonable rents and the relaxed, small-time quality of the area. - William Katz, from the introduction for the portfolio.

Among other artists, writers and photographers who have lived or worked there are: Arman, Jack Brusca, Larry Calcagno, Pierre Clerk, Tom Doyle, Jean Dupuy, Janet Fish, Robert Frank, Adolph Gottlieb, Eva Hesse, Roy Lichtenstein, Jay Maisel, Ed Meneeley, Malcolm Morley, Kenneth Noland, Angelo Savelli, and Tom Wesselmann.

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.
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, with his first one-man show at the Green Gallery, New York, in 1961. 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.[citation needed] He resettled permanently in New York in 1976.

Smith's early work drew on packaging and advertising, which led to his being associated by some critics to the Pop Art movement. The 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 Art contemporaries, who were more concerned with iconography. Smith never produced any free standing sculptures, preferring to challenge the conventions of painting by working in an area between painting and sculpture. In 1972 he exhibited the first of what are called the "kite paintings", in which rather than using a conventional stretcher the canvas is tensioned by cords and structures of aluminium tubing, which become an element in the composition of the works. This both reduced the strength of the edge of the canvas while at the same time drawing attention to its contour. The concerns of these works also appear in his small scale work of the time, where the paper was cut and folded, and often include elements fastened to the work by paper-clips or pieces of knotted string.
Works by Smith are in the collection of the Tate Gallery, London and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. See less