Stretched Skin

By ROBERT HUGHES

During the 1960s a new kind of artist seemed to be emerging in London: pictor transatlanticus. Amid mutterings of dismay about Coca-Colonization, Anthony Caro, Richard Hamilton, Richard Smith and others addressed themselves to New York City as their elders had directed their genuflections to Paris. "To have worked in New York did make a tremendous difference," Smith recalls. "It set you at a certain distance from other English painters. You could never pick up again with artists who hadn't been there, except as friends. You had a different set of references."

It is 14 years since Smith, then a 30-year-old on a Harkness fellowship to America, had his first one-man show in New York. This month the Tate Gallery hi London is holding a Smith "retrospective"--seven of his exhibitions over that time, reassembled painting by painting. In a European summer almost empty of worthwhile museum shows, Richard Smith's is a delectable event, reintroducing an artist who has been around for years without quite getting his due.

Amoral Pleasure. When Englishmen of Smith's generation (he is now 44) started looking to America, what caught their eye was less the painterly heroics of abstract expressionism than the "media landscape"--to borrow a phrase of the day--from which Pop art was sprouting. Though as a painter he was not interested in the icons of popular culture, Smith was fascinated by its mechanics, particularly by what happened to color and form in reproduction. The green in a color ad was not like grass; it was mint green, menthol green, a hue of such insinuating and saturated lushness that it belonged to an order other than nature. Color pages and Bendel's window displays gave Smith, fresh from the pinched dampness and grayness of England in the '50s, much the same sense of abundant, amoral pleasure as reflections on water and glowing fruit on a table gave the Impressionists. Their color was everything that color in English art was not: exotic looking, artificial and rich.

So Smith's paintings at the Green Gallery in 1961 used the simple, emblematic formats of ad layout--a disk, a heart, striped bands--but dissolved them in a feathery, airy film of brush strokes. Then he became interested in packages. Again, packaging was not iconic; it was the most abstract way of putting a product over, smooth and low-keyed, with a regular boxy shape. Paintings like Piano (1963) thrust out from the wall, the sloping canvas sides of the built box contradicted by the smaller fake boxes painted on it in Smith's cursive, soft handwriting, like a festive ziggurat tottering off-balance.

By the mid-'60s Smith was clearly one of the most gifted colorists on either side of the Atlantic. This was acknowledged (amid much protest from the French) when in 1967 he won the grand prize at the Sao Paulo Biennale. His use of color was radiant without facile sweetness, and he could move across the spectrum with an assurance similar to that of natural pitch in a musician. But, as he recalls, "I realized I couldn't spend my life painting cigarette packets, and the structure of my early pieces was beginning to look adventitious."

He moved back to England, first to London and then, with his American wife Betsy, to a farm in Wiltshire, where his gardening activities soon included a giant dovecot built hi the form of an Egyptian pyramid. The shapes of his pictures, meanwhile, were becoming more geometric as the Pop references vanished. A 1966 work entitled A Whole Year, Half a Day, which contained a set of twelve rectangles with increasingly large diagonal "bites" taken out of them, marked Smith's growing interest in the canvas as membrane--a surface stretching topographically over a built-up support, giving a suave play of shadow in the folds. "I think of the curves from the canvas as somehow fleshy, body-like," he says. But they could also suggest landscape, as Riverfall (1969) showed: an undulating expanse, 22 ft. wide, sprayed and delicately washed with green, evoking the wet meadows and spring hedgerows of the English countryside.

Yellow Pages. Since 1972 Smith has been working on a different kind of surface: paintings like canvas kites, stretched on rods, hung on strings and ribbons from the wall or slung, like Yellow Pages (1975), from the roof. They are as light, demountable and unpretentious as toys or banners. "I'd been dissatisfied with the physical heaviness of my paintings," Smith says. "I was using too many resources; they looked light on the walls, but there was all that scaffolding and framing under them."

By contrast, the "kites" are economical; even the strings they hang from act as drawing. They are perfectly suited to Smith's restrained temperament as an artist; he is always at pains to avoid the bribes of visual overstatement.

For all the American background. Smith remains a very English artist. No matter what the style, English art has never felt like American, and one of the differences has to do with sociability. Smith's work is quite conversational in its ease of style. Like Caro's or Hockney's, it is permeated with a casual, offhand rightness about material, color and meetings of shape, but it is not polemical. No proposition about the future of art is being shoved in one's face. Hence its unlikeness to New York painting in the '60s, to that clamor of nonnegotiable demands on the viewer's eye and sense of history. This is not a matter of good or bad, only of tone of voice, and Smith's discourse is so controlled, so free of aesthetic cliquishness and so fastidious in its loyalty to painting as a still valid medium that he must be accounted one of the most original artists of the past decade.

Robert Hughes

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