The Art Newspaper: “An Englishman in New York: Richard Smith biography highlights the influence of the US city on his work”
Ian Massey for the Art Newspaper
10 January 2023
On his article for the Art Newspaper, Massey delves into the influence New York had on artist Richard Smith, recounting the development of Smith’s work starting from his inaugural visit to the United States in 1959 funded by the Harkness Fellowship award.
With Richard Smith being the first British artist of his generation to spend a sustained period of time in the US, Massey discusses the influence of American culture, artists and context on Smith’s work as well as on the development of his career.
Upon his return to London in 1961, Smith was deemed as the “personification of self-aware modernity, in a capital city just waking from post-Imperial crisis of Suez”, by emeritus professor of art history at Sussex University, David Alan Mellor who wrote the artist’s first and much anticipated monograph.
In New York he became fascinated by its metropolitan spectacle of billboards and neon signs, and by wide-screen Cinemascope, which he described as “a new experience of pictorial space”. His abstracted motifs derived from magazine adverts, hoardings and cinema screens, “which never present objects actual size: you could drown in a glass of beer, live in a semi-detached cigarette pack.”
Such observations resulted in experimentation with shaped canvases and included three-dimensional structures that protrude outwards from the wall. The lush hues of Smith’s pigment, backlit by the white of the canvas, are those of film and advertising photography, and his titles those of brand-names, such as Panatella and Revlon, or refer to types of packaging; for instance, Flip Top and Gift Wrap.
Smith’s work changed in terms of emotional tenor, when he returned to the UK in 1968 with his wife and infant son to settle in Wiltshire, having left the US disillusioned by the Vietnam war. In the years Smith spent in Wiltshire, his work “became generally more restrained and monochromatic, its external reference points more obtuse” Massey details, further highlighting the influence of New York on the artist.
Read the rest of “An Englishman in New York: Richard Smith biography highlights the influence of the US city on his work”, on the Art Newspaper.
