Richard Smith

Alan Power
Acquired by the present owner, August 1990

London, Whitechapel Art Gallery, Richard Smith, Paintings 1958-1966, May 1966, cat. no.14, illustrated.

Original canvas. There is a very faint stretcher bar mark visible to the right and left hand edges. There is surface dirt and traces of studio detritus to the work, most visible to the white pigments. There are few minor rubs to the red pigment at the bottom edge, but this excepting the work appears in very good overall condition. Ultraviolet light reveals an area of fluorescence and probable retouching to the centre of the top half of the composition, together with a few smaller spots of scattered probable retouchings to the centre of the upper right edge. Housed in a simple, strip frame. Please contact the department on +44 (0) 207 293 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
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Painted in 1962, Lubitsch is a highly important work from the most exciting period of Richard Smith’s career. After graduating from the Royal College of Art in 1957, Smith was awarded a Harkness Fellowship, which allowed him to spend nearly two years in New York. Immersed in the culture of sixties America, Smith found the shiny world of Hollywood glamour, glossy magazines and lurid advertising irresistible, and the experience was to prove a formative influence on his work. Inspired by the advertising billboards of Times Square, he began to produce large-scale, brightly-coloured paintings, with titles such as Revlon, Billboard and Chase Manhattan. As the critic Robert Hughes wrote in 1975: ‘colour 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’ (Robert Hughes, Art: Stretched Skin, Time Magazine, 1st September 1975). 

The resultant works captured everything that was new and glamorous about the post-war world, and Smith consequently enjoyed wide commercial and critical success on both sides of the Atlantic. Having held his first solo exhibition at the Green Gallery in New York in 1961 – which, incidentally, was also one of the very first solo Pop Art exhibitions - this was followed by one-man exhibitions in London at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1962 and at the newly-founded and highly innovative Kasmin Gallery in 1963. In 1966, whilst still in his thirties, Smith was given a retrospective exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery, a significant show which featured nearly fifty works, including Lubitsch.  

Lubitsch thus originated from this period of great creativity, and in its large scale and scintillating colours the influence of the bright lights of New York are evident.  Stylistically, much of Smith’s work is distinctive yet elusively undefinable, falling somewhere between Pop art and Colour Field painting, and the present work is no exception. Smith adopts the gestural brushwork redolent of the Abstract Expressionists, yet his subject matter is distinctly commercial, something which would have been anathema to his very serious American contemporaries. It both embraces the large expanses of intense colour that fill the work of Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, yet in its vivid mix of yellow, red and pink presents an undeniably ‘pop’ palette. And whilst in the flurry of brushstrokes we see the artist’s own unique touch, most evident towards the top of the canvas, there is also an undeniable joy in the distinct, linear design, the red-and-yellow stripes curving in sinuous lines, which replicate the stylisation of advertising techniques. Lubitsch is a work as exciting and relevant as its time: here, captured on canvas, we have the exhilarating spirit of the sixties, transcribed in lush colour and distilled into pure abstraction.