Richard Smith

Kasmin Ltd, London, where acquired by The Lambert Collection, December 1967
Their sale, Christie's London, 3rd July 1987, lot 1100
Knoedler Gallery, London
Acquired by the present owner in May 1990

London, Arts Council, Situation: an Exhibition of Recent British Abstract Art, 1962, cat. no.28, illustrated, with tour to Arts Council Gallery, Cambridge, Aberdeen Art Gallery, Aberdeen, Hatton Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne, Bradford City Art Gallery, Bradford, Kettering Art Gallery, Kettering, and Liverpool Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool;
London, Knoedler Gallery, Richard Smith, Paintings 1960-1963, April 1990, cat. no.4, illustrated.

Original canvas. The canvas appears sound. There are a few very fine lines of craquelure to the extreme edges of the canvas, where it folds around the stretcher. There is some very light rubbing to the extreme edges in places, and one or two light scuffs, including a horizontal scuff at the centre of the lower edge. There are one or two specks of light surface dirt and studio detritus in places. Subject to the above the work appears to be in excellent overall condition. Ultraviolet light reveals some areas of fluorescence, which are thought to be in keeping with the Artist's materials. The work is presented within a simple painted wood frame. Please telephone the department on +44 (0) 207 293 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
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‘I tend to think of colour ripening, or colour shimmering … I don’t think of tonality, really. I like lighter colours over darker colours.’

(The Artist, Richard Smith, Paintings 1958-1966 (exh. cat.), Whitechapel Gallery, London, 1966, unpaginated)

In June of this year Sotheby’s offered the major work Lubitsch by Richard Smith, which went on to achieve a new auction record of £102,500. Considering the importance of Smith within both a British and American context it is surprising that this was the first time that a work by the artist had achieved in excess of the £100,000 mark, recognition that was certainly long overdue. Executed in 1962, the same year that Lubitsch was painted, First Fifth showcases the same brilliant palette and coolly confident brushwork of Lubitsch. Having graduated from the Royal College of Art in 1957, Smith was awarded a Harkness Fellowship which allowed him to leave Britain for the bright glittering lights of New York. As London slowly crept out of the post-war gloom and into the swinging sixties, America offered an immediate release, with the kitsch culture of post-war America – from towering billboards to Hollywood glamour – presenting much the same attraction that drew David Hockney to America in the same decade.

His time spent in New York, working in the studio of Robert Indiana and seeing works by heavyweights of the American Abstract Expressionist movement, including Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, was to have a profound impact on his work. In part inspired by the bright lights and the constant bombardment of billboard advertisements, Smith began to produce large-scale, brightly coloured paintings, the titles of which – Revlon, Diamond, Package, Dream Kitchen – referenced the brands and products advertised across the city. As Bryan Robertson wrote in the introduction to his 1966 Whitechapel retrospective (which in itself was an impressive feat for an artist only just into his thirties): ‘What Smith is doing is to explore the world of reality, which is what all artists do, but by indirect means; and in doing so, is creating works of art which have no direct connection with this reality but are entirely convincing’ (Bryan Robertson, intro. Richard Smith, Paintings 1958-1966 (exh. cat.), Whitechapel Gallery, London, 1966, unpaginated).

The works that Smith produced during this early 1960s period capture and celebrate the glamour of American post-war society, and it was no surprise that the artist found great commercial success on both sides of the Atlantic, including his first solo exhibition at New York’s Green Gallery in 1961 – one of the very first solo Pop exhibitions held in America. Painting with a great flurry of colour and excitement, Smith’s work, including First Fifth, captures the excitement and optimism of the period, paving the way for his British contemporaries, including Hockney and Allen Jones, whose Bus Paintings use a similar sense of rhythm to that seen in the composition of the present work. With Smith’s death earlier this year the British art world lost a great talent – an artist that refused to remain static and constantly broke free both of the traditional canvas structure and the art world establishment – but to look at the present work one is reminded of the sheer brilliance with which the artist worked, and his pioneering legacy in a transatlantic dialogue.