Richard Smith (1931 - 2016)

Richard Feigen Gallery, New York
Ruth S. Schaffner Gallery, Santa Barbara
Sale, Sotheby's London, 4th December 1974, lot 70
Waddington Galleries, London, where acquired by the present owner

Santa Barbara, Ruth S. Schaffner Gallery, Richard Smith, 11th February - 18th March 1973, cat. no.6. 

Original canvas. The canvas appears sound. There is some very slight rubbing to the edges of the canvas, and there may be two very light scratches in the lower right corner, visible upon close inspection. There are some traces of light surface dirt and studio detritus in places, but otherwise the work appears to be in very good overall condition. Ultraviolet light reveals some fluorescence and possible retouching towards the left side of the lower edge. The work is presented in a simple wooden frame. Please telephone the department on +44 (0) 207 293 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
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NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

In 1959, Richard Smith, then a recent graduate from the Royal College of Art, was awarded a Harkness Fellowship, enabling him to leave London - where he had been sharing a studio with Peter Blake - and travel to the USA, where he would remain for the next two years. America, awash with the freedoms and excesses that were yet to appear in post-war Britain, proved revelatory to Smith, and indeed to the many other British artists that were to travel to America at this time, including David Hockney and Gerald Laing. 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).

Smith took his inspiration from the commercialisation that typified 1960s America: it was a time of towering billboards and Hollywood glamour. The resulting paintings, inspired also by his time spent working in the studio of Robert Indiana and seeing works by heavyweights of the American Abstract Expressionist movement, including Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, were large-scale, colourful celebrations of the new environment he found himself in. Producing semi-abstract paintings filled with loose, gestural brushstrokes, and sporting titles such as Billboard, Diamond, and Dream Kitchen, Smith’s work captured the exuberance and novelty of 1960s America, becoming popular on both sides of the Atlantic.

Packaging in particular became a major source of inspiration for Smith at this time: in 1966, recalling his earlier work, he was to note that: 'the kind of images I was using then were based on cartons, or boxes. The carton is an incessant theme in present-day civilisation' (Richard Smith, quoted in Richard Smith, Paintings 1958-1966 (exh. cat.), Whitechapel Gallery, London, May 1966, unpaginated.) Smith’s works from the early 1960s are full of references to the products that surrounded him: abstracted motifs and designs fill works with titles such as Revlon, Pack, and Package.  Cigarettes - perhaps one of the most hotly-contested advertising battlegrounds of the time - seem of specific interest: Kent, from 1962, takes inspiration from both the marketing of and the cigarettes themselves, whilst in Flip Top, from the same year, cigarettes emerge from a zig-zag-patterned box, similar to that of Marlboro cigarettes (which were also advertised with the slogan ‘filter, flavor, flip-top box’). Tip Top, too, seems to be suffused with references to this world of brightly-coloured consumerism: its vivid, geometric motif is repeated, mimicking the mass-production of both products and print, whilst the circles might be both the ‘Ben-Day’ dots of newspapers and magazines, or perhaps sweets or cigarettes within a box, ready to be rolled out using a tip-top lid. Given the similar titles of Flip Top and Tip Top, it is not hard to make an imaginative leap connecting the two together, Smith having perhaps literally tipped the view to show a pack of cigarettes from above. To quote Bryan Robertson, in Tip Top, as in many of his best works, Smith 'has managed to make a box seem magical and he has projected a glamour - of extraordinary purity - on to distillations from the most mundane wrappings and trappings of the expendable machine-made world.' (Bryan Robertson, ibid., unpaginated.)