Martin Gayford

The ex factor | 22 November 2018

Plus: Richard Pousette-Dart has also been relegated to the league of art-historical also-rans but his early work was as good as Pollock’s

It is easy to assume that the contours of art history are unchanging, its major landmarks fixed for ever. Actually, like all histories it is a matter of shifting perspectives. As we move through time, the view backwards constantly alters.

The rising and falling critical estimations of the painter Richard Smith are a case in point. Had you asked an art-world insider in 1963 who the brightest rising star of British art was there is a strong chance — though other names such as David Hockney might have been mentioned — that the answer would have been Smith (1931–2016).

Appropriately, 1963 is the end date of an excellent little show at Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert gallery. This collates many of the most impressive pictures from Smith’s earliest and most seductive period. At that time he was working in a fluid boundary zone between what was later termed ‘colour field abstraction’ and what was about to be dubbed ‘pop art’. The pictures often take the form of hugely enlarged, softly atmospheric studies of packaging.

‘Flip Top’ (1962), for example — a favourite of mine — is a wall-sized image based on a then novel type of cigarette packet. That information alone places it in a distant age when advertising and the paraphernalia of consumerism seemed new and exciting. But the pop art aspect of Smith’s work is not the most important or lasting. Indeed, so close was he to that frontier with abstraction that it would be possible to look at most of these pictures without noticing their origins in advertising or cartons.

The qualities that make them special are hard to define. They include what painters call ‘touch’ — that is, the way Smith put paint on a canvas. His brush strokes are sometimes loose and free, but they are also hazily atmospheric.

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