Citizen Smith

Richard Smith was one of the pioneers of british pop art and can count Howard Hodgkin and Peter Blake among his contemporaries. But while they have attained global recognition, Smith’s contribution remains criminally in the shadows. But, really, he doesn’t mind, he tells Martin Bewick

Through the crackle of a bad telephone line comes a clearly English voice. Richard Smith, the quiet man of British pop art, has called from his long-time home in New York. The artist, in his mid-70s, is not going to be painting today, but his work still continues apace, his enthusiasm undimmed by the fluctuations of the art market or by years spent in the shadow - it has to be said - of friends and contemporaries including David Hockney and Peter Blake. In many respects, Smith is the forgotten British pop artist.

“Yes, I do have a regular routine,” says Smith eagerly, “but it doesn’t include painting every day. In fact recently I’ve been working on a group of etchings that are now just being printed - they’re being done with Maurice Payne, who worked with Hockney...”

Smith’s canvases still look the embodiment of 20th century ‘modern’ painting. Show them to someone with only a passing interest in art and they will describe them as ‘abstract’ or ‘pop’ - perhaps the two epithets that most characterise Smith and his contemporaries’ work for the average gallery-goer. Indeed, Smith was influenced heavily by the abstract expressionists of the mid-20th century and became a leading light of the pop movement with his painting of an abstracted cigarette packet and 3D and mixed media canvases.

Born in Hertfordshire, Smith studied at St. Albans School of Art and then at the Royal College of Art in London. He was a awarded a Harkness Fellowship and first travelled to New York in 1959 where his interest in American culture, advertising and the packaging of household items saw him begin to develop his individual take on pop art - suffusing the iconography of the everyday, those cigarette packets, slot machines, gift wrapping paper - with the minimalist expressionism of the contemporary US abstract painters.

“I came over [to New York] on the Queen Mary, not by plane. It was a very different experience. [The city] was all new to me. And there was what felt like a pioneering edge to where I was living, in downtown New York. Of course, nowadays it’s just full of shops...”

“I’d always been immensely interested in New York,” recalls Smith, “but it was a bright scene in London in the late 1950s and the show we did at the ICA in ’59 delayed my trip.” That show was the influential collaborative installation Place, featuring work from Smith, Robyn Denny and Ralph Rumney, which aimed to actively involve the spectator as a participant in the physical ‘space’ of the exhibition - to engage with the work in a new way. With the show a success, Smith finally embarked on his much-anticipated trip to New York.

“I actually came over on the Queen Mary, not by plane,” explains Smith, with a hint of excitement at the recalling of that voyage. “It was a very different experience. When I arrived I met up straight away with the artist Harold Cohen, and the first thing he said was, ‘You have to find a studio’,” Smith laughs. “It was all new to me. And there was what felt like a pioneering edge to where I was living, in downtown New York. The city was kind of glamorous and it became very exciting. Of course, nowadays downtown is different. It’s just full of shops.”

The following years saw Smith to-ing and fro-ing between his new home in the US, where he was married, and Britain, where many of his friends remained.”‘I had my first New York show in 1961, but then I came back to England for a couple of years. After that I was backwards and forwards.” The influence of New York’s art scene was not only reflected in his work, but also in Smith’s working arrangements. “When I came back to London in ’61, I found a studio near Hoxton,” says Smith. “But it was difficult to find what I’d become used to in New York - that typical New York loft space. In the end I did finally manage to find somewhere near Hoxton on Bath Street with that New York feel.”

“You find generations of people who haven’t seen the work. The Tate did put a room of my work together five years or so ago - and it was lovely. But they haven’t bought anything for ages. I actually ended up giving them a painting in the 1980s...”

Smith’s work synthesised the then current concerns in modern art. But his paintings of mass market, everyday objects were never straightforward depictions of what he saw around him at home or in the street. They were representational, at times minimalist - Smith describes painting not the objects themselves so much as “shadows and light crossing things”. He also played with the accepted notion that paintings are flat canvases on a gallery wall.

“I had been pursuing work based on neon signs, advertising and magazine spreads,” recalls Smith. “Then I made my cigarette pack and began to make 3D work. It seemed like an overwhelming idea to work in three dimensions.” Smith realised he could take the canvas off the stretcher and let it hang limply down, or he could tie it, or make shapes from it - a method from which he developed his ‘kite’ paintings. The paintings became sculptural - objects that came off the walls of the gallery and invaded the viewers space. Space - the space between viewer and art object, just like at the ICA, was contestable.

“I was using the resources I already had available to me as a painter - canvas and stretcher - but in 3D,” says Smith. “The thing with those advertising paintings is that you are dealing with this big box in space. The paintings were rather cobbled together at the Bath Street studio, but they did stand up to wear and tear.” The 3D idea stuck and soon Smith was producing multi-leaved screen prints, like outsized origami, and ‘paintings’ on prefabricated metal sculptures. A series of lithographs from 1968 were named after a theatre designer, Edward Gordon Craig - the analogy of the theatre again drawing attention to a space that is contested by object and viewer.

In 1970 Smith had been the official British artist at the Venice Biennale and oil millionaires were soon falling over themselves to buy his work. His fame seemed assured and, during the next decade, as he consorted with the beautiful people of the global art set, the commissions got ever bigger. In interview, Smith has described himself as having become romantic about cocaine during this period, after discovering it through Warhol’s acolytes. However, aware of how his life has moved on, he puts it down only as a “passing phase”.

Over the following years Smith’s work has often been overlooked. At the turn of the millennium he was invited to the opening of Tate Britain, along with a vanguard of British art greats. Inside, though there were roomfuls of Hockneys, Peter Blakes and Howard Hodgkins, he didn’t find a solitary example of his own work. “Now you find generations of people who haven’t seen the work,” says Smith with resignation. “The Tate did put a room of my work together five years or so ago - and it was lovely. But then they haven’t bought anything for ages. In fact, I actually ended up giving them a painting in the 1980s.”

“I was doing a self-portrait, working from a photograph. [Then] I saw a magazine with these really erotic pictures of David Beckham and I ended up painting him. It wasn’t really intended to be about Beckham, the painting wasn’t intended to have his name on it...”

In the light of his contemporaries’ high standing, Smith is philosophical about his status, recognising that above all he is an artist - not a celebrity, not a salesman - and he sounds equivocal when talking about current trends in painting, young British artists or the market for art. “I’m not really an avid consumer of new work by young artists, although I take an interest,” he says. “You go round the galleries in Chelsea, for example, but it’s difficult to get round them all. Really I see more of my contemporaries. I have some paintings coming up for auction. They were done for a specific venue but now the place has changed so they’re being sold. I don’t really like that. But then I have lots of work - when you’ve been painting for so long you do. Much of it is in storage, so I never see it. In fact I’m going to have something built so that I can see it again.’” How he feels when he sees his old paintings and prints? He chuckles: “When I see old work I feel quite good, usually!’ He laughs again. “I had some at an art fair in New York recently and I’m glad to say that, yes, they looked good.”

Smith finds a consistency in his half-century of work. So what about some of the anomalies -- the monotone works of the 1990s or the oil painting on shaped canvas entitled Beckham? Smith sees it as simply a part of the process: “With the black-and-white work, I hadn’t used oil paint for a long time but started to again. It’s so different to working in acrylic and it felt like a learning process. Using colour felt difficult and in any case I’d always liked black and white, grey colours.”

And was Beckham a nod to celebrity culture? “Oh yes, I do remember it,” says Smith, as if he had almost forgotten that piece of work. “I was doing a self-portrait, working from a photograph of myself taken by Robert Freeman in the ’60s,” he explains. “While I was working on that I saw a magazine with these really very erotic pictures of David Beckham and I ended up painting him. It wasn’t really intended to be specifically about Beckham, and the painting wasn’t really intended to have his name on it. In fact, that reminds me - I did an earlier painting of Marilyn Monroe based on a cover from Paris Match. But I’ve never really pursued that type of work.”

Taking what is around him, what he sees in the world, is the current that drives the ebb and flow of Smith’s output, from cigarette packets and slot machines to movie stars and footballers. “I see my work as a consistent development,” he says. “I went from working on flat paintings to the 3D work and then to the kite paintings. Now, for over ten years - in fact for maybe 20 years - I’ve been painting flat canvases again. So there is a consistency. I’ve spent a lot of time painting commissions. I’ve been happy with the opportunities I got.”