Richard Smith (Charles Richard Smith), British painter and printmaker (1931, Letchworth, Hertfordshire, England - 2016, Patchogue, N.Y.), created bold large-scale abstract paintings, many of which were sculptural three-dimensional constructions.
He was particularly known for his three-dimensional “kite paintings,” shaped canvases that were intended to be hung freely from above. Although he was often associated with Pop Art, much of his work was reflective of the Minimalist and the colour-field art movements.
Smith enrolled at the Luton School of Art (1948–50), but his studies were interrupted by his required national service (1950–52) in the Royal Air Force.
Following his return to England from his RAF posting in Hong Kong, he attended St. Albans School of Art (1952–54) and the Royal College of Art in London (1954–57).
He was awarded a Harkness fellowship and traveled to New York City, where he found artistic inspiration in the brightly coloured commercial advertising, opulent store window displays, and other elements of modern American culture.
He returned to London in 1961, soon after his first solo exhibition at New York City’s Green Gallery, but in 1976 he permanently settled his family in the U.S.
Smith won numerous awards, including the Grand Prize at the 1967 São Paulo Biennial, and he represented Britain at the 1966 and 1970 Venice Biennales.
His paintings were often included in group exhibitions, notably the Tate Gallery’s 1964 show Painting and Sculpture of a Decade, 1954–1964, and in 1975 the Tate mounted a major retrospective of his career.
Smith was made CBE in 1971. In later years he received less critical attention, though he continued working well into the 21st century.

In his early work he was influenced by both the vigorous handling of Abstract Expressionism and the brash imagery of American advertising, with allusions to billboards and packaging, so linking the preoccupations of the Situation group, with whom he exhibited, to those of Pop through a fascination with the rhetorical power of sheer scale.
From about 1963 he used shaped canvases, which he sometimes made project from the wall, turning the picture into a three-dimensional object.
This led to further experimentation with the support, and some of his most characteristic paintings use a kite-like format in which the canvas is stretched on rods that are part of the visual structure of the work (Mandarino, 1973, Tate).
In these the colouring is usually much more subdued and soft than in his early work, sometimes with a watercolour-like thinness of texture and vague allusions to nature.

Richard Smith, CBE (27 October 1931 – 15 April 2016) was an English painter and printmaker. He produced work in a range of styles but was often associated with colour field painting.

Richard Smith was born in Letchworth, Hertfordshire. After national service with the Royal Air Force in Hong Kong, he studied at St Albans School of Art and later undertook post-graduate studies at the Royal College of Art in London from 1954 to 1957. From 1957 to 1958 he was a lecturer at Hammersmith College of Art. He was awarded a Harkness Fellowship in 1959 and travelled to America and spent several years there painting and teaching, with his first one-man show at the Green Gallery, New York, in 1961. In 1970 he was the British representative at the Venice Biennale and in 1975 a retrospective exhibition of his work was exhibited at the Tate Gallery in London.

He resettled permanently in New York in 1976

Smith's early work drew on packaging and advertising, which led to his being associated by some critics to the Pop Art movement. Smith stated that his work was "often physically related to hoardings or cinema screens which never present objects actual size; you could drown in a glass of beer, live in a semi-detached cigarette packet". However, his concerns were largely formal. His works from this period, such as Panatella (1961) can be seen as abstract works whose scale, handling of paint and use of colour show the influence of American colour field painters such as Mark Rothko and Sam Francis, and he tried to integrate their expressive painterly concerns with an exploration of the experience of mass culture. As an attempt to make a connection between 'high' art and popular culture Smith's work differs from the work of his British Pop contemporaries, who were more concerned with iconography. Smith stated that "My interest is not so much in the message as in the method"

In 1963 Smith progressed to an examination of the two-dimensional nature of painting. In Vista he added a shaped extension to the rectangular canvas, and in works such as Piano and Giftwrap progressed to extending the surface of the painting out into three-dimensional space. Despite the three-dimensional element of these works, Smith insisted on their identity as paintings: saying "Since I have always retained a wall, there is no question of a multifaceted sculptural object" Smith never produced any free standing sculptures, preferring to challenge the conventions of painting by working in an area between painting and sculpture.

In 1972 he exhibited the first of what are called the "kite paintings", in which rather than using a conventional stretcher the canvas is tensioned by cords and structures of aluminium tubing, which become an element in the composition of the works. This both reduced the strength of the edge of the canvas while at the same time drawing attention to its contour. Smith's new found interest in the edge of a picture is shown by the concentration of incident there in works such as 3 square 2. At this time Smith had returned from New York and was living in the English countryside, and his palette changed to more muted colours.

The concerns of these works also appear in his small scale work of the time, where the paper was cut and folded, and often include elements fastened to the work by paperclips or pieces of knotted string.

Works by Smith are in the collection of the Tate Gallery, London and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Richard Smith: Artist whose work was a unique fusion of abstract values and contemporary subject matter

By Chris Stephens / The Guardian, 28 Apr 2016

The artist Richard Smith, who has died aged 84, was one of the most original painters of his generation, and one of the most underrated. He was a truly transatlantic figure who enjoyed huge commercial and critical success in the US and Britain during the 1960s and 70s. Early on, his art bridged the apparent gap between abstraction and pop art, the sophistication of his paintings revealing the inadequacy of such categorisations.

Smith was born in Letchworth, Hertfordshire, the son of Charles, who worked as a printer for Hansard in the House of Commons, and Doris (nee Chandler). Periods of study at Luton and St Albans art schools were separated by two years in the RAF in Hong Kong. From 1954 to 1957, he studied at the Royal College of Art, London, and was a leading light in the first wave of brilliant intakes who redefined the standards and protocols of painting. His was the first generation to be fundamentally affected by the first extensive displays in Britain of American abstract expressionist painting at the Tate in 1956 and, in particular, 1959. At the same time, his art challenged and dispensed with the values at the heart of the American painting.

For some, the abstract art of that earlier generation was based on highbrow spiritual and cultural values and, for others, on such formal ideas as the importance of the flatness of the canvas. In contrast, Smith engaged with the new culture of commodity packaging and advertising – and extended his paintings into the space of the room to such a degree that the stretched canvases almost became sculptures.

At the Royal College, Smith was making expansive paintings using vigorous, sloping brush strokes. These appeared abstract, but already he was keen to stress his interest in popular culture and the mass media, co-signing a letter to his tutor John Minton that observed: “To your generation the 30s meant the Spanish civil war; to us it means Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.”

His art was abstract, and yet always rooted in the real world. In 1959, a two-year Harkness scholarship took Smith to New York, where the billboards of Times Square influenced a new body of work, paintings in which soft-edged forms and modulated surfaces seemed to be totally abstract but were in fact based on details from, and the quality of, magazine and other photographs. Titles such as Revlon and Panatella indicated the kind of sources Smith was drawing upon. He had read Marshall McLuhan’s The Mechanical Bride, a study of the advertising industry, but his use of imagery based on such commercial images was neither celebratory nor critical.

He became fascinated by the advertising of cigarettes and, back in Britain, made a series of works based on the cigarette packet. His first solo exhibition had been at the Green Gallery, New York (claimed by some to be the first solo pop art show), the second was at the super-hip Kasmin Gallery in London. There he showed a group of large works, based on flip-top cigarette packets, that projected from the walls, or reached out across the floor, raising the lowly source material to an epic scale and revolutionising the boundaries of painting practice.

Smith participated in some of the most important exhibitions of his time. In 1959, he worked with Ralph Rumney and Robyn Denny on Place at the ICA, in which canvases were positioned on the floor to create a labyrinthine environment; he was included in the Situation group show in 1960 at the RBA Galleries, which celebrated the impact of American painting on the British; and he featured in the enormous Painting and Sculpture of a Decade 54-64 at the Tate in 1964.

In the late 1950s and early 60s, he wrote perceptively about colleagues’ art, revealing in those texts his own awareness of the essential relevance of the new urban environment and of the mass, photographic media. He pioneered the idea of the artist film-maker when, in 1962, he collaborated with the great photographer of that time, Robert Freeman, on Trailer, an 8mm colour film focusing on cigarette and other commercial packaging. The film is lost, but his published notes stated: “I paint about communication”, explaining that in making painting derived from everyday contemporary objects, he sought to establish common ground between the modern spectator and high art.

Each of Smith’s solo exhibitions established a new frontier to the territory of painting as he stretched its definition further and further; so much so that his 1975 Tate retrospective was structured around the re-creation of his seven most important shows. Complex underlying structures caused the canvases to bulge or reach out along the wall or into the room; a sequence of 12, gradually changing forms was based on the pages of a calendar from which successive pages had been torn; and finally, in work from 1972, the architectonic quality of the paintings was discarded in his Kite Paintings, in which unstretched, painted canvases were suspended from rods and interrupted by cords and threads hanging off and passing through them. Gravity became a key component and the works, as lyrically beautiful as they were formally innovative, made the gallery look like a colour-filled sail shop. A revival of these works in New York in 2015 reminded audiences of their great beauty, and one can be seen in Tate Modern.

Throughout the 1960s, Smith shuttled backwards and forwards between Britain and the US, teaching for periods in Colorado, Virginia and California before settling back in Britain, in Wiltshire, in 1968. He married Betsy Scherman in 1964 and they had two sons, Edward and Harry. He was appointed CBE in 1971. In 1978 he and the family moved to New York, where he became an active part of the art scene, living first in Tribeca and then West Broadway.

He continued to make the Kite Paintings, which became increasingly elaborate, throughout the 1980s. From 1993, he reverted to more conventional flat surfaces, creating space through interleaving painted forms, but always demonstrating his extraordinarily astute use of colour. The curator Bryan Robertson noted that, in everything he did, Smith showed himself to be a great designer and, also, that he was a dandy despite his innate modesty; Freeman’s photographs from around 1960 confirm that this was always the case.

Smith was one of five artists who represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1966, when he won an award; he also had a solo show there in 1970. In between, he won the grand prize at the 9th São Paulo Bienal in 1967, and he had museum shows in Europe and North and South America throughout the 1970s. After that, his work was shown primarily at the galleries in New York and London that represented him, and his public profile declined.

The Sixties Art Scene in London exhibition at the Barbican in 1993 reminded the world of the ambition and inventiveness of Smith’s early work, and it was followed by a solo exhibition at the Bernard Jacobson Gallery in London three years later. One might say, however, that stereotyped ideas of the art of the 1950s and 60s have prevented his unique fusion of abstract values and contemporary subject matter from being fully celebrated.

He is survived by Betsy, Edward and Harry, and six grandchildren, Rose, Emma, Noah, Adeline, Charlotte and Julia.

• Richard Smith, artist, born 27 October 1931; died 15 April 2016

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Richard Smith, British Painter Who Turned Toward Pure Color, Dies at 84

By William Grimes / The New York Times, April 18, 2016

Richard Smith, a British painter whose idiosyncratic explorations of form and color embraced both Pop Art and Color Field painting, making him one of the most distinctive, indefinable artists of the 1960s and ’70s, died on Friday in Patchogue, N.Y., on Long Island. He was 84.
The cause was heart failure, said his wife, Betsy.

Mr. Smith was widely regarded as one of the most original and accomplished British artists of his generation, with a ravishing sense of color and formal restraint that stood in marked contrast to the more emphatic, polemical American style.

Like many young British artists in the 1950s, he became entranced by the visual clamor and aggressive packaging of American commercial culture while at the Royal College of Art, where his fellow students included the Pop pioneer Peter Blake.

After moving to New York temporarily, he executed large-scale paintings inspired by the billboards in Times Square, with titles like “Chase Manhattan,” “Revlon” and “McCalls.”

A one-man show at the seminal Green Gallery in Manhattan in 1961 put him on the map, and in London he began showing with the Kasmin Gallery, whose other main artist was David Hockney.

“What intrigued me wasn’t the nitty-gritty, down dirty popular culture,” Mr. Smith told The Guardian of London in 2000. “It was the high end. These beautiful ads for Smirnoff vodka and glamorous films and store windows and CinemaScope.”

Influenced by painters like Mark Rothko and Kenneth Noland, he turned toward pure color, often displayed on shaped, three-dimensional canvases. These evolved, in the ’70s and ’80s, into a series of kite-like works, in which traditional wooden stretcher bars were replaced by a support structure of aluminum rods, allowing the painting to be suspended from the wall or ceiling by strings or ribbons.

Mr. Smith was given a retrospective exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1966, when he was still in his 30s, and represented Britain at the 1970 Venice Biennale. In 1975 he was the subject of a retrospective at the Tate Gallery, which described him, tellingly, as “an odd artist, at once in and out of touch with the currents in the mainstream.”

Charles Richard Smith was born on Oct. 27, 1931, in Letchworth, Hertfordshire. After studying at the Luton School of Art, he served two years with the Royal Air Force in Hong Kong before enrolling in the St. Albans School of Art.

He went on to the Royal College of Art, graduating in 1957. In 1959 he was awarded a Harkness Fellowship, allowing him to spend nearly two years in New York, where he was awash in luridly colored advertising displays and technicolor magazines.

“Color 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,” the critic Robert Hughes wrote in Time magazine in 1975. “Their color was everything that color in English art was not: exotic looking, artificial and rich.”

His work attracted the attention of the curator and impresario Henry Geldzahler as well as the dealer Richard Bellamy, who was on the verge of opening the Green Gallery, where he would showcase the work of Claes Oldenburg, Donald Judd, Robert Morris and many others.

Already, Mr. Smith’s art was proving hard to pin down. “Richard’s paintings had a breathiness and color and a kind of newness absolutely separate from Pop Art,” Mr. Bellamy once said. “Those paintings were suffused with light, a different kind of light than I had ever seen.”

The woozy abstraction of works like “Panatella” (1961) and “Zoom” (1963) — the critic Hilton Kramer referred to their “soft-focus visual ambiguity” in The New York Times — gave way to shaped canvases with just two colors or even one, as in the monumental, all-red “Ring-a-ling,” nearly as wide as a movie screen.

In time he became dissatisfied with the heaviness of traditional canvas supports, which seemed at cross purposes with the lightness of his color. His “kite paintings,” first exhibited in 1971, formed crosses, zigzags and arcs from overlapping planes and repeated square, rectangular and curved shapes.

Mr. Smith worked primarily in Britain in the ’60s and most of the ’70s but returned to the United States in 1978 and settled in Patchogue. In addition to his wife, the former Betsy Scherman, he is survived by two sons, Edward and Harry, and six grandchildren.

In his most recent work, Mr. Smith embraced a bold, abstract style, with punchy forms — the letter S, or sticks of color — against a ground of fat crosshatched lines. A 2013 exhibition at the Flowers Gallery consisted of painted frames within the canvas defining a central abstract image.

Mr. Smith’s stock as an artist rose and fell dramatically through the years. In 2000, The Guardian called him “the Invisible Man.” That might have hurt, if he had not adopted, early on, a philosophical position on the art-world lottery.

“My ambition once was to make the visual taste of an era, as the Adam brothers did in the 18th century,” he told The Times in 1967. “But things move too quickly today. You’re lucky to have an impact for a month or two.”