Richard Smith. [Exhibition catalog].

Unpaginated [22 p.], ill. A very good and clean copy. - From the text by Brooks Adams: In 1993 Richard Smith took a break from the kitelike constructions that had occupied him for more than 20 years and returned to painting on flat canvas more or less full-time. The decision marked a watershed in this British artist's career. In the early '60s, newly arrived in New York, he first became known for a novel hybrid of what might be called cosmetic abstractions. These large field paintings with feathery brushwork, lipstick colors and titles like McCalls, Revlon and After Six formed an unforeseen link between early Pop Art and Color Field Painting. Part and parcel of the archeological reconstruction of the '60s. Smith's early work has recently been included in a number of historical shows, most notably Pop Art: An International Perspective at the Royal Academy in 1991 and The Sixties Art Scene in London at the Barbican Art Gallery in 1993. This vague terrain between abstraction and imagery has in turn been rediscovered by a whole new generation of artists, including Ross Bleekner, the late Moira Dwyer, Philip Taaffe and the English painter Gary Hume who, comparably excited by his short stays in Manhattan, makes high-gloss, neo-Pop emblems that owe much to the insouciant, hipster spirit of early Smith. The artist's new paintings suggest a reexamination of first principles inflected with 30 years' experience. At the height of the Mod scene in London, he was lionized by the Beatles, Ken Russell and the fashion designer Ossie Clark, all of whom visited his studio. During the '60s Smith experimented extensively with reliefs and shaped canvases that mimic cigarette packs, Brillo boxes, pianos and calendars rendered as gigantic shapes jutting out into space. All these sleek consumerist abstractions speak to our time with a redoubtable period chic-fashion being from the very onset a vital part of Smith's painting concern.