Richard Smith

Exhibited by Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert

Material Oil on canvas

Dimensions 84 × 68 in

Price Price Upon Inquiry

Status Vetted

About the Work

In 1959, Richard Smith was awarded the Harkness Fellowship, the first of his generation of artists to make the transatlantic move to New York. From his SoHo loft, Smith began absorbing the culture of 1960s America, taking inspiration from commercial packaging, billboards, corporate logos, mass-circulation glossy magazines, movies and pop music. These references formed the starting

point for paintings that would be vividly fixed into the fabric of contemporary urban life, using these as markers for his pictures and placing him at the forefront of the movement that by 1963 came to be known as Pop Art. His first one-man show in New York, at Richard Bellamy’s Green Gallery in

April 1961, featured works now in museum collections including Chase Manhattan, 1960 (Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC), Panatella, 1960 (Tate, London) and Capsule, 1960-61 (Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia). This exhibition established Smith as a leading artist in the quickly developing New York and London scenes and was quickly followed by a second exhibition at the Green Gallery in 1963. Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert has the rare opportunity to bring

together some of these paintings, including Mister, 1962 (private collection) and Nassau, 1962 (private collection).

The presentation will continue at Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert’s New York gallery, featuring a selection of Smith’s paintings and works on paper from the 1960s.

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