Modernists and Mavericks

by Martin Gayford

  Another work from this period, Panatella (1961), used a similarly huge scale – at over eight feet by ten – to focus in on a tiny detail of product branding: the hexagonal logo on the paper band around a cigar. It was thus very much like the big abstract paintings exhibited in ‘Situation’, or the works of Robyn Denny, Smith’s good friend, fellow student at the Royal College of Art and co-participant in the ‘Place’ exhibition – except that it was subtly distinct from these in being actually representational, not abstract. To an enthusiastic observer such as Morphet, a lot of the excitement of Smith’s work lay in its transatlantic flavour, both in the way it was painted – the sheer size of his pictures – and what it depicted: logos, packaging, advertising imagery. ‘He was perceived’, Morphet remembers, ‘as bringing the scale and the excitement of America into British art.’

  After he had finished work on the ‘Place’ exhibition, Smith had set sail for New York, where he spent two years on a Harkness Fellowship. In Manhattan, Smith shared a spacious, ex-industrial loft on Howard Street with another painter. The rent was fifty dollars a month. Smith felt a kinship with Piet Mondrian, another European painter who had moved to New York less than twenty years before, in 1940. Like his great predecessor, he felt ‘enamoured and exhilarated’ by this excitingly modern city, by its rhythms, its architecture and the clear sunshine of the Eastern seaboard. ‘New York is an immensely bright city,’ Smith enthused. ‘The light there is tremendously sharp.’

  Strangely, although his paintings appeared highly American to British eyes, to an actual New Yorker they also seemed alien. His art dealer in Manhattan at that time, Richard Bellamy, put it like this: ‘Richard’s paintings had a breathiness and colour and a kind of newness absolutely separate from Pop art. Those paintings were suffused with light, a different kind of light than I had ever seen.’ In part, it was to do with that elusively personal aspect of painting, ‘touch’. Francis Bacon, struggling to explain what was so special about the work of Michael Andrews, ended up simply saying, ‘It’s just his touch I suppose …’ It was the same with Smith for the few years in the early 1960s when he was at his peak; he had a wonderfully loose, free and subtle way of putting on the paint.

  Frank Bowling saw it in 1959, while he was working in a studio next door to Smith’s at the Royal College. ‘Dick Smith befriended me while he was preparing for the ‘Place’ exhibition at the ICA, and what attracted me to his work was the way he was so relaxed about brushing the colour in, with no anxiety, as if it was the most natural thing to do.’ And this was before Smith had even set out for New York. For all his admiration of the scale of American painting, his delight in New York and his adoption of the essentially American subject of commercial packaging and marketing, there remained something un-American about his work. This was the vision of an outsider, in love with the USA, its life and its sights, in a way no native would be.

  There was also a difference in the way that American and British artists painted, even those Britons who were most in love with all things transatlantic. For Jim Dine, a young artist from Cincinnati of much the same generation, it came down to the way that the art of the United States was ‘like a sign: it’s flatter, more graphic’. Allen Jones found the same thing when he spent over a year in New York between 1964 and 1966. For him, there was an:

  American idea of flatness that wasn’t a part of my formative life. That was an essential difference … What I learned was that being European was different, it wasn’t that you were a paler shade of what was happening in New York. It seemed plain that there was a huge, noticeable difference. For me, it came down to the fact that I can’t think of a single British artist of that generation – and maybe later – who was able to dump illusionism.

  It was this European – or perhaps British – quality that, for a short period, made Smith’s paintings stand out in New York. His works had many of the qualities of Ellsworth Kelly or Barnett Newman: they were big, clear in colour and geometric. But they were not quite flat, and there was a particular atmosphere to them, a vestigial wisp of Turner’s haze or Monet’s fog on the Thames. Smith’s brushwork was softly romantic, giving his monumental blow-ups of cartons and packaging a quality like drifting smoke or melting ice cream. Indeed, while keeping more or less to the idiom of the Situation group, Smith was something unexpected and unusual: a romantic Pop artist.

  Unlike the work of his friend Robyn Denny, for example, Smith’s art referred to real, commercial things such as logos on cigars and cigarette packets. On the other hand, in Pop terms, his imagery, as he later observed, was softly vague, a matter of ‘form and mood and shape and colour’. Mainstream Pop, as he saw it, ‘was all about supermarkets and stuff’. But he wasn’t attracted to this kind of ‘low-grade, debased imagery’ – Andy Warhol’s soup cans and Brillo boxes, for example. Smith was intrigued by what he called ‘the high end’: ‘beautiful ads for Smirnoff vodka and glamorous films and store windows and CinemaScope’. American Pop was fundamentally realistic. It was about everyday life and familiar sights. The British variety tended to be about something imagined or aspired to: the American dream, as seen through foreign eyes.

  Smith returned to London in 1961, not because he had fallen out of love with America but because his visa had expired. When he got another visa, he went back and continued to go back and forth, exhibiting in both cities until he finally settled on the western side of the Atlantic in the mid-1970s. He was one of several British artists who ultimately spent much of their lives in the United States. David Hockney would be another.

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  After the screening of Trailer, as often occurred at ICA events, there was a row, which Richard Morphet still remembers: ‘There was this unbelievably acrimonious discussion in which some people were very keen on it, and others thought it was absolutely outrageous because its subject matter was advertising.’ ‘It’s not as if I’m being inspired by Majorcan pottery or something’, Smith responded, ‘This is something that’s all around us!’ The transatlantic scene was the hot topic of the moment. The next event on Dover Street featured the architect Cedric Price talking about ‘his recent impressions of everyday America’ under the title ‘Supermarket USA’. American life held a fascination for London highbrows; someone who had seen a real US supermarket was regarded as an explorer who had had a glimpse into the future.

  Of course, not everybody liked the look of this brave new, commercialized world, nor approved of the vogue for large, simple abstract paintings. At one ICA discussion, the painter Bernard Cohen remembered his fellow artist Peter Blake accusing the rest of the audience – presumably made up of exponents of large-scale, more or less hard-edge abstraction – of being ‘third-rate American copyists’.

  While Allen Jones was in New York, the American critic Max Kozloff published an essay discussing the current wave of European artists settling in New York, suggesting that they were not helping themselves by doing so. To belong to the Manhattan painting community, he argued, an artist had to follow certain rules. Looking back, Jones, who felt that Kozloff probably had him in mind, summarized these stipulations: ‘paint should be flat or at worst egg-shell finish, it had to be hard-edged, the colour clear and so on. Labels such as “Pop” or “Abstract” had nothing to do with it; from Ellsworth Kelly to Roy Lichtenstein, New York painters followed this recipe of pictorial flatness.’ At the time, Jones thought, ‘it’s really shockingly true’. In fact, it wasn’t an entirely fair description of Richard Smith’s work, as we have seen. His pictures retained their distinct, un-American identity. This can also be said for the work of Smith’s friend Peter Blake, but then he wasn’t a fan of New York paintings so much as of American films, music and fashion.

  PETER BLAKE Self-Portrait with Badges, 1961

  When Smith came back to London in 1961, he and Blake shared a house and studio. This was the year that Blake painted Self-Portrait with Badges, with the garden of this house as a setting. In this strange image of himself – which almost qualifies for the Yiddish term
‘nebbish’, meaning ‘ineffectual, timid or submissive’ – Blake is clad in blue, a colour recalling the costume of Thomas Gainsborough’s The Blue Boy (c. 1770). However, he is not wearing the Van Dyck-silks and satins of the eighteenth-century sitter, but cowboy denim and baseball boots. In the mid-1950s, when they were still young art students, Smith and Blake had seen Bill Haley and His Comets at the Kingston Empire, as well as the pioneer of rock-and-roll, Johnnie Ray, at the London Palladium. Smith had a ‘buzz cut’ modelled on the hairstyle of the jazz baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan. Half a century later, and by then bald, he remained nostalgic about this ‘wonderful haircut’.

  The clothes he and Blake wore were hard to source. ‘You liked to dress in an American way, which was immensely problematical,’ Smith remembered. Blake had found his denim jacket while in the South of France in 1956 (on a scholarship, studying folk art). It came from a US Army surplus store. In his painting, Blake wears Levi 501s, the original classic aficionado’s jean, with the bottoms stylishly turned up. To paint the self-portrait, Blake put the jacket on a tailor’s dummy and covered it with his collection of badges, which numbered among his many private accumulations of bits and bobs of popular life, and were not for everyday wear. In the picture, however, Blake shows himself festooned with a positive embarrassment of badges, including a giant one of Elvis Presley – and he also clutches a Presley fanzine. The Stars and Stripes are emblazoned on his jacket pocket, much larger than the Union Jack, which appears in the form of a tiny badge.

  Nonetheless, the whole ensemble is ironically downbeat and British. One badge, in that telling American term represents a ‘loser’: Adlai Stevenson, unsuccessful presidential candidate in 1952 and 1956. The painter’s pose suggests Jean-Antoine Watteau’s Pierrot (formerly known as Gilles, 1719), the wistful outsider, more than Gainsborough’s confidently aristocratic Blue Boy. Ironically – or perhaps, appropriately, considering how much British pop music consisted of young Britons such as Mick Jagger, Blake’s neighbour from Dartford, mimicking Americans while subtly sending up themselves – this picture helped to make Blake an art world star. It was reproduced on a full page of the very first edition of another harbinger of things to come: the inaugural Sunday Times Colour Section of 4 February 1962. This illustrated an article on the artist by John Russell, entitled ‘The Pioneer of Pop Art’, in which Blake was described as ‘a quiet red-bearded young man with the looks of an intellectual gardener’. The other person featured in the magazine was the fashion designer Mary Quant, who was also a leading figure in what was soon being talked of as ‘Swinging London’.

  Seven weeks later, on 25 March 1962, Blake’s self-portrait appeared in a BBC television documentary, ‘Pop Goes the Easel’, as part of the arts series Monitor. This was the first full-length film directed for the programme by Ken Russell, who was quickly rising to prominence himself, and it effectively introduced a hip new art movement – and way of looking at the world – to the British public. Along with Blake, three younger artists were included in ‘Pop Goes the Easel’, all students at the Royal College of Art: Derek Boshier, Peter Phillips and Pauline Boty.

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  Through the film’s soundtrack, Peter Phillips was presented as the most cool. Behind shots of the artist and his works was heard some of the most abrasively cutting-edge jazz of the moment: Cannonball Adderley, Charles Mingus and a raucous yet lyrical free jazz performance by Ornette Coleman. Such fine points mattered in 1962. In that year Kasmin travelled to New York, hoping to sign up artists for the gallery he was planning to open. He took a suite at the Chelsea Hotel and threw a party. He found, though, that Kenneth Noland, a painter of colour field abstractions whom he was courting, did not want to mix with Larry Rivers, a figurative painter in a Pop idiom and jazz saxophonist, who also lived in the hotel. Noland told Kasmin: ‘I don’t know if I want to be in your gallery if you talk to Larry Rivers – he likes the wrong sort of jazz and paints the wrong sort of pictures.’ Although, as we have seen, Pop and abstraction had a great deal in common, there were still sharp divisions between them.

  In his work, however, Phillips found ways of squaring this circle by painting real objects – such as pinball machines – that were flat and had hard edges. Unlike Blake – or indeed Smith – Boshier could not be described as a fan of all things American. On the contrary, he was at this time a critic of the creeping Americanization of British life. Boshier had read studies of advertising and mass media such as Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders, and McLuhan’s Mechanical Bride. Packard’s bestselling book, published in 1957, described trends in advertising based on psychological research. This enabled brands – from cereals to cigarettes – to be given a distinct identity, constructed in such a way as to appeal to certain personalities. In advertising terms this was described as an ‘image’ – a visual appearance – and this image, like any other, could be the subject of art. This, in a nutshell, was the intellectual underpinning of Pop art.

  DEREK BOSHIER Special K, 1961

  In ‘Pop Goes the Easel’ Boshier is seen musing uneasily at the breakfast table:

  I think the Englishman probably starts with America at the breakfast table, starting with corn flakes, which are American in design, American in packaging, American in the whole set-up, the give-away gifts, the something for nothing technique.

  One of his first distinctive works, Special K (1961), featured a box of the Kellogg’s cereal. Boshier got the idea, he recalled, from seeing a packet of corn flakes on the table in a ‘Kitchen Sink’ interior by John Bratby. But his own cereal packet was not approached in a spirit of squalid realism. It was a more turbulent commodity: the bottom of the red ‘K’ seeming to spurt with flames; the space above appearing atmospheric, like a sky filled with US military planes and missiles.

  Boshier made his stance patriotically clear in another picture from 1961, England’s Glory, featuring a brand of matches of the same name, in which the Victorian design of the matchbox is metamorphosed into the Stars and Stripes. Anti-Americanism, of course, was the flipside of the yearning for everything from the USA. The two emotions not only divided the British public, they were often to be found within the same sensibility. Boshier, for all his early suspicion, soon joined his contemporaries in making an ‘American Journey’ – the mid-twentieth-century equivalent of the eighteenth-century European Grand Tour – and has spent much of his life living in the United States. Even in those early pictures, what is clear, visually speaking, are not the artist’s political misgivings, but his willingness to make packaging the main subject of his art. That giant K is the protagonist, if not the hero, of the picture.

  At the RCA, as we have seen, Boshier shared a studio with David Hockney. They also had in common, for a while, what you might call a ‘grocery theme’. In 1961 and 1962, Hockney produced a series of pictures of packets of tea, which were – he confessed – the closest he ever came to Pop art; but even in these he wasn’t interested in the phenomenon of consumerism or advertising. The packets were to hand because Hockney was in the habit of making himself cups of tea in the morning. His mother’s favourite brand of tea was Typhoo, so he was also making a picture of something familiar and personal, to do with his own feelings and memories. Where Boshier transformed a cereal box into a battle scene, with dripping blood and puffs of smoke, Hockney made the packet of tea into a miniature room – whether a sanctum or a cell is not quite clear.

  In the third work in the series, Tea Painting in an Illusionistic Style (1961), the canvas itself is shaped to resemble a box-like space with the lid open, as if it were a house in a fresco by Giotto. It is painted, intuitively, in isometric perspective, rather than the conventional, Renaissance-type view with a single, fixed vanishing point. The lines of the top of the Typhoo packet don’t recede towards a distant vanishing point, they converge towards the viewer; in other words, this is reverse perspective, an early mediation on a problem that still fascinated the artist over half a century later.

  Inside the box sits a naked m
an – a self-portrait, perhaps, or an object of desire – like a miniature version of a figure in a painting by Francis Bacon; an existential hero trapped in a mundane box of tea. Or perhaps, changing the metaphor, he is waiting to come out. Hockney’s lack of true interest in commercial design is suggested by an engaging slip. On the side of the packet, he misspelled the word ‘tea’, writing it as ‘TAE’. Hockney is not, he later confessed, a good speller, but misspelling a three-letter word that was the subject of his painting was quite something.

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  Pauline Boty was not quite a Pop artist when she was included in ‘Pop Goes the Easel’ – that came later. She was chosen, one guesses, because she looked like a star. Her good looks were, in a way, her subject and her dilemma. The November 1962 edition of a magazine entitled Scene featured her on the cover. The text began with a statement in large print at the top of the page, which, over half a century later, seems outlandish in the casual prejudice it betrays. ‘Actresses often have tiny brains. Painters often have large beards. Imagine a brainy actress who is also a painter and also a blonde, and you have Pauline Boty.’

  DAVID HOCKNEY Tea Painting in an Illusionistic Style, 1961

  PAULINE BOTY The Only Blonde in the World, 1963

  This crass piece of writing is a demonstration of what Boty was up against. She was sensationally beautiful in a way that precisely coincided with the fantasies of the age. Early on, she had been known as the ‘Wimbledon Bardot’ because she came from that south-west London suburb. It was not the French star, however, with whom she seemed to identify herself. Boty painted Marilyn Monroe several times: The Only Blonde in the World (1963) could almost be a self-portrait. Most of the surface of the picture might be an abstract from the ‘Situation’ exhibition. But two-thirds of the way across, around the point of the golden section, it opens like a screen or the curtains of a stage – and in walks a figure. If this were an allegory, she would be a personification of sexuality, fashion and youth. Effectively Boty was Andy Warhol and Marilyn wrapped up into one person. This was an impossibly dissonant combination for journalists – and the public – in the early 1960s.