The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (451 page)

BOOK: The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists
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Smith , Jack
.
Smith , John Raphael
.
Smith , Sir Matthew
(1879–1959).
English painter. He studied at the
Slade
School, 1905–7, and for a short time in Paris (1911) under
Matisse
. Thereafter he identified strongly with French art and spent much of his time in France. He was delicate in health and of a nervous disposition, but this is hardly apparent from his work, which uses colour in a bold, unnaturalistic manner echoing the
Fauves
. His lush brushwork, too, has great vigour, and he was one of the few English painters to excel in painting the nude, his dark saturated colours and opulent fluency of line creating images of great sensuousness. He also painted landscapes (most notably a series done in Cornwall in 1920) and still lifes. Frank
Auerbach
and Francis
Bacon
are among the many artists who have admired Smith's painterliness. His work is in many public galleries, the best collection being in the Guildhall Art Gallery, London.
Smith , Richard
.
Smith , Tony
(1912–80)
. American sculptor, painter, and architect. He served an apprenticeship in architecture as clerk of works to Frank Lloyd Wright and practised as an architect from 1940 to 1960, during which time he also painted. He began to take an interest in sculpture around 1940, but although he taught at various colleges in the 1940s and 1950s (in addition to his architectural career) and was closely associated with leading avant-garde figures such as Barnett
Newman
, Jackson
Pollock
, Mark
Rothko
, and Clyfford
Still
, he did not exhibit sculpture publicly until 1964. From that time he quickly emerged as one of the leading exponents of
Minimal art
. His work was sometimes very large in scale, composed of bold geometrical shapes (often repeated modular units) that he had industrially manufactured in steel. Many of his works were placed outdoors, helping to bring to American sculpture a new interest in the environment. A well-known example is
Gracehoper
(Detroit Institute of Arts, 1972), which one can walk through.

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