Jack smith: a painter in pursuit of marvels

Jack Smith is one of Britain's leading abstract artists, certainly the most ceaselessly inventive one. In the mid-1950s, recently out of the Royal College of Art, he was associated with a group of realists exhibited by the Beaux Arts Gallery and labelled the 'Kitchen Sink School'. Since the beginning of the 1960s he has been an abstract painter. With energy and great ingenuity, he is exploring the apparently infinite world of forms and colours, creating images that vary greatly in expression, yet are always positive and optimistic in character. The aim of this book is to present and examine aspects of his ever-new output of abstract work, and thus also to rid him of the old label which art historians and curators still associate him with after forty years of confident, brilliant paintings without realistic subject-matter. EXCERPT: 'Jack Smith has been an abstract painter for close on forty years. His early work, of 1952-56, did include a number of domestic interiors, kitchens and living rooms, with or without figures. They were ordinary, un-posh, and based on the house he shared with other artists and with his brother. They were neither sordid nor resentful. They stood at some distance from the often more pleasing or romantic art produced in England since the war, but they were dignified representations, honouring what they pictured. Yet they were received as images of protest. Contemporary realistic movements in France and Italy were more directly polemical. Jack Smith, John Bratby and others were taken to be an English equivalent, and welcomed or disdained as such according to taste

Jack Smith is one of Britain's leading abstract artists, certainly the most ceaselessly inventive one. In the mid-1950s, recently out of the Royal College of Art, he was associated with a group of realists exhibited by the Beaux Arts Gallery and labelled the 'Kitchen Sink School'. Since the beginning of the 1960s he has been an abstract painter. With energy and great ingenuity, he is exploring the apparently infinite world of forms and colours, creating images that vary greatly in expression, yet are always positive and optimistic in character. The aim of this book is to present and examine aspects of his ever-new output of abstract work, and thus also to rid him of the old label which art historians and curators still associate him with after forty years of confident, brilliant paintings without realistic subject-matter. EXCERPT: 'Jack Smith has been an abstract painter for close on forty years. His early work, of 1952-56, did include a number of domestic interiors, kitchens and living rooms, with or without figures. They were ordinary, un-posh, and based on the house he shared with other artists and with his brother. They were neither sordid nor resentful. They stood at some distance from the often more pleasing or romantic art produced in England since the war, but they were dignified representations, honouring what they pictured. Yet they were received as images of protest. Contemporary realistic movements in France and Italy were more directly polemical. Jack Smith, John Bratby and others were taken to be an English equivalent, and welcomed or disdained as such according to taste