Date: 22-05-1990
Owning Institution: Crane Kalman Gallery
Publication: The Independent 1987 - 1999      
Subject:   20th Century    

Andrew Graham-Dixon assesses Matthew Smith's reputation, revived at the Crane Kalman Gallery

You can't fault his references. In 1926, his exhibition at the Mayor Gallery made Roger Fry ''bold and optimistic enough to believe in the future of an English school of painting''. Three years later P G Konody described him, unequivocally, as ''the outstanding personality in British art''. The testimonials have continued to flood in, albeit with less frequency. In 1987, when the Royal Academy staged ''British Art in the Twentieth Century'', he was deemed sufficiently important for eight of his works (fewer only than Henry Moore) to be included. Despite all that his place in the history of British art in this century is, still, only partially established.

Matthew Smith (1879-1959) has become an artist whose work is known and admired, above all, by other artists. His reputation within the relatively small circle of his supporters lies in stark contrast to the ignorance of his art that prevails among the general public, to whom Smith remains for the most part as anonymous as his surname. His uncertain status is reflected in the prices which the Crane Kalman Gallery is asking for the works in its current Smith exhibition, which range from pounds 30,000 to pounds 80,000 - hardly cheap, but since this is no more than is being asked elsewhere for distinctly mediocre Edwardian paintings, it suggests that the market is still a long way from concurring with Roger Fry's estimate of Smith.

Smith studied at the Slade School of Art, where his tutor Henry Tonks's first judgement of him was a terse ''No sense of drawing, no ability to paint''. He was evidently not a man to be swayed from what he perceived to be his vocation. Smith's father, a Halifax wire manufacturer, had done his level best to dissuade his son from pursuing a career in art, and his fellow students at Manchester School of Art, where he studied before attending the Slade, nicknamed him ''Mr Futile''. None the less, Smith went on from the Slade to embark on a second studentship in Paris in 1910 where, at the age of 31, he enrolled for classes in the school of Henri Matisse. In later life, he would recall how ''Matisse admonished one man student for not showing enough appreciation of the female form, and frowned a little at him and said: 'Et vous un jeune homme!' ''

Smith's painting has been remembered, somewhat misleadingly, as a minor British tributary of Fauvism. This is partly, doubtless, because of his early contact with Matisse - and partly too because his painting, with its inflamed, hothouse colours, the hedonistic luxuriance of its palette, has always seemed so much at odds with other British art of the inter-war years. Looking at Smith's paintings at Crane Kalman - the still lives in particular, or the assembled sequence of heavy-limbed nudes in claustrophobic, almost overbearingly flushed interiors - it is hard not be struck by how radically un-English a sense of colour he had.

His art seems a continent away from the low-toned murks of Walter Sickert, the depressive post-war drabness of Nash or Nevinson, or the ascetic greys and whites of Nicholson. Whether it is, strictly speaking, Fauve is another question. Take one of the finest paintings in the current exhibition, the Model a la Rose of 1924, where the reclining figure of his then model, Vera Cunningham, seems of less interest to the painter than the crushed folds of her red dress, rendered in a furious, bravura flurry of close brushstrokes. The colours are, perhaps, shared by Matisse, but there is none of Matisse's poise about Smith's painting, which is far busier, far fuller - there are none of those spatial pauses, those flat voids of colour favoured by the French artist - and more overtly passionate in its involvement with what is being depicted. Smith seems closer to one of Matisse's great influences, Delacroix, than to Matisse himself. The orientalist Delacroix lies behind Smith's own brand of pictorial hedonism: the Delacroix of Sardanapalus, or of the Femmes d'Algers, a virtual reprise of which Smith painted in his own The Two Sisters. Overcome by lassitude in velveteen circumstances they seem sisters, too, to Delacroix's slumbrous harem inhabitants.

Patrick Heron, one of Smith's numerous artist-admirers, once remarked that ''Had he consented to make Paris his headquarters instead of London, there is little doubt, in my mind at least, that the world beyond these shores would have been taught to value him at least as high as Vlaminck.'' That is probably true; it has been Smith's critical misfortune, as an English-born contributor to what is essentially a French tradition of painting, to have always fallen between categories.

Smith's shaky reputation may also be accounted for by his extreme unevenness. His art, which leans so heavily on painterliness (an unsatisfactory term, but the only one available) for its success, carries like all painterly painting a high risk of failure. The flickering skein of brushstrokes, the variations of transparency and opacity within the medium of oil paint capable of conjuring the impression of drapery, of flesh or fruit, can easily go awry, and when they do in Smith they suggest - as in, for example, A Nude Female Model Reclining of 1924 - a poorly directed virtuosity, a busy mark-making that has somehow lost touch with the thing it is attempting to bring across.

At its best, however, Smith's paint carries tremendous conviction, and a fantastic weight of sensual response to the visible world. That response is not necessarily sexually biased, either. The most impressive painting at Crane Kalman is not of the nude but of Laura the Parrot: painted in the loosest of Smith's manners, the birdcage the crudest of diagrams, its inhabitant a vaguely avian splodge of green and blue, it gives the impression that the bird's exotic colouring has somehow expanded to bathe its surroundings in rainbow-like radiance. Worked quickly with the brush and - shades of late Titian - the fingers, Smith's paint suggests that the air itself has become clotted, saturated with colour. It is a painting that conveys sheer visual pleasure and exuberance in a way that is quite exceptional in British art of the time, where colour is usually used far more nervously (a hangover, perhaps, of our Protestant inheritance), far more parsimoniously.

Smith's guiltless approach to painting is made more unusual by the context in which his art developed. Most of his peers were engaged in some form or other of depressive retrenchment: guiltily atoning, in the case of the Vorticists, for their previously avowed faith in the Machine Age; or glumly meditating on a world to which war had laid waste. Smith's intensity, the determined embrace of life that his art, at its best, so clearly expresses, was hard-won - he was badly shell-shocked in 1917 and suffered periodically from depression for the rest of his life - but not something that he would ever surrender. His friend Alden Brooks wrote a novel, The Enchanted Land, the hero of which, Dominique Prad, is a thinly disguised portrait of Smith. The novel's account of Prad's wartime injury and recovery probably gives the truest picture of Matthew Smith's feelings at the time and suggests that it was the war which finally turned Mr Futile into Mr Positive. Injured, Prad reflects on a life of non-achievement, 37 years old and still to paint a decent picture; should he survive, he vows ''to live life, beautiful life, to the full, as it should be led.''

Francis Bacon wrote the most elegant and lucid defence of Smith's art in the early 1950s, praising him as ''one of the few English painters since Constable and Turner to be concerned with painting - that is, with attempting to make idea and technique inseparable.'' Bacon's admiration for Smith says as much about Bacon, perhaps, as its ostensible subject; it suggests, among other things, Bacon's reluctance to be regarded simply as a modernist, his interest in finding a contemporary equivalent to Old Masterly painting. But that is also perhaps the key to the success of Smith's finest paintings, which - to borrow a phrase used by Bacon in another context - ''bring the figurative thing up on to the nervous system more violently and more poignantly'' than those of almost any other British artist of his generation.