#Ivisible man getting bur ed full#
#Ivisible man getting bur ed plus#

In 1970, Smith was the official British artist in Venice. Just 14 years earlier it had all been very different.

#Ivisible man getting bur ed plus#

Howard Hodgkin was the official British representative that year and he was being supported by a roistering group of friends who included Mick Moon, Patrick Caulfield and John Hoyland, plus a man with a rather shuffling, grey, careworn air, who turned out to be Dick Smith. I remember seeing him many years ago at the movable piss-up that is the Venice Biennale. He has apparently always been quiet and self-effacing. Two recent, massively invasive operations on his heart have left him looking frail and almost transparent. So he was invisible in terms of his work at the Tate, and almost invisible in his person. Twenty years later, at the main tobacco-sponsored tournaments during the heyday of televised snooker, where the sets echoed the brand 'livery' and product packaging, it often looked as if the players were walking around inside a Dick Smith painting.

His best paintings were generally large, sharing a sense of scale with cinema and billboard advertising where, as Smith said at the time, 'you could drown in a glass of beer and live in a semi-detached cigarette packet'. None of the extraordinary, bulking, built-out paintings that he came under particularly heavy attack for in the early 60s, accused of strengthening advertising's success by taking it, in the form of abstracted Salem and Philip Morris cigarette packets, as his subject.

#Ivisible man getting bur ed full#

When he wandered inside to take a look at the radical new rehang, it brought home to him that - while there were Hodgkins and Peter Blakes and Hockneys (a whole room full of Hockneys, his stablemate at the Marquess of Dufferin and Ava-backed Kasmin Gallery in New Bond Street throughout the 60s) - there were no Smiths on display. 'Give me eyes, Tracey!' Smiles broadened on the faces of the PR contingent. 'Tracey, give us a smile, Tracey.' Mad Tracey from Margate, whose career still has a lot of heat under it. Smiles froze on the faces of the official group. Tracey Emin in a biker jacket and brassy jewellery had arrived in a taxi. and suddenly there was a stampede away from the official picture opportunity in the direction of another one that had unexpectedly presented itself. The PR persons with the clip-boards had ticked off who had turned up and who hadn't, the artists had been whipped into some sort of order, the snappers had been assembled beneath the scrubbed-up portico. Also present was Smith's old friend and former Wiltshire neighbour, Sir Howard Hodgkin, who, in the years that Smith's standing has been steadily eroded, has made himself enormously famous and important.

Peter Blake was there, and so was Patrick Caulfield. Present were some of the eminent pop-ists who with Richard Smith invented pop art in this country in the late 50s. And he duly took his place on the steps at Millbank alongside the great and the good, the young and not-so-young Turks, the ennobled and bearded grandees, freighted with reputation and achievement.