The Slade runner
John Hoyland
MATTHEW SMITH by Malcolm Yorke Faber, f25, pp. 204 Iremember Clement Greenberg saying in the mid-Sixties that the worst painters in New York were better than the best painters in England. To me this was a red rag to a bull; how dare this egotistical, insensitive critic make such an outlandish, xenophobic claim? It couldn't be true, and it wasn't, quite, but in retrospect I know what he meant. In the Sixties American art, for those of us who spent the majority of our time over there, lifted our work and our spirits. Something was in the air: Rothko, Motherwell, Newman, Kline and De Kooning were painting there, Pollock and Louis had just died.
Several decades earlier, this had hap- pened to Matthew Smith, born in 1879, ten years after Matisse. After leaving the Slade, he was in France — the right place at the right time. He exhibited in the Salon des Independents alongside Matisse, Derain, Dufy, Vlaminck and others. He knew them, or of them; his role may have been minor, but showing amongst artists of such stature is a great confidence-builder and would have given him an opportunity to make comparisons, and for self-criticism. Perhaps in the artist's mind there is an imagined golden thread attaching him to the great artists of the past and to his idols. He had only worked briefly in the Matisse school, but three weeks listening to Matisse, I would guess, would be more valuable than four years in Manchester and three years at the Slade. This would have given him the opportunity to see Matisse the man: a man like himself, not a god, a man experiment- ing and asking questions, a man who wor- shipped his own gods.
Matthew Smith was born into a typically Victorian family in Halifax, Yorkshire, where his father was a successful factory owner; a stern but good man considered to be highly intelligent, he pursued refined taste within the limited possibilities of provincial Victorian England. Naturally he wished his sons to succeed and prosper, and in his view there was no way that this could be done as an artist. Art was for leisure.
Matthew was the oddball, shy and awk- ward, and seemingly physically weak with troublesome eyes and a record of failure at the jobs his father found for him. There was a showdown. Matthew had decided he wanted to study art and won. This revealed steel behind the timid exterior. After art at Manchester Municipal School of Art and Technology (father still hedging his bets) he found a place at the Slade. I was enter- tained by Yorke's collection of anecdotes about the Slade, the Royal Academy and the heroes of the day. Wilson Steer pro- nounced on Van Gogh (`shouted too loud'); Sickert advised Gauguin to stick to painting as a hobby; Tonks, the Slade professor, taught students to hate French painting and how to draw with a plumbline. The public wanted detail, high finish, stories and melodrama, painted pains- takingly with consummate skill. Art schools taught the English disease of over- refinement CI don't think you have quite resolved the nose'). Not much has changed.
Smith was lucky; he had a rich daddy `The Blue Necklace, 1924 who, though reluctant, paid for everything, including travel. He lived an enviable life, wining and dining with interesting people and if .they weren't interesting they were rich and supportive. Smith was a hypochon- driac, a professional one; the type who complains that he is worn out from attend- ing his friends' funerals, always moaning about something to divert people from his innate selfishness, while driving others to despair, but this was perhaps his only pro- tection, his shield against self-doubt.
Smith became very successful in Eng- land. By the time he was 40, his colourfully robust work set him apart from his contem- poraries. He had managed to do something that few English painters achieve. He painted light with colour through colour volume; paint was paint and paint was form, but the paint also had a life of its own. There is none of the illustrational melodrama and theatricality of Bacon, or the timid expressionism of some of our `leading' (or is it 'leaden') painters; his best works were a pure force.
He was a northener; like Van Gogh and Matisse he lusted for the sun, the wine and the women (with whom he seems to have been very successful) and though his manners were impeccable his nickname was the 'Moth' — we see him trying to pick up waitresses, feeling up secretaries in gal- leries and seducing friends' wives. The fact that he always had 'a few bob' may have facilitated his many successes. He had what I would describe as canniness, which others might see as Yorkshire meanness: generous when it was to his benefit. Being a Yorkshireman, he didn't like being taken for a ride and this was his form of natural justice.
As a painter, Matthew Smith never had a `big idea' and lacked the physical and intel- lectual rigour of the greatest artists that he admired. He didn't have the breadth of ambition. Nevertheless, he achieved moments of great beauty in his finest works. He was not a Gauguin, whom he admired, but there are some parallels. Thinking of Gauguin in Tahiti, all these events took place over the past 100 years. Smith's achievements took place 50 years later and today it seems that little has changed, in art, the establishment or public attitudes. But in art 100 years is a drop in the ocean.
When an artist enters his studio, no mat- ter how much money he has, he still has to confront himself through the painting he is alone; money is of no importance. Before I read this book I knew nothing about Matthew Smith the man. This is a lively, well-researched work full of amazing anecdotes, background detail, and cross- references to the historical context, and it paints a wonderful picture of his life and times. Malcolm Yorke displays an under- standing of how painting works and how we all develop in different ways. His life of Matthew Smith helps convincingly to explain what made him tick.
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