Vincent Smith, Painter Who Portrayed Black Life
Hyfler/Rosner
Vincent Smith, Painter Who Portrayed Black Life, Dies at 74
By RONALD SMOTHERS NY Times
Vincent Smith, an artist whose work depicted the rhythms and intricacies of
black life in diverse styles, from a hard-edged, socially conscious
expressionism to riots of dazzling colors and patterns, died last Saturday
in Manhattan. He was 74 and lived in Manhattan.
The cause was lymphoma complicated by pneumonia, said Cynthia Smith, his
wife.
Mr. Smith, who had more than 25 one-man shows and participated in more than
30 group exhibitions since the early 1970's, was among about a dozen
prominent members of the Black Arts movement of the 1960's and 70's. A
figurative painter with an often subtle, social thrust, he placed his
subjects in a stylized way against geometric, textured and intricately
colored backgrounds. He stood as an expressionistic bridge between the stark
figures of Jacob Lawrence and the Cubist and Abstract strains represented by
black artists like Romare Bearden and Norman Lewis.
Mr. Smith, a Brooklyn native, was a high school dropout who, family members
said, spent his time in school sketching in his notebooks rather than
listening to his teachers. He was a railroad and postal worker, traveled the
country riding the rails as a hobo and served in the Army, all before
beginning to work seriously as a painter in 1953.
He eventually returned to school to earn a college degree at 50. But it was
his early bitter and sweet experiences as a black man that helped shape his
work, along with several visits to Africa and a series of fellowships from
Maine to Maryland.
The cumulative influence of these experiences were on view in his last show,
this fall at the Alexandre Gallery in Manhattan.
In his review in The New York Times, Holland Cotter noted Mr. Smith's
vibrant oranges and yellows, which he said glowed "like light through
stained glass."
"The visual effect is a little reminiscent of Rouault's expressionism, but
applied to a Social Realist art inflected with references to African
culture," Mr. Cotter wrote.
Texture also played a role in Mr. Smith's work. He often used sand and
pebbles mixed with paint, said Lowery Sims, executive director of the Studio
Museum in Harlem. Mr. Smith also projected a political black nationalism and
cultural nationalism that came out of the 60's and 70's, she said.
In 1999 the Metropolitan Museum of Art bought the first of three of his
paintings, said Gil Einstein, his art dealer.
"He said that as a boy and a young man he went to the Met and never saw
paintings that looked like himself or his life," Mr. Einstein said. "This
was important to him because it told how far he had come as an artist and as
a representative of his people."
Coming out of his Brownsville neighborhood in the mid-40's, Mr. Smith
wandered the Bowery and Greenwich Village. His wife recalled that he was
drawn to Manhattan as much by its romance as by his desire to escape the
gangs and violence in his neighborhood.
Mr. Smith left his postal job to paint full time in 1953. He studied from
1954 to 1956 at the Brooklyn Museum Art School and later at the Skowhegan
School of Painting in Maine. He was a recipient of a John Hay Whitney
Fellowship in 1959 and in the 70's received travel fellowships to study and
paint in Africa and Europe.
In interviews with the artist and art historian David C. Driskell, Mr. Smith
talked of how his use of color and its luminosity followed his travels.
After going from the grays and blacks of Brooklyn to the vibrant greens of
Skowhegan, he began landscape paintings. In Africa the sunlight's yellows
and oranges struck him and became more prominent in his work. "It just seeps
in," he said.
He also did illustrations for a line of greeting cards and for books on jazz
and the blues by his friend Amiri Baraka, the poet. Manhattan subway riders
using the West 116th Street station of the No. 2 line walk past two murals
he made as part of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's Art En Route
program. More of his public art commissions are at social service centers in
the Bronx and Harlem and at Boys and Girls High School in the
Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn.