Matthew Smith: His Life and Reputation by Malcolm Yorke. Faber & Faber 264pp, £25 in UK
"International" reputations in art are often hard to understand, but many "national" ones are even harder. In the case of (Sir) Matthew Smith, a non-English person may be puzzled by some of the high-flying claims made for him, just as he or she may be puzzled by the standing in England of artists such as Nash or Bomberg. Yet every country - that is, every country with an art tradition - has its native figures who are cherished at home but mean relatively little abroad. Like so many local wines, they resist attempts to export them and simply do not travel well, if they travel at all.
In the case of Smith, this does seem a contradiction since his main influences were French and he spent much of his life in France. In that, of course, he was typical of many English artists of between the wars, not to speak of painters of the 1950s such as Patrick Heron. It is impossible to imagine Ben Nicholson, for instance, without his French and other Continental influences, yet these were all absorbed fully and made his own: Nicholson was a born, effortless cosmopolitan, while remaining innately English. But the Englishman in love with France and French culture is often, at heart, an inverted provincial in lifelong reaction against his background and what he sees as English drabness and philistinism. Sometimes, of course, he may find his true self and direction on foreign soil, but more often than not he becomes a kind of awkward hybrid between two irreconcilable cultures.
Smith came of a North of England business family, but it was plain that he was unsuited to working in the family firm, so his father, rather reluctantly, agreed to his studying art. Matthew was a very slow starter, in fact almost a non-starter, who failed to distinguish himself at art college in Manchester and later in London. At the Slade School he was bullied by the notorious Henry Tonks, who seems to have done irreparable harm to English art, but he also met a talented fellow-student, Gwen Salmond, who had the self-confidence and bounce which he lacked, and who became his wife.
They had two sons, and since they were both Francophiles they saw a lot of France in general and Paris in particular. Smith was timid and myopic, but he insisted on volunteering in the first World War and became a lieutenant, though in the Labour Corps and not among the fighting men. He was wounded at Passchendaele in 1917, spent the last months of the war working in a camp for German prisoners, and shortly after being "demobbbed", he met in Paris the Irish painter Roderic O'Conor, who became a major influence both personally and artistically.
Smith's marriage broke up - or more precisely, he left his wife - and he spent the early 1920s painfully groping for the personal style which somehow eluded him. This first emerged in a series of paintings done in Cornwall, but he really found himself as the result of a passionate liaison with a painter-cum-model named Vera Cunningham, who inspired a series of nudes which are probably his best works. He spent more and more time in France, until the second World War drove him back to London; but both his sons died while serving in the RAF, a dual tragedy from which he never quite recovered.
London after the bombings was never the same, though visits to Paris convinced him that it, too, was no longer the city he had known and loved. The old Montparnasse milieu had gone for ever. In postwar Britain, Smith gradually lapsed or grew into the role of Grand Old Man, sought after socially, lauded by the critics, collected avidly by those who could afford his pictures, and finally honoured with a knighthood. Dudley Tooth, his dealer, "pushed" him shrewdly and he was even chosen to represent Britain at the resurrected Venice Biennale, though foreign critics appear to have been unimpressed.
Shy, self-deprecating, almost helpless in practical matters, living by choice in a cramped studio-flat although he had ample private means apart from his art earnings, he offered exactly the kind of licensed semi-eccentricity the English have always liked. Yet he never lost a certain inborn Yorkshire shrewdness, and he also had a gregarious, socialising streak which blossomed in sympathetic company.
Smith could never live long without women, whether posing for him, cosseting him or partnering him in bed; and his later liaisons sometimes involved him in troubles and tension. In spite of his shyness he possessed a quiet, chivalrous charm which attracted women far younger than himself, including Mary Keene, who had been the mistress of Louis MacNeice and by whom he had a daughter. To the stupefaction of his family and close friends, she became the almost sole beneficiary of his will - and he died a wealthy man, apart from leaving a carefully hoarded collection of his best paintings and drawings.
Malcolm Yorke has written a sympathetic, fluent biography of a man who, in spite of his chronic self-pity and hypochondria and fits of meanness, was plainly loved by many people. I only wish that it could silence my doubts about Smith's stature, for ultimately I cannot quite believe that he was anything more than a second-division painter who on rare occasions rose to something more than that.
Apart from the all-too-obvious influences of Matisse, Derain and Segonzac, his "hot" colour is repetitive and airless and his drawing is often slovenly - perhaps as a result of trying to flog that early, constricting Slade training out of his skin. Under the Fauvist exterior there was always a Royal Academician lurking, and the conventionality of Smith's late work shows that this artistic alter ego became dominant in the end. After all, he was acclaimed as a master in an English art epoch which believed that Epstein and Augustus John were geniuses of the first rank, and whose judgment is suspect from the start. Perhaps a wellchosen - and not too large - memorial exhibition might prove me wrong, or at least prejudiced?
Brian Fallon is Chief Critic of The Irish Times