Oil in State Show Is Artist’s Only Picture After 14 Years’ Painting
Ex-Marine Has Destroyed All Others as Not Up to Par—Sticks to $300 Price.
JOHN McREE SMITH with his painting—”Still Life With Green Pitcher,” in the Missouri Exhibition at City Art Museum.
One St. Louis artist has his entire surviving production in the current Missouri Exhibition at City Art Museum, it was learned yesterday. The complete output of John McRee Smith in 14 years of painting, the last two very seriously, consists of only one picture. He has destroyed all the others, he explained, because they were not good enough.
The severe self-critic is probably the most talented artist ever to attend the Washington University art school, his former teachers there, Fred Conway and Philip Guston, have declared. Smith, the 24-year-old son of Mr. and Mrs. Iredell Smith, 4524 Forest Park avenue, is an ex-Marine who was wounded in combat. He is determined to spend the rest of his life painting despite the fact his injury, like that of noted Mexican artist Ozro, was to his left eye.
Apparently Smith is inclined to agree with his teachers as to his ability. His small canvas, “Still Life with Green Pitcher,” bears a $300 price tag, whereas most other artists exhibiting for the first time have valued their works far below $100.
From Giotto to Beckmann.
Last week a connoisseur was fascinated by Smith’s work, which has a sculptural sense of space and a remarkable quality of contour defined by the colors themselves. The collector, a woman, announced at once that she would buy the painting. When she asked the tag, however, she asked whether there had not been some mistake.
“No mistake,” Smith said when the information was relayed to him. “It’s worth all of $300. Next year my price will be $500.” The sale was not made.
Smith’s uncompromising attitude stems from the conviction he is on the right track in art at last. A lover of such old masters as Giotto and Michelangelo, he also is absorbed by contributions of moderns like Rouault, Cezanne and Beckmann. He has been a City Art Museum habitue since he was 10 years old, when he started to paint.
In Quest of Studio.
Not even the war halted Smith’s painting. He went on despite fighting, in which he lost four buddies in quick succession, but he does recall he was reprimanded once during island-hopping in the Pacific because his painting brushes were in perfect order and his rifle wasn’t.
Smith’s current experimental work has puzzled his non-artistic friends, but they all liked portraits he painted of fiancee Mary Alice McMichael, 3932 Bates street. A strain was placed on amicable relations with the McMichaels’ family when the artist took back her portrait and painted over it, as he had already done to his own.
Right now Smith is trying to rent a studio so that he will be able to paint in isolation the greater part of each day. His aim is completion by the fact he likes to work all day to the accompaniment of records of Mozart’s music and other classical music, sometimes with the volume great enough to drown out clacking typewriters in adjacent offices. Because of this preference he has left 10 studios in the last three years.
“Not everyone appreciates great music,” he said. —H. D.