Beginning in 1958, Smith spent part of every year at the New Jersey shore. Attracted as ever to the topography of the coast and the clarify of the light as muse, he also enjoyed the casual atmosphere and relaxed pace of seaside living, much as he had at Pawleys Island. There he continued to produce beach scenes, drawing from his current surrounds and working from sketches he had done in South Carolina. (Smith was prone to mining subject matter that he would resurrect from earlier trips and compositions.) Eventually, he turned to painting a variety of subjects, even city views.

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Smith believed that the painter's goal was "to make color and form work together so you invent your own world on canvas." His lean, tranquil interpretations of the landscape, executed in complex but subdued hues with little visible brushwork, succeeded in doing just that - creating entrancing escapes, much like a summer treat.

Valerie Ann Leeds

2006

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Like many American artists of his generation,Houghton Cranford Smith experienced an epiphany in Paris. For Smith, it occurred in 1930, nearly half way through an already successful career as a painter of Impressionist landscapes. That year, he encountered the Purist aesthetic of Amédée Ozenfant, which sparked a dramatic and permanent change in Smith's painting style. The mature, post-1930 works that are the subject of this exhibition are pristine, crystalline landscapes that evoke a mood of stillness, calm, and quietude. They are lovingly crafted and carefully designed, the pain meticulously laid down with a minutely striated texture creating what became for Smith an unmistakable signature style. While the simplified, hard-edged forms and crisp contours bring to mind the Precisionist aesthetic of Charles Sheeler or the Regionalist paintings of Grant Wood, Smith's artistic goals differed significantly from his American contemporaries in his devotion to Purist ideals. His dedication to his particular principles resulted in some of the most innovative works produced in America in the mid-twentieth century. 

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Adrienne Goering

2001

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In Paris in 1930, the American painter Houghton Cranford Smith (1887-1983) began studying under Amédée Ozenfant, who along with Le Corbusier had developed a variation on Cubism called Purism. Decisively converted, Smith returned to New York, where he applied this machine - like style to the creation of pastoral landscapes. His late works call to mind painters like Grant Wood, Rockwell Kent and Charles Sheeler but have their own muted, slightly comical, slightly melancholy serenity.

 

What you see in Smith's work is less rationalized abstraction than a classicizing and nostalgic idealism. All things, from clumpy or serpentine trees, puffy clouds and bulging hills to block little houses and toy-like boats, are crisply defined, simply shaded, and perfectly composed. Using small but loaded brushes, Smith created surfaces with a texture that could almost be mistaken for that of a coarse weave fabric.

 

Formalist rigor does not neutralize the emotional content of Smith's work. His images, whether of foreboding gray mountains in Chile, sunny harbors or rolling hills in New England or gleaming Manhattan skyscrapers, exude an affecting yearning for a never-never land of peace, harmony and tranquility.  

                                      Ken Johnson

April 6, 2001

The New York Times

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The fruition of Smith's modern style emerged with the practice of the Purist curriculum: mathematical precision of form and color, and the use of tactical surface texture. Yet Smith set himself apart from his French Purist mentors, as well as his American contemporaries, by adhering to one theme throughout his lifetime of work: the landscape. Whether the view was natural or manmade , whether he was working in his early impressionist style or his mature precisionist manner, Smith celebrated the landscape throughout his rich and productive seventy - five years of painting. 

 

Margot P. Sands

1996

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Whether Smith painted mountain landscapes or crowded urban scenes, everything in his later painting is characterized by a clarity and stillness that gives to his art a strange, otherworldly quality. In these paintings he is a master of a certain kind of light - a pale, pearly light that seems almost unearthly in its origin. Every image - of clouds, mountains, the sea, ships or skyscrapers is turned into a kind of archetype. Whereas in the Impressionist pictures every accident of light and every observed detail is transmuted into a poetry of shifting sensation, in the later painting, everything is stripped of accident, removed from the realm of time and the weather, and distilled in a structure of pure painting. Without being abstract in the literal sense, these are paintings that nonetheless address the eye as virtual abstractions. They are very haunting paintings, and quite unlike anything that Smith's contemporaries were producing. He is that rare thing on the current art scene - a true discovery.

 

Hilton Kramer

April 2, 1990

The New York Observer

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