A Whole Year a half a day IX is one in a series of twelve reliefs Richard Smith presented at the Jewish Museum in 1968. The two-color, shaped canvases were exhibited in a single row across the length of a wall. As the sequence progressed, the top right corner of each painting lifted increasingly away from the wall, bending into the viewer’s space, like pages being torn from a paper calendar. In this work, color and form are united, its expanding edge delineated by a band of sky blue against vivid red. Smith was a major figure in both British and American art in the 1960s and 1970s. In his own words, he hoped that paintings such as this one would be “new entries in a lexicon, not new definitions of forms already there.”