: Acknowledged as the greatest American sculptor of the Twentieth
Century, David Smith (1906-1965) combined imagery inspired by
European innovations in Cubism and Surrealism with materials and
techniques that evoked the power of American industry and
technology. Synthesizing avant-garde traditions in works of
welded metal, he created a unique three-dimensional form of
abstract expressionism. His diverse, iconic works revolutionized
the art of sculpture at home and abroad.
Celebrating the 100th anniversary of his birth, the Solomon R.
Guggenheim Foundation, in collaboration with the Centre Pompidou
and Tate Modern, have organized the retrospective "David Smith: A
Centennial." Curated by the Guggenheim Museum's curator of
Twentieth Century art, Carmen Gimenez, it features 120 sculptures
from throughout Smith's career (1932-1965), as well as drawings
and sketchbooks. Many works come from the David Smith estate. It
is on view at the Guggenheim through May 14 and then travels to
the Musee National d'Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou in Paris (June
14-August 21) and Tate Modern in London (October 25-January 14,
2007).
The exhibition offers a comprehensive opportunity to appreciate
the complexity of Smith's aesthetic concerns and his impact on
the course of modern sculpture. His use of industrial materials,
notably welded metals, utilization of "drawing in space" in open
networks of forms and eventual commitment to works of enormous
scale continue to influence sculptors. When he died in a tragic
car accident at the age of 59 and at the peak of his profession,
Smith left behind a remarkable body of work.
Smith used symbolic objects to recall memories of his life in
"The Letter," 1950. Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute,
Museum of Art, Utica, N.Y.
David Roland Smith was born in Decatur, Ind., the
great-great-grandson of a blacksmith and the son of a telephone
company engineer. As a youngster, he took little interest in art,
although in high school he took mechanical drawing and subscribed
to a correspondence course in drawing.
Starting in his late teens, Smith worked briefly as a riveter and
welder at the Studebaker automobile factory in South Bend, then
attended college for a short time and ended up employed in
Studebaker's finance department in New York City. His vague
aspirations for a career as an artist intensified after he met an
art student Dorothy Dehner, who encouraged him to join her in
classes at the Art Students League. There he studied under
Richard Lahey, John Sloan and Jan Matulka. The latter, a Czech
abstract painter, exposed Smith to Cubism and Constructivism, and
encouraged him to attach found and shaped wooden objects and
other materials to painted surfaces.
Similarly, after learning about Pablo Picasso and Spanish
sculptor Julio Gonzalez from Russian émigré artist John Graham,
Smith studied reproductions of Picasso's art and Gonzalez's
welded metal sculptures in the periodical Cahiers d'Art.
That started Smith thinking about iron and steel as artistic
mediums.
In 1929, two years after marrying Dehner (they divorced in 1952),
Smith purchased the Old Fox Farm in Bolton Landing, N.Y., near
Lake George in the Adirondack Mountains. They lived in Brooklyn
but spent summers and falls on the farm, renamed Terminal Iron
Works, until settling there permanently in 1940.
For a time around 1930, Smith worked in an abstract Surrealist
style, experimented with painting, collage and reliefs, and tried
combining constructed compositions with painting. Following an
extended visit to the Virgin Islands in 1931, he created his
first freestanding sculptures, including "Construction
(Lyndhaven)," 1932, in which a painted wood base supported a
construction of coral, iron, lead and wire. He used his earlier
experience at the Studebaker plant to weld these pieces,
primarily in a rented working space in a metal shop on the
Brooklyn Navy Pier.
The circle, a recurrent element in Smith's work since the late
1930s, was an important conceptual and formal theme in later
pieces, such as "Voltri XII," 1962, created during his stay in
Italy. Private collection, Atherton, Calif.
In the 1930s, Smith turned out relatively small works on
traditional subjects like reclining figures, musicians, dancers and
bathers, while at the same time searching for a systematic style of
metal-working to create open structures akin to Picasso's
constructions.
In "Aerial Construction," 1936, he scrapped the conventional
design of a central mass around which sculptures had historically
been organized in favor of retaining a hollow space at the heart
of the piece framed by a network of lines and planes.
As World War II approached, Smith began work on a series of 15
antiwar medallions titled "Medals for Dishonor," 1938-40. These
jam-packed, complex narrative reliefs depict everything from
racism and sexual violence to mutilated bodies, disease and
mortality. "Bombing Civilian Populations," 1939, for instance,
cast in bronze and ten inches in diameter, focuses on a woman who
stands with her womb cut open to reveal a fetus, surrounded by
bombs, ruined structures and an impaled child. These are
passionately composed, graphic and powerful images.
During the war, with metal scarce for his own pieces, Smith
worked on an assembly line at American Locomotive Company in
Schenectady, N.Y., welding tanks and locomotives seven days a
week.
By the time the war ended, he had built an open-plan, cinderblock
studio with a concrete floor at the farm in Bolton Landing. It
looked more like a machine shop than an artist's studio, with
stacks of stainless steel, piles of cast iron, strips of metal
tubing, nuts and bolts, brass, copper and aluminum strewn
everywhere and tools on workbenches and hoses running from
cylinders of gas to various torches. Much of this material was
ransacked from local dumps and junkyards.
In this cluttered setting, Smith unleashed his pent-up creativity
during an enormously productive and inventive period; in 1945
alone he turned out 35 pieces.
The totemic "Cubi I," 1963, was the first of Smith's much
admired "Cubis" series. This tall piece is in the collection of
the Detroit Institute of Arts.
Smith began to evolve away from small-scale works toward
larger pieces with deeply felt, highly elaborated autobiographical
themes. Thus, "Pillar of Sunday," 1945, is a totemic series of
painted steel vignettes recalling his teenage years. In "The
Letter," 1950, interwoven lines and planes in open space define
symbolic scenes.
Two of his most acclaimed sculptures, "Hudson River Landscape"
and "Australia," both 1951, were larger in scale and incorporated
recreated graphic effects in sculptural terms. In the process of
"drawing in space," Smith welded steel rods into delicate curves
and loops that resembled lines on a blank page. Measuring a mere
491/2 by 75 inches, "Hudson River Landscape" offers a rather
playful image, whereas "Australia," more than 6 feet tall and 9
feet wide, exerts a magisterial presence. Usually described as a
"seminal" work, "Australia" was given to the Museum of Modern Art
by the late William Rubin, then director of the museum's
department of painting and sculpture.
While enjoying growing success in the art market, Smith often
chafed under his self-imposed isolation in Bolton Landing and
became increasingly irascible. Divorced from Dehner (by now an
accomplished sculptor in her own right) in 1952, he married Jean
Freas the following year. Daughters Rebecca and Candida, born in
the 1950s, have been active in perpetuating their father's
legacy.
In the "Tanktotem" series, 1952-1960, Smith created tall, linear
forms set off by curved discs and steel fragments in sculptures
that could stand directly on the floor or ground. "Tanktotem
VIII," 1960, exemplifies the manner in which he painted this
series in vibrant colors.
In order to view his work outdoors amidst nature, he arranged
pieces on the field outside the farm, a practice he continued for
the rest of his life. When he died, there were 89 sculptures in
the field.
In the final decade or so of his abbreviated career, Smith
continued to incorporate found materials and worked on an
increased scale in numerous series of works. During a monthlong
residency in Italy in 1962, he created a phenomenal 27 sculptures
in 30 days. Titled "Voltri" after the town where he worked, this
series consisted of found scraps of steel and tools assembled in
coherent but diverse construction styles. "Voltri VII," 1962,
shaped in the form of a wagon, includes a variety of clearly
identifiable, found components. The more abstract "Voltri XII,"
1962, features a grouping of metal fragments.
In his large, breakthrough sculpture, "Hudson River Landscape,"
1951, Smith created an abstract, symbol-filled depiction of the
region in which he worked. Whitney Museum of American Art, New
York City.
Between 1961 and his death in 1965, Smith turned out his most
famous works, the "Cubis" series, which have become icons of
Twentieth Century American art. This group, characterized by huge
compositions of burnished, stainless-steel rectangular boxes
attached to one another around a main support, pick up the color
and light of their surroundings. "A marvelous geometric order,
simplicity and harmony pervade the entire arrangement - as if one
were visualizing in a single instant some great metallic symphony,"
art historian Wayne Craven has written. "They are a testimony to
man's ability to find beauty in geometric truths and in the harmony
of pure geometric forms."
The extreme verticality (124 inches in height) of "Cubi I," 1963,
recalls the earlier "Tanktotems" series. Fashioned as a huge
gate, "Cubi XXVII," 1965, a carefully balanced construction of
industrial steel blocks and cylinders, serves as a frame on an
enormous scale - 1113/8 by 873/4 by 34 inches.
The high esteem in which the "Cubis" works are held was confirmed
in November 2005 when the last work in the series, "Cubi XXVIII"
(measuring 108 by 110 by 45 inches), achieved $23.8 million, the
highest price ever paid for a work of contemporary art sold at
auction. Coming from a Texas foundation, "Cubi XXVIII" was
purchased by Eli Broad, famed Los Angeles financier and
connoisseur, for his personal collection.
In the spring of 1965, while driving in Bennington, Vt., Smith's
truck overturned. He died that night. He was at the height of his
creative powers.
Since then Smith has been the subject of a half-dozen
retrospectives and numerous museum and gallery exhibitions. His
work is in the permanent collections of major museums throughout
the world.
"Aerial Construction," 1936, made of painted iron, drew
inspiration from Smith's early cubist paintings. Hirshhorn
Museum and Sculpture Garden.
The feel of the "sculpture farm" he organized at Bolton
Landing was memorably evoked, with the cooperation of Smith's
daughters, in "The Fields of David Smith," a series of outdoor
exhibitions, 1997-1999, on the spacious grounds of the Storm King
Art Center in Mountainville, N.Y.
By displaying works from each phase of his career, "David Smith:
A Centennial" offers a great opportunity to appreciate the
evolution of the sculptor's influential styles and the magnitude
of his achievement. "He was as much a pioneer as any artist can
be," Storm King Art Center director David Collens has observed.
"No sculptor was more important than Smith to those who
followed."
From plain, small works of the 1930s to brightly painted,
monumental pieces of the 1960s, this driven, restlessly
experimental sculptor created diverse yet coherent and
extraordinarily powerful works that will forever mark a high
water mark in American art history.
The 472-page, fully illustrated exhibition catalog features
scholarly essays and photographs of sculpture in the show, as
well as an extensive bibliography, exhibition history and
chronology. This handsome and comprehensive volume sells for $85
(hardcover) and $50 (softcover).
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum is at 1071 Fifth Avenue. For
information, 212-423-3500 or www.guggeheim.org.
