Smith, David

Smith, David (1906–1965). American sculptor, painter, and draughtsman. He was one of the most original and influential American artists of his generation and is widely considered the outstanding American sculptor of the 20th century. Born in Decatur, Indiana, he began studying art at Ohio University in 1924 but soon dropped out of the course, and in the summer of 1925 worked at the Studebaker motor plant at South Bend, Indiana, where he acquired the skills in metalwork that stood him in good stead later in his career. From 1926 to 1931 he studied painting intermittently at the Art Students League, New York, while supporting himself by a variety of jobs. His main teacher was the Czech-born abstract painter Jan Matulka (1890–1972), whom he described as ‘a guy I'd rather give more credit than anyone else'. Among his friends at this time were Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning. In the early 1930s he began to attach objects to his paintings, and from this he moved on to sculpture, making his first welded iron pieces (probably the first by any American artist) in 1933. These were inspired by the work of Julio González, which first made him realize the potential of iron as an artistic material ( John Graham showed Smith illustrations of González's work in Cahiers d'art). From 1935 Smith concentrated on three-dimensional work, but he always maintained that there was no essential difference between painting and sculpture and that although he owed his ‘technical liberation’ to González, his aesthetic outlook was more influenced by Kandinsky, Mondrian, and Cubism. He continued to paint throughout his life and was a prolific draughtsman.

In 1935–6 Smith made an extensive tour of Europe. On his return to the USA he worked for the Federal Art Project and also began making a series of relief plaques called Medals for Dishonor, which stigmatized violence and greed. In 1938 he had his first one-man exhibition, at the East River Gallery, New York. By this time he was producing sculpture of considerable originality, constructing compositions from steel and ‘found’ scrap, parts of agricultural machinery, etc. He had a love of technology and wrote: ‘The equipment I use, my supply of material, comes from factory study, and duplicates as nearly as possible the production equipment used in making a locomotive … What associations the metal possesses are those of this century: power, structure, movement, progress, suspension, destruction, brutality.’ In 1940 he settled at Bolton Landing in upstate New York, where he built a studio he called ‘Terminal Iron Works'. This was his home for the rest of his life, and he alternated sustained periods of lonely creativity with brief binges in New York City.

Smith was employed as a welder on defence work, 1942–4, then returned to sculpture. From this time he began to build up an international reputation, his work being shown in numerous one-man and group exhibitions (including a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1957 and a representation at the Venice Biennale in 1958). However, he also found time to teach at various colleges. During the 1940s and 1950s his sculpture was predominantly open and linear, like three-dimensional metal calligraphy. Perhaps the best-known work in this style is Hudson River Landscape (Whitney Museum, New York, 1951). From the end of the 1950s, however, his style became more monumental and geometrical, with boxes and cylinders of polished metal joined at odd angles. Although the forms are often massive, the effect they create is not one of heaviness, but of unstable dynamism, the exhilarating sense of freedom being enhanced by the reflection of sunlight from the bright surfaces (they are generally intended for outdoor settings). Smith often created these works in series, such as Agricola, Cubi, Tank Totem, Voltri, Zig. They initiated a new era in American sculpture, ushering in the sort of objectivity that characterized Post-Painterly Abstraction, and gave Smith a place as the peer of the great Abstract Expressionist painters who were his contemporaries. Like the most famous of the Abstract Expressionists, Jackson Pollock, Smith died in an automobile accident: ‘During the preceding thirty-odd years he had absorbed the inventions of Cubist and Constructivist sculpture, tinctured by Surrealism, and literally forged directly in metal a style that was wholly original, wholly American and still unfolding at his death’ (Whitney Museum of American Art, 200 Years of American Sculpture, 1976). See also IRON AND STEEL.