David Smith
David Smith American, 1906–1965 Exhibitions Contemporary American Painting and Sculpture: Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Roy R. Neuberger (1952; catalogue), David Smith Sculpture (1952), The Classic Tradition in Contemporary Art (1953; catalogue), Expressionism 1900–1955 (1956; catalogue, tour), The John and Dorothy Rood Collection (1960; catalogue), The Cities Collect (2000) Holdings 3 sculptures, 1 drawing, 1 unique work on paper, 2 periodicals
It has been said of David Smith that “he came into the inheritance of all the modernist impulses of European art simultaneously and without having to commit himself to one over another.” 1 The impulses in question are Constructivism, Surrealism, and Cubism, all of which deeply imprinted his sculptural work. After seeing Vladimir Tatlin’s Constructivist reliefs in the late 1920s, Smith—who began as a painter—added objects to the surfaces of his canvases, engaging the space in front of them as well as the flat plane of the wall. Surrealist interest in myth and legend suffused his early works, but Cubism was his most important discovery—especially the iron sculptures of Pablo Picasso and Julio González. He first saw such works in the early 1930s, in the French art journal Cahiers d’Art; by then, he was already familiar with steel, having worked as a welder at a Studebaker factory while he was a student. But he hadn’t thought to use it as a material for his work. “[Seeing] the Picasso-González iron constructions of 1931 . . . was the liberating factor which permitted me to start with steel, which before had been my trade, and had until now only meant labor and earning power for the study of painting.” 2 Smith’s early welded sculptures—the first was made in 1933—were open, linear constructions that suggested animals, figures, and totems, all familiar Surrealist motifs. The Royal Bird (1947–1948), purchased for the Walker Art Center’s collection in 1952, the year the Walker organized a solo exhibition of his work, is based on the skeleton of Hesperornis regalis—the regal western bird, a prehistoric diving carnivore.3 When Smith made the piece, World War II had not been over for long, and his vehement antiwar views surely informed his rethinking of the bird’s body as an aggressive knot of spikes and talons. His decision to model it after a bird that kills in order to live may also be a specific indictment of profiteering through death—the particular variety of warfare he most abhorred.4 Smith made The Royal Bird at his studio in Bolton Landing, a town in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York. He had set up shop there permanently in 1940, naming it Terminal Iron Works for the Brooklyn business where he had previously rented studio space. There he planned and constructed his welded steel and iron objects, installing many of the finished pieces in the surrounding fields. Smith, the painter-turned-sculptor, worked his ideas out in two dimensions: he made hundreds of drawings that were studies for forms in the round, and he also used the floor of his work space to move fragments of scrap
metal around until he had a composition he liked. His last series, the Cubis, were mostly mocked up using discarded cardboard cartons such as liquor and cigar boxes. The process of manipulating real materials to arrive at the meaning and structure of a work had been the basis of Picasso’s collage technique and, through him, became central to New York School artists, including Smith and his close friend Robert Motherwell.5 Cubi IX was made in October 1961, the first of twenty-eight works in this series created before Smith’s death in a car accident in 1965. A radical departure from the essentially flat or linear work he had made up until that time, the Cubis are composed of stacks of blocky shapes that seem both architectural and dynamic. As described by poet and curator Frank O’Hara, the Cubis are “stainless-steel volumes balancing one on another, signaling like semaphores, climbing into the air with the seeming effortlessness and spontaneity of a masterful drawing, while retaining the sobriety of their daring defiance of gravity.” 6 Their stainless-steel surfaces were finished with an electric buffing machine fitted with a Carborundum disk, which left swirling patterns that shimmer and reflect the light and colors around them.7 Smith’s engagement with surface inflection dates from his beginnings as a painter and remained a lifelong concern—in fact, about a third of his sculptures are polychromed. “My sculpture grew from painting. My analogy and reference is with color,” he said simply.8 By the end of his prolific career, Smith had almost single-handedly imagined a new idiom for modernist sculpture. He refused to explain his work, only asserting time and again that it had been created out of necessity and as an expression of his identity. “I haven’t named this work nor thought where it would go. I haven’t
David Smith Cubi IX 1961 stainless steel 105 3/4 x 58 5/8 x 43 7/8 in. (268.6 x 148.9 x 111.4 cm) Gift of the T. B. Walker Foundation, 1966 1966.20
DAVID SMITH 519
thought what it is for, except that [it] is made to be seen. I’ve made it because it comes closer to who I am than any other method I can use. The work is my identity. . . . Why should you expect understanding when I do not?” 9 J.R. Notes 1. Hilton Kramer, quoted in Frank O’Hara, David Smith, exh. cat. (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1966), 9. 2. Smith in Cleve Gray, ed., David Smith by David Smith (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1968), 68. 3. Smith saw the specimen in the collection of the American Museum of Natural History, New York, and owned at least one photograph of it. 4. See Robert S. Lubar, “Metaphor and Meaning in David Smith’s Jurassic Bird,” Arts 59 (September 1984): 78–86. Lubar also suggests that we might read in the sculpture’s title an allusion to monarchy and, by extension, to colonization and slave trade, brutalities that were motivated in large part by economics. 5. This point was made by E. A. Carmean, Jr., in David Smith, exh. cat. (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1982), 36. 6. Frank O’Hara, quoted in David Smith (London), 46. 7. See Carmean, David Smith (Washington), 46. Smith intended the Cubis to be installed outdoors, but doing so has caused some to develop small rust pocks due to iron inclusions in the impure grade of stainless steel he used. In addition, the surfaces of the Cubis are easily scratched but difficult to restore because of their swirling patterns. See conservation documents on Cubi IX (Walker Art Center Archives). 8. Smith, statement of 1960, quoted in David Smith (London), 13. His painted metal sculptures were not always well received—modernist critic Clement Greenberg, for example, considered the addition of paint to be an aesthetic mistake on the artist’s part. Greenberg, one of the executors of Smith’s estate, drew criticism in 1974 for his extraordinary decision to strip the paint from several sculptures that were still part of the estate. See Hilton Kramer, “Altering of Smith Work Stirs Dispute,” New York Times, September 13, 1974, 28. 9. Smith, quoted in Gray, David Smith by David Smith, 164.
David Smith Circle and Arcs 1961 steel, paint 74 1/8 x 37 5/8 x 35 in. (188.3 x 95.6 x 88.9 cm) Gift of Judy and Kenneth Dayton, 1999 1999.61
David Smith The Royal Bird 1947–1948 steel, bronze, stainless steel 22 1/8 x 59 13/16 x 8 1/2 in. (56.2 x 151.9 x 21.6 cm) Gift of the T. B. Walker Foundation, 1952 1952.4
520 DAVID SMITH
Bits & Pieces Put Together to Present a Semblance of a Whole: Walker Art Center Collections Joan Rothfuss and Elizabeth Carpenter Bits & Pieces Put Together to Present a Semblance of a Whole: Walker Art Center Collections is published on the occasion of the opening of the newly expanded Walker Art Center, April 2005. Major support for Walker Art Center programs is provided by the Minnesota State Arts Board through an appropriation by the Minnesota State Legislature, The Wallace Foundation, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation through the Doris Duke Fund for Jazz and Dance and the Doris Duke Performing Arts Endowment Fund, The Bush Foundation, Target, General Mills Foundation, Best Buy Co., Inc., The McKnight Foundation, Coldwell Banker Burnet, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the National Endowment for the Arts, American Express Philanthropic Program, The Regis Foundation, The Cargill Foundation, 3M, Star Tribune Foundation, U.S. Bank, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the members of the Walker Art Center. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Walker Art Center Bits & pieces put together to present a semblance of a whole : Walker Art Center collections.-- 1st ed. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 0-935640-78-9 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Walker Art Center--Catalogs. 2. Arts--Minnesota--Minneapolis--Catalogs. 3. Walker Art Center--History. I. Title: Bits and pieces put together to present a semblance of a whole. II. Title: Walker Art Center collections. III. Title. N583.A53 2005 709’.04’0074776579--dc22 2004031088
First Edition © 2005 Walker Art Center All rights reserved under pan-American copyright conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means—electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage-and-retrieval system—without permission in writing from the Walker Art Center. Inquiries should be addressed to: Publications Manager, Walker Art Center, 1750 Hennepin Avenue, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55403. Available through D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers 155 Sixth Avenue, New York, NY 10013
WALKER ART CENTER COLLECTIONS
Every reasonable attempt has been made to identify owners of copyright. Errors or omissions will be corrected in subsequent editions. Wayne Koestenbaum, “Jackie and Repetition,” from Jackie Under My Skin: Interpreting an Icon (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), © by permission of the author. Publications Manager Lisa Middag Editors Pamela Johnson, Kathleen McLean Designers Andrew Blauvelt, Chad Kloepfer Production Specialist Greg Beckel Printed and bound in Belgium by Die Keure. Cover art Lawrence Weiner
It has been said of David Smith that “he came into the inheritance of all the modernist impulses of European art simultaneously and without having to commit himself to one over another.” 1 The impulses in question are Constructivism, Surrealism, and Cubism, all of which deeply imprinted his sculptural work. After seeing Vladimir Tatlin’s Constructivist reliefs in the late 1920s, Smith—who began as a painter—added objects to the surfaces of his canvases, engaging the space in front of them as well as the flat plane of the wall. Surrealist interest in myth and legend suffused his early works, but Cubism was his most important discovery—especially the iron sculptures of Pablo Picasso and Julio González. He first saw such works in the early 1930s, in the French art journal Cahiers d’Art; by then, he was already familiar with steel, having worked as a welder at a Studebaker factory while he was a student. But he hadn’t thought to use it as a material for his work. “[Seeing] the Picasso-González iron constructions of 1931 . . . was the liberating factor which permitted me to start with steel, which before had been my trade, and had until now only meant labor and earning power for the study of painting.” 2 Smith’s early welded sculptures—the first was made in 1933—were open, linear constructions that suggested animals, figures, and totems, all familiar Surrealist motifs. The Royal Bird (1947–1948), purchased for the Walker Art Center’s collection in 1952, the year the Walker organized a solo exhibition of his work, is based on the skeleton of Hesperornis regalis—the regal western bird, a prehistoric diving carnivore.3 When Smith made the piece, World War II had not been over for long, and his vehement antiwar views surely informed his rethinking of the bird’s body as an aggressive knot of spikes and talons. His decision to model it after a bird that kills in order to live may also be a specific indictment of profiteering through death—the particular variety of warfare he most abhorred.4 Smith made The Royal Bird at his studio in Bolton Landing, a town in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York. He had set up shop there permanently in 1940, naming it Terminal Iron Works for the Brooklyn business where he had previously rented studio space. There he planned and constructed his welded steel and iron objects, installing many of the finished pieces in the surrounding fields. Smith, the painter-turned-sculptor, worked his ideas out in two dimensions: he made hundreds of drawings that were studies for forms in the round, and he also used the floor of his work space to move fragments of scrap
metal around until he had a composition he liked. His last series, the Cubis, were mostly mocked up using discarded cardboard cartons such as liquor and cigar boxes. The process of manipulating real materials to arrive at the meaning and structure of a work had been the basis of Picasso’s collage technique and, through him, became central to New York School artists, including Smith and his close friend Robert Motherwell.5 Cubi IX was made in October 1961, the first of twenty-eight works in this series created before Smith’s death in a car accident in 1965. A radical departure from the essentially flat or linear work he had made up until that time, the Cubis are composed of stacks of blocky shapes that seem both architectural and dynamic. As described by poet and curator Frank O’Hara, the Cubis are “stainless-steel volumes balancing one on another, signaling like semaphores, climbing into the air with the seeming effortlessness and spontaneity of a masterful drawing, while retaining the sobriety of their daring defiance of gravity.” 6 Their stainless-steel surfaces were finished with an electric buffing machine fitted with a Carborundum disk, which left swirling patterns that shimmer and reflect the light and colors around them.7 Smith’s engagement with surface inflection dates from his beginnings as a painter and remained a lifelong concern—in fact, about a third of his sculptures are polychromed. “My sculpture grew from painting. My analogy and reference is with color,” he said simply.8 By the end of his prolific career, Smith had almost single-handedly imagined a new idiom for modernist sculpture. He refused to explain his work, only asserting time and again that it had been created out of necessity and as an expression of his identity. “I haven’t named this work nor thought where it would go. I haven’t
David Smith Cubi IX 1961 stainless steel 105 3/4 x 58 5/8 x 43 7/8 in. (268.6 x 148.9 x 111.4 cm) Gift of the T. B. Walker Foundation, 1966 1966.20
DAVID SMITH 519
thought what it is for, except that [it] is made to be seen. I’ve made it because it comes closer to who I am than any other method I can use. The work is my identity. . . . Why should you expect understanding when I do not?” 9 J.R. Notes 1. Hilton Kramer, quoted in Frank O’Hara, David Smith, exh. cat. (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1966), 9. 2. Smith in Cleve Gray, ed., David Smith by David Smith (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1968), 68. 3. Smith saw the specimen in the collection of the American Museum of Natural History, New York, and owned at least one photograph of it. 4. See Robert S. Lubar, “Metaphor and Meaning in David Smith’s Jurassic Bird,” Arts 59 (September 1984): 78–86. Lubar also suggests that we might read in the sculpture’s title an allusion to monarchy and, by extension, to colonization and slave trade, brutalities that were motivated in large part by economics. 5. This point was made by E. A. Carmean, Jr., in David Smith, exh. cat. (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1982), 36. 6. Frank O’Hara, quoted in David Smith (London), 46. 7. See Carmean, David Smith (Washington), 46. Smith intended the Cubis to be installed outdoors, but doing so has caused some to develop small rust pocks due to iron inclusions in the impure grade of stainless steel he used. In addition, the surfaces of the Cubis are easily scratched but difficult to restore because of their swirling patterns. See conservation documents on Cubi IX (Walker Art Center Archives). 8. Smith, statement of 1960, quoted in David Smith (London), 13. His painted metal sculptures were not always well received—modernist critic Clement Greenberg, for example, considered the addition of paint to be an aesthetic mistake on the artist’s part. Greenberg, one of the executors of Smith’s estate, drew criticism in 1974 for his extraordinary decision to strip the paint from several sculptures that were still part of the estate. See Hilton Kramer, “Altering of Smith Work Stirs Dispute,” New York Times, September 13, 1974, 28. 9. Smith, quoted in Gray, David Smith by David Smith, 164.
David Smith Circle and Arcs 1961 steel, paint 74 1/8 x 37 5/8 x 35 in. (188.3 x 95.6 x 88.9 cm) Gift of Judy and Kenneth Dayton, 1999 1999.61
David Smith The Royal Bird 1947–1948 steel, bronze, stainless steel 22 1/8 x 59 13/16 x 8 1/2 in. (56.2 x 151.9 x 21.6 cm) Gift of the T. B. Walker Foundation, 1952 1952.4
520 DAVID SMITH
Bits & Pieces Put Together to Present a Semblance of a Whole: Walker Art Center Collections Joan Rothfuss and Elizabeth Carpenter Bits & Pieces Put Together to Present a Semblance of a Whole: Walker Art Center Collections is published on the occasion of the opening of the newly expanded Walker Art Center, April 2005. Major support for Walker Art Center programs is provided by the Minnesota State Arts Board through an appropriation by the Minnesota State Legislature, The Wallace Foundation, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation through the Doris Duke Fund for Jazz and Dance and the Doris Duke Performing Arts Endowment Fund, The Bush Foundation, Target, General Mills Foundation, Best Buy Co., Inc., The McKnight Foundation, Coldwell Banker Burnet, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the National Endowment for the Arts, American Express Philanthropic Program, The Regis Foundation, The Cargill Foundation, 3M, Star Tribune Foundation, U.S. Bank, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the members of the Walker Art Center. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Walker Art Center Bits & pieces put together to present a semblance of a whole : Walker Art Center collections.-- 1st ed. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 0-935640-78-9 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Walker Art Center--Catalogs. 2. Arts--Minnesota--Minneapolis--Catalogs. 3. Walker Art Center--History. I. Title: Bits and pieces put together to present a semblance of a whole. II. Title: Walker Art Center collections. III. Title. N583.A53 2005 709’.04’0074776579--dc22 2004031088
First Edition © 2005 Walker Art Center All rights reserved under pan-American copyright conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means—electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage-and-retrieval system—without permission in writing from the Walker Art Center. Inquiries should be addressed to: Publications Manager, Walker Art Center, 1750 Hennepin Avenue, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55403. Available through D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers 155 Sixth Avenue, New York, NY 10013
WALKER ART CENTER COLLECTIONS
Every reasonable attempt has been made to identify owners of copyright. Errors or omissions will be corrected in subsequent editions. Wayne Koestenbaum, “Jackie and Repetition,” from Jackie Under My Skin: Interpreting an Icon (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), © by permission of the author. Publications Manager Lisa Middag Editors Pamela Johnson, Kathleen McLean Designers Andrew Blauvelt, Chad Kloepfer Production Specialist Greg Beckel Printed and bound in Belgium by Die Keure. Cover art Lawrence Weiner
