David Smith (sculptor)
Roland David Smith (March 9, 1906 – May 23, 1965) was an influential and innovative American abstract expressionist sculptor and painter, widely known for creating large steel abstract geometric sculptures.
For David Smith, Australian sculptor of the 1970s, see Optronic Kinetics.
David Smith
May 23, 1965 (aged 59)
- Helmholtzian Landscape (1946)
- Hudson River Landscape (1951)
- Tanktotem I (1952)
- Agricola V (1952)
- Voltri VI (1962)
- Cubi VI (1963)
Born in Decatur, Indiana, Smith initially pursued painting, receiving training at the Art Students League in New York from 1926 to 1930. However, his artistic journey took a transformative turn in the early 1930s when he shifted his focus to sculpture.
In the early phase of his career, he crafted welded metal constructions that incorporated industrial objects, foreshadowing later developments in sculpture.
During the 1940s and 1950s, his work shifted to more personal, landscape-inspired sculptures. These works possessed a delicate linear quality, akin to drawing in metal, and echoed the aesthetics of contemporary painting. Notably, Smith cultivated strong friendships with renowned Abstract Expressionist painters, including Jackson Pollock and Robert Motherwell, illustrating the interplay between different art forms during this period.
By the late 1950s, his sculptures started to assume monumental proportions. Using overlapping geometric plates of highly polished steel, his works developed a reductive and geometric aesthetic. These massive pieces of the 1960s are considered precursors to the minimal "primary structures" that emerged later in the decade, further exemplifying Smith's forward-thinking approach to sculpture.
Early life[edit]
Roland David Smith was born on March 9, 1906, in Decatur, Indiana and moved to Paulding, Ohio in 1921, where he attended high school. From 1924 to 1925, he attended Ohio University in Athens (one year) and the University of Notre Dame, which he left after two weeks because there were no art courses. In between, Smith took a summer job working on the assembly line of the Studebaker automobile factory in South Bend, Indiana. He then briefly studied art and poetry at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.[1]
Moving to New York in 1926, he met Dorothy Dehner (to whom he was married from 1927 to 1952) and, on her advice,[2] joined her painting studies at the Art Students League of New York. Among his teachers were the American painter John Sloan and the Czech modernist painter Jan Matulka, who had studied with Hans Hofmann. Matulka introduced Smith to the work of Picasso, Mondrian, Kandinsky, and the Russian Constructivists. In 1929, Smith met John D. Graham, who later introduced him to the welded-steel sculpture of Pablo Picasso and Julio González.[3]
History[edit]
Early work[edit]
Smith's early friendship with painters such as Adolph Gottlieb and Milton Avery was reinforced during the Depression of the 1930s, when he participated in the Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project in New York.[2] Through the Russian émigré artist John Graham, Smith met avant-garde artists such as Stuart Davis, Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning. He also discovered the welded sculptures of Julio González and Picasso, which led to an increasing interest in combining painting and construction.
In the Virgin Islands in 1931–32, Smith made his first sculpture from pieces of coral.[3] In 1932, he installed a forge and anvil in his studio at the farm in Bolton Landing that he and Dehner had bought a few years earlier. Smith started by making three-dimensional objects from wood, wire, coral, soldered metal and other found materials but soon graduated to using an oxyacetylene torch to weld metal heads, which are probably the first welded metal sculptures ever made in the United States. A single work may consist of several materials, differentiated by varied patinas and polychromy.[2]
Exhibitions and Collections[edit]
Exhibitions[edit]
Smith's first solo show of drawings and welded-steel sculpture was held at the Willard Gallery in New York in 1938.[3] In 1941, Smith sculptures were included in two traveling exhibitions organized by the Museum of Modern Art and were shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art's Annual exhibition in New York.
Smith represented the United States in the 1951 São Paulo Art Biennial and at the Venice Biennale in 1954 and 1958. Six of his sculptures were included in an exhibition organized by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, that traveled to Paris, Zurich, Düsseldorf, Stockholm, Helsinki, and Oslo in 1953–54; he was given a retrospective exhibition by MoMA in 1957. In 1961, the MoMA organized an exhibition of fifty Smith sculptures that traveled throughout the United States until the spring of 1963. At the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, "David Smith: Cubes and Anarchy" took a thematic look at the sculpture Smith produced between the Depression years and his death.[16]
Death[edit]
He died in a car crash near Bennington, Vermont on May 23, 1965.[8] He was 59 years old.