Skin and Bones

Comment on Later Works in David Smith Centennial Exhibition, Guggenheim Museum, New York

The Guggenheim fellowship in 1950 clearly defines an artistic period of David Smith's development as a sculptor. His earlier pieces are framed and bordered; his later pieces move toward being unframed and unbordered. Of the forty-seven works illustrated in the exhibition catalog produced before 1950, nineteen are forcefully--and I would say, brutally--framed and bordered just like a painting in a frame. After 1950, the frames mostly disappear. I believed that Smith expressed the importance of the Guggenheim fellowship in two sculptures of 1950, the charming "Structure of a Small Concept Possessing a Big Power" (1950, plate 48 in catalog of sculptures), and "The Letter" (1950, plate 52 of the catalog of sculptures). "The Letter" is a contained and bordered piece. I thought it symbolizes the excitement and anticipation of the Guggenheim letter informing him that he had won the fellowship, but it actually is a love letter to a friend after a lovers' quarrel.(1) "Structure on a Small Concept" appears to depict a mailbox!

At all events, Smith's sculptural work opens up and references external space beginning in 1950. He clearly is not in the position of realizing the concept that mass defines space and gravity; but he is in a position to move to this concept, he is open to it without necessarily realizing that he is. "Australia" (1951, plates 58 two views in the catalog of sculptures, also my photographs, here) exemplifies this revolutionary step. It is not unanticipated. Other pieces in 1950 include free-standing, unframed columns and points (such as, "Sacrifice" [1950, plate 49 in catalog of sculptures], "17 h's" [1950, plate 53 in catalog of sculptures], and "24 Greek Y's" [1950, plate 54 in catalog of sculptures]); but "Australia" bursts with energy, bursting frames, spiking into space and (through the archaeological and fossil references) time.

On the basis of the conceptual breakthrough in "Australia", Smith builds the "Agricola" series several years later. (He produced "Agricola Head" in 1933 [plate 6 in the catalog of sculptures], but I do not know the relationship, aside from the title, to the 1952-1953 series of the same name. It is, anyway, a very different work, looking like a helmet on a head, thus bordered and defensive, completely contrary to the later Agricola series.)

Having made the leap to the traditional, Western mode of sculptural reference to space, Smith now explored the Western tradition of sculpture. That is how I read the Tanktotem series ("Tanktotem I", 1953, plate 65, and "Tanktotem III", 1953, plate 66 of the catalog of sculptures) and the Forging series ("Forging III" through "Forging XI", 1955, plates 68-75, catalog of sculptures). These vertical columns/figures take Smith back to ancient Greek sculpture, to the caryatids, which were usually attached to columns supporting lintels and other structural beams in Greek temples and buildings. Eventually the caryatids evolved to become free-standing figures; but their historical reference remained the structures they supported. Hence, the caryatids are metaphors for the way mass creates and supports the structure of space. (There is more, too. The caryatids embody certain values of civic order, so as to say that the social and civil space in which humankind lives is created and structured by values.)

Having made his conceptual breakthrough, there was no turning back for Smith. He began to explore the power of traditional modes and concepts of Western sculpture. He made his figures with blocks (e.g., "Five Units Equal," 1955, plate 75, and "5 1/2", 1956, plate 76 in catalog of sculptures), with representative persons ("History of Leroy Borton", 1956, plate 77, and "Running Daughter", 1956-60, plate 78, catalog of sculptures), with sociological-symbolic personages ("Sentinel", 1956, plate 80, catalog of sculptures).

Importantly, he began to think of sculpture in astronomical terms, as in "Tanktotem IX" (1960, plate 82, catalog of sculptures) and "Tanktotem X" (1960, plate 83, catalog of sculptures), which have references to the moon and the earth. This development, too, is Smith's discovery of ancient Greek perspective. I do not mean Greek myth. I mean the ancient Greek cosmology, which viewed the universe as a God-created machine, in which the heavens and the earth and human beings on earth are all integrated as parts of the machines. Humans are gifted with the divine spark of rationality that enables them to understand and create in this world. The ancient Greeks unified mathematics, science, cosmology, mechanical arts and crafts, and mechanical machines in a world view and a unified scheme of values. Now Smith was the Greek apprentice.

All the work that Smith does after the mid-1950s sprang out of his recovery of the beginnings of Western sculpture in the ancient Greeks. The famous Voltri series began when he took a commission to work in the Voltri foundry and metal works in Genoa, Italy, in 1962. Here Smith was in the heart of classical civilization, working as metal smiths might have worked two thousand years earlier. He was now creating in iron and steel classical sculptures that explored and translated concepts the ancient Greeks had worked in stone. He began to reference the craft of iron work explicitly (and not ironically), no doubt because the craftsman represented the center of the Greek mechanical cosmology (I am not ignoring the strict Greek distinction between the philosopher/scientist/mathematician and the craftsman [who was often a slave]). Tools appear in the Forging series. Bits of found materials were incorporated. The texture of the iron became important to him. I believe art critics are mistaken who interpret this experience for Smith in terms of modern industry. Rather, Smith has traveled two thousand years back and discovered the great concepts that produced the wonderful tradition of Western sculpture.

The last artistic development that I would like to comment upon is Smith's placement of his pieces in the fields around his Bolton Landing studio. I have not visited the studio, so I cannot be certain of my interpretation here; but I have viewed some photographs and the outdoor sculptures are well depicted and discussed in the exhibition catalog.

As I indicated earlier in this article, both in modern cosmology and in Western sculpture, mass creates, defines, and structures space. This concept is extended to landscape. Sculpture (and architecture) creates the landscape. We can understand this point by referring to Henry Moore, who used this concept profoundly. When Moore placed his regal seated figures in an outdoor setting, it was not because they looked good there, or because the visitor had a better view of them in natural light, or because there was space for them. In fact, they were not even "in" the landscape. He placed them where they are, because his sculptures create the landscape. When the king and queen are out on the land, the land is their dominion, their landscape, their place, their location. Their ownership, power, and dominion over the land creates a royal landscape out of the land, out of the scenery, out of the verdant greenery, grasses, hedgerows, copses, streams, and rocks.

I do not believe that Smith had fully made that leap to the notion of the figure creating the landscape at Bolton Landing. He appears to have placed his pieces out-of-doors because he needed room to store them. He obviously organized them in an archival manner, as well as in serial order. They were in and on the land; but they did not create the landscape. In a way, the framed fields (thinking of aerial images of his studio and the land around it) are another frame and border, just as the early sculptures of the 1930s and 1940s are framed and bordered. But I am convinced that the later work in its outdoor locale was not simply a macro-version of Smith's miniatures from the early decades. They were, rather, the artistic platform on which Smith would have, had he not died in 1965, made the breakthrough to a full conception of sculptural mass, space, gravity, and motion. All his energy, potential, and trajectory pushed him in that direction. He was obviously a great sculptor. Had he lived to make the next breakthrough, he could easily have taken Western sculpture to new conceptual grounds.

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1. The exhibition catalog states, "The Letter can for practical purposes be considered the first of the 'drawings in air' .... The Letter was made after a lovers' quarrel with Jean Freas and was intended to speak for Smith in hs attempt to bring her back." (p. 307)

Carmen Giminez (Curator of the Exhibition), David Smith: A Centennial (Guggenheim Museum Publication, New York, 2006).

(Revised.)

Comments on Early Works in David Smith Centennial Exhibition, Guggenheim, New York

I had little acquaintance with Smith's sculptures prior to visiting the exhibition. My in situ exposure was limited to several of his later, monumental sculptures; otherwise I had only seen photographs of Smith's works. I made a brief study of a large piece at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, link here. The piece flummoxed me. I just glimpsed at and never studied the photographs. In other words, I had not engaged his sculpture at all. Upon reflection, I think I had seen more photographs of Smith working in his Bolton Landing studio on sculptures than of the sculptures themselves.

The exhibition has one goal of introducing Smith's large artistic output of the 1930s and 1940s, before his Guggenheim fellowship of 1950 that had such an influence on his work and demarcates the earlier from later work. His larger pieces and his monumental series, such as Cubi, date after 1950s. Nearly fifty iron and steel compositions from the early decades are exhibited.

According to the pamphlet guide to the exhibition and the catalogue, Smith's innovation in the earlier period was, under the influence of cubism and abstract European pictorial art of the inter-war period, to create a sculptural interpretation in iron and steel of a genre mostly executed on two-dimensional canvas. He was drawing in space, the guide states (apparently quoting him). His conceptual accomplishment was to abandon the traditional sculptural concern with mass.

My personal reaction was to be underwhelmed with the early pieces. If his effort was to create three-dimensional (and even four dimensional--given some references to surrealism) translations of abstract expression painting and drawing, it seems to me not to have succeeded. The pieces are uniformly flat and two dimensional. They are viewed like pictures. Viewing them from the ends seldom reveals anything more of their composition.  Moreover, like pictures, they are hemmed in by frames and borders, so they are set apart from their immediate envelope of space. Spaces are defined internally by the lines of the sculptures literally. Space is not defined externally by reference of the forms and arrangement of the works. They do not define the surrounding spaces as sculptures traditionally have done.

The surfaces of many of the small pieces are not worked, but are painted. Some of the painting is polychrome and visually exciting, such as Helmholtzian Landscape (1946, plate 39 in catalog of sculptures). Smith is engaged in formal work, so to speak, not crafts work in which he would try to expose and work with the essential qualities of the material--the iron and the steel--in which he works. He seldom does much artistically with the welding and the welds that bind his compositions. Only one piece, Landscape with Strata (1946, plate 42 in cataloger of sculptures) that I recall, applies welds to the surface of some of the metal to texture the surface three-dimensionally.

Since much of Smith's early work involves lines in space, it is worthwhile to examine them. It is interesting to me that Smith does not use wire in the technical sense of wire as metal bars manufactured by drawing the bars through small apertures (larger wires, like cables, being constructed by weaving many wires together).  Rather, Smith uses hammered strips of iron or steel to make the lines. I do not know why he made this choice. Perhaps he did want (or could not afford) to purchase true wire, or perhaps he wanted to use only pieces in his compositions that he could manufacture himself, with wire fabrication not being possible.The result of his choice is that some of the pieces lack the tension, suspense, and animation that he tried to create. Suspended Figure (1935, plate 13 in catalog of sculptures), for example, seems rigid and lacks suspense in the suspension. As a student of sculpture, I would say that the problem here, for Smith, is that he is trying to represent and reference gravity, which is one of the physical conditions of sculpture associated with mass that he is trying to eliminate in an effort to render abstract expressionism.

From my point of view, the problem with eliminating mass in sculpture is that you also eliminate space and gravity. In both Einstein's gravitational physics, which is the accepted cosmic theory today, and in sculpture, it is the presence of mass that creates space, its structure and its dynamics. Gravity is the product of mass in motion. So eliminating mass does away with the entire spatial field which has strain, stress, suspension, and the other characteristics that make sculpture in situ exciting. Put differently, the mass is not in the landscape; mass creates the landscape.

I would say that Smith worked himself into a conceptual bind that he couldn't really get out off so long as he conceived of his project the way he did. All he could do was make himself a technically more proficient miniaturist, which he obviously did. The bind restrained him and his development as a sculptor. It put him in a situation in which major development of himself as a sculptor and of his work required breaking out of, bursting, the paradoxical concept within which he was working.

The result for me is that Smith has produced pictures rather than sculptures in these early works. They are (too easily, alas) put into the category of miniatures, of figurines, and toy representations of art, which is to say, out of the category of art altogether.  I realize I have a naive reaction, not leavened by the learning of artistic criticism, that might offend, but offense is  not intended.

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Notes. Exhibition publications that I consulted are:

"GuggenheimGUIDE exhibitions and programs, January-May 2006: David Smith, A Centennial."

Carmen Giminez (Curator of the Exhibition), David Smith: A Centennial (Guggenheim Museum Publication, New York, 2006).

David Smith Centennial Retrospective at the Guggenheim New York

The exhibition runs February 3-May 14, 2006. I visited it on April 21.

The Guggenheim New York does not permit photography above the Lobby; consequently, I could only photograph the three Smith sculptures in the lobby. The label information is from the exhibit labels.

My comments on Smith's sculptures and the exhibition are in the next article.

Australia (1951) welded steel, painted | two photographs

Cubi I (1963) stainless steel, polished | four photographs

Hudson River Landscape (1951) welded steel | two photographs

(Revised.)

Flummoxing Stick Figure

David Smith. (Welded Stick Figure.) Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
View twice = without looking at exhibit label.

Reference Photographs from Mary Ann Sullivan's online art image collection.

Reference Biography

[Note. Some abstract sculptural art completely flummoxed me. This David Smith piece is an instance. I neglected even to take down the name of the sculpture after studying the piece. As a result, I am unable to find an image of the piece that I can be certain is the piece at LACMA. Initially, I viewed the art without looking at the exhibit label, because I wanted my native reaction to it without the filter of a label or exhibit text. For some reason, I had begun using equal signs as punctuation, and I am not sure now of the meaning of some of the notes.]

1. Literal description. Six foot high (approx.), thin-stick Figure - one column, on center drum, one top column; top piece.

Click on image to enlarge.

2. Placement. In a group of 8 Smith figures; in an open room; arranged toward the center of the room, but without a social grouping.

3. Structural composition. Two off-center columns; off-balance; one on top and one on bottom of a drum - Drum cut open - Moore, etc. So = basically = a free column top piece = gnarled metal; pieces welded together.

4. Mass - gravity. Mass has been eaten - (eroded) away - But this is not anti-mass and not anti-gravity because there is no tension in the figure; there doesn't seem to be any "lift" to the piece: no motion.

5. Emotive content.
Associations =
> a human figure = "head" = vertebrae; center = womb = female = empty
> a crane or stork, with one leg up, resting?
> a classical column, separated from a building because building ruined
> all the strength is in the welds - the welded joints
> not anthropomorphic = no humor; no seriousness; no editorial statement
> so this piece comes off as really formal?
> dominant association = isolation in a ruined (archaeological) setting

6. Surface technique. The upper column has been chiseled and worked; edged; smoothed and buffed edges of the upper column. Lower column has not been surface worked. Painted patina = gray patina in crevices; "Rust" may be partly painted.

7. Comment =
Imagine settings for this?
What did Smith have in mind, other than his welding shop?
Outdoor?

In Eastern US forest?
In desert?
In snow?

Indoor?

In bed?
In living room?
Against Building exterior wall?

If one took away the welds, the sculptures would fall apart = no natural balance.

Off-balance?

There is space referenced by the sculpture but it is the space of a containing building - why?

Because of the presence of the sculptor - Smith has not removed himself from the presence of the sculpture - that is the meaning of the welds. The sculpture has not been "born", and has not left the studio! It is still the sculptor's conception = Hence this is "rationalistic" sculpture, mentalistic; not "realistic".