Polychrome in the Sixties: David Smith and Anthony Caro

91 Polychrome in the Sixties: David Smith and Anthony Caro Sarah Hamill In the winter of 1960–61, David Smith made a series of color slide transparencies in the snow-filled landscape surrounding his upstate New York studio. The setup was casual; sculptures were situated directly on the gravel and snow just outside the sculptor’s workshop. However informal their composition—however indifferent to the conventions of sculptural display—Smith’s photographs stage an interchange between sculpture and landscape in which paint acts as the deciding term. A photograph of Doorway on Wheels (1960) (fig. 1), for instance, juxtaposes the sculpture’s interplay of black lines against the white snow, presenting it in stark relief. Other colors appear in parcels: the burst of red in the sculpture’s wheel, the lone green pine to the right, and the subdued brown corner of barren deciduous trees. Smith’s photograph of Doorway on Wheels forges equivalences and connections. Tone and hue structure a process of differentiation, a process that, in turn, offers a complex picture of what the sculptor imagined color’s role to be. Using photography, a medium that Smith had made central to his sculptural project since the 1940s, the artist structured a specifically pictorial encounter with his painted objects.1 The photograph organizes the shifting effects of color into a pictorial plane. In so doing, it stages a collision between the media of sculpture, painting, and photography, and offers a rejoinder to Greenbergian modernism. In his winter photograph, Smith construes an alternate response to the age-old question of color’s role in sculpture—a question that took on new urgency in the early 1960s for Smith and a group of painters and sculptors working in and around Bennington, Vermont; the group included Kenneth Noland, Helen Frankenthaler, Jules Olitski, and Anthony Caro. Historically, polychrome sculpture had inhabited the aesthetic sidelines of sculpture, a situa- tion Smith himself described in a 1940 essay, noting a legacy of “the dead dark [of bronzes], and marble, dead white.”2 Rather than the traditions of art, Smith drew from the technological fabric of modern life, finding a model for color sculpture in the vitreous enamels of “gasoline stations, hamburger stands, and stew pans.”3 In the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, the sculptor had explored paint as a visual element of a sculptural encounter in different ways. In the early 1960s, he returned to color with a newfound urgency and produced an expansive and studied body of painted sculpture. He also photographed them in relationship Hamill, “Polychrome in the Sixties: David Smith and Anthony Caro,” Anglo-American Exchange in Postwar Sculpture, 1945–1975 (Getty, 2011) PROOF 1 2 3 4 5 6 92 Sarah Hamill Figure 1 David Smith (American, 1906–1965), Doorway on Wheels, 1960, in Snow, Bolton Landing, New York. Color transparency, 5.7 × 5.7 cm 1 1 (2 ⁄4 × 2 ⁄4 in.). © Estate of David Smith/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Photo: David Smith to the landscape, capturing the contingent effects of viewing color in film. His return to color coincided with a series of paintings by his friend Kenneth Noland, titled Circles (1956–63). Smith’s sculpture Noland’s Blues (1961) was a debt to the painter; other sculptures directly cited Noland’s canvases. Anthony Caro, whose turn to welding was influenced by Smith, visited Bennington in the early 1960s and later taught at Bennington College, a women’s college in the Vermont town. During these years, Caro was similarly invested in merging color and steel sculpture, in conversation with Noland, Olitski, and others. Smith’s and Caro’s separate investigations of painted sculpture did not sit well with Clement Greenberg, whose essays critiqued the role of color in their sculptures. Greenberg remained an advocate of both Smith’s and Caro’s work, and, as he reminded Smith in a 1961 letter, he had promoted the sculptor from the start, having “discover[ed]” him.4 However much the critic championed their modernist steel sculpture, he was nevertheless critical of color; painted sculpture challenged his dictum of medium purity. “It seems to be a law of modernism,” Greenberg wrote in 1958, “that the conventions not essential to the viability of a medium be discarded as soon as they are recognized.”5 Paint was a nonessential aspect of the medium of sculpture; it interrupted the “raw, dis- colored surfaces”6 of welded steel. Hamill, “Polychrome in the Sixties: David Smith and Anthony Caro,” Anglo-American Exchange in Postwar Sculpture, 1945–1975 (Getty, 2011) PROOF 1 2 3 4 5 6 93 Polychrome in the Sixties: David Smith and Anthony Caro Greenberg’s judgments were not limited to the written page. A letter that he sent Smith in 1951 requested permission to paint over the multicolored surface of a sculpture given to him by the artist. “It should be black,” Greenberg emphasized, adding, “We can always scrape it off again.”7 The critic’s 1951 letter foreshadowed actions he would take after the sculptor’s accidental death in 1965, when Greenberg served as one of three executors of Smith’s estate. In that capacity, he stripped the paint from five of Smith’s sculptures, which had been painted white. He had them rusted and sealed, giving them the appear- ance of having been painted brown.8 Other sculptures the critic let deteriorate or fade as a result of weather.9 In 1974, Rosalind Krauss published an essay that documented these changes with the aid of photographs taken by Dan Budnik. She concluded that Greenberg had committed “an aggressive act against the sprawling, contradictory vitality of his work as Smith himself con- ceived it—and left it.”10 Krauss’s essay provoked an outpouring of letters that raised questions about Smith’s intentions and the ethics of Greenberg’s intervention. Critics, scholars, dealers, and artists sided with or against Greenberg. The subsequent debate hinged on the question of primer. According to those involved, white paint—the color of the works subsequently stripped—was taken to be a sign of incompletion, even though, as Krauss herself noted elsewhere, Smith had explored white as an end color in sculptures such as Untitled (1955) or in the Menands series.11 The debates also did not linger on Smith’s process as he himself described it, in which white was not a primer coat, but a vital step toward polychrome.12 Applied over a yellow-green zinc primer, white acted as an explor- atory canvas that, as Smith emphasized, might be in place for several years while he worked toward a final color.13 In the discussions surrounding Greenberg’s actions, which took place in the pages of Art in America and The New York Times, white was mobilized to different ends. For some, it was a mistaken endpoint, and Greenberg was simply carrying out Smith’s wishes by removing a temporary coat of paint. For others, however, incompleteness mattered in itself; the white color of the sculptures was part of Smith’s working process. It was an intermediary step toward polychrome. In light of all this, Greenberg’s “restoration” was a bombastic statement that occluded Smith’s working process. As Beverly Pepper framed the question, “Should we not value phases of the artist’s research as much as the conclusions he came to?”14 For Greenberg, the answer was no. Forty years later, however, the question of what Smith aimed for in his painted sculpture remains unanswered. Comprehending the sculptor’s ambi- tions for color means deciphering a particular historical moment in which Smith and other artists were each exploring color as shaping a uniquely visual encounter. The dialogue surrounding their efforts sheds new light on the issue of polychrome sculpture and offers a glimpse at how two modernist artists were challenging commands for medium purity by moving between media. Seen in Smith’s photographs, moreover, sculpture is tied not only to painting but also to the medium of photography. Employing a pictorial framework to analyze and display his painted objects, Smith insisted on color’s vitality for his sculptural optic. His images structure a visual, nonlinguistic retort to Greenberg’s narrow delimitation of medium. The sculptor’s death in 1965 would abruptly conclude his robust experiments with paint. By the end of the decade, Caro would term his use of color Hamill, “Polychrome in the Sixties: David Smith and Anthony Caro,” Anglo-American Exchange in Postwar Sculpture, 1945–1975 (Getty, 2011) PROOF 1 2 3 4 5 6 94 Sarah Hamill something of a failure. Still, in spite of these endpoints, color became significant for sculpture in the late 1960s. Donald Judd, John Chamberlain, and Anne Truitt would each make applied color a key component of their projects for sculpture. Richard Serra and Bruce Nauman would explore the bodily and spatial aspects of color in videos. These investigations stressed the industrial and fabricated elements of color, as well as color’s role in a phenomenological encounter. Returning to Smith’s and Caro’s painted surfaces, this essay offers a prehistory to such explorations—which took place in the late 1960s and early 1970s—by showing how color operated as a spatial element of sculpture. Their experiments with color emphasize how the medium of welded sculpture was tied to, and reliant upon, the media of painting and photography. The Problem of Color In the discussions surrounding the controversy of Greenberg’s paint stripping, few have paused to consider just what was wrong with color, according to the critic. One need not look far to find Greenberg’s judgments of color’s failure when declarations such as these abound: “The question of color in Smith’s art (as in all recent sculpture along the same lines), remains a vexed one.

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