5 RISKS AND REWARDS 7 THE EARLY YEARS 11 THE 1930S 28 FOCUS 1 PHOTOGRAPHY IN THE 1930S 31 FOCUS 2 WELDING 32 FOCUS 3 MEDALS FOR DISHONOR 37 WAR AND ITS AFTERMATH: THE 1940S 50 FOCUS 4 HELMHOLTZIAN LANDSCAPE 52 FOCUS 5 PHOTOGRAPHING SCULPTURE 57 MATURITY: THE 1950S 90 FOCUS 6 DRAWINGS AND SPRAYS 94 FOCUS 7 THE WORKING PROCESS 99 FULL FLOWER: 1960–5 122 FOCUS 8 VOLTRI 132 FOCUS 9 CUBI 138 FOCUS 10 THE FIELDS 142 CHRONOLOGY 14 5 FURTHER READING 146 LIST OF WORks RISKS AND REWARDS The ambition, imagination and innovation of the sculptor David Roland Smith (1906–1965) altered the course of modern art. Over the passing decades the sweeping diversity of his forms developed steadily, like those of a great symphony in space. It is vital, though, to grasp the revolutionary aspects of Smith’s achieve- ment in context and its great import for his successors. Welding – which Smith was the first to develop fully as a sculptural process in the United States – is now such a common technique that it is hard to imagine the process ever having been daringly new. Yet Smith’s decision to establish his workshop in the industrial site of the Brooklyn Navy Pier in New York in 1933 was unprecedented – most sculptors then used a bronze foundry, a marble quarry, or a conventional studio. Smith fundamentally recast the artist’s role and persona. When he chose to move in 1940 to the rural isolation of upstate Bolton Landing in the Adirondacks, Smith left the buzzing New York art world behind to synthesize his own workspace, combining industry and nature. The risk to his future prospects was incalculable, but essential to his evolving identity as an artist; the move also played a key role in the size and imagery of his sculpture. Working in a rural environment, with acres of open fields surrounding his home and studio, enabled Smith to build a dizzying array of large-scale works. However, even this was only a portion of his prodigious output, which moved with ease between two and three dimensions, unifying them. This creative wealth included graphics and photographs, as well as paintings and sculptures in all materials, from bronze and cast aluminium to stainless steel and silver. Eventually the fields around his home and studio were ‘planted’ with more than eighty large welded metal pieces that seemed to speak to each other and to have an unexpected reciprocity with the distant tall pines and undulating mountains. Smith considered all his creations a part of his ‘workstream’: a singular, seamless outpouring of artistic activity. Many of Smith’s sculptures made after 1954 bear inscriptions such as ‘Hi Rebecca’ or ‘Hi Candida’, which he said would stand as perpetual greetings to his two daughters, in the future, when his legacy found its eventual place in museums. But at the time they were made, there was neither a market for these works nor any willing collectors with appropriate settings to house them. His last show at the Marian Willard Gallery in New York in 1956 yielded no sales whatsoever. When Smith died in a car accident on 23 May 1965, while driving to Bennington, Vermont, most of his oeuvre remained in his possession. Now it can be seen in museums around the world. His premonition came true. ◄ David Smith with his wife Jean Freas and their daughters Rebecca and Candida at Bolton Landing, c.1958. Photograph by the artist. The Estate of David Smith, New York. THE EARLY YEARS MIDWEST ROOTS, 1906–25 David Smith was a product of the American Midwest. He was born in 1906 in Indiana and raised in Ohio in a strict Methodist home. His great-great grandfather was a blacksmith; his father, in addition to working for a phone company, was an inventor, while his mother was a schoolteacher. This ancestral legacy of an ironworker and an inventor remained a touchstone for Smith throughout his career. With virtually no access to art, he showed talent in high school as a cartoonist. He was erudite, but largely self-educated. He attended three colleges with the aim of studying to be an artist but, frustrated by what he encountered, never attained a degree. More important was a summer job he held in 1925 at the Studebaker factory assembly line in Indiana. This first exposure to industrial methods of production and organization later served as the near-mythical font for his evolving artistic identity and studio procedures. NEW YORK, 1926–30 Smith arrived in New York City in 1926. He was transferred there from Washington, DC, by the bank that employed him. With little idea of what it meant, he somehow knew that he wanted to be an artist. Shortly after relocating, Smith [1] met Dorothy Dehner who suggested that he attend classes at the Art Students League where she was studying. Within a year, he had quit his position at the bank and was a full-time art student, doing various jobs to support his new career. 1 Smith’s first wife, Dorothy Dehner (1901–1994), at Bolton Landing, c.1930 Photograph by Smith The Estate of David Smith, New York ◄ Smith holding a cat at Bolton Landing, c.1930. Photograph by Dorothy Dehner. The Estate of David Smith, New York. The Art Students League was a hub of activity, with teachers ranging from the American Ashcan painter John Sloan (1871 –1951) to the inspiring Czech modernist Jan Matulka (1890–1972). The latter introduced Smith to the work of a broad roster of modern artists, including Piet Mondrian (1872–1944), Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) and the Russian Constructivists. Smith’s student works reflected his keenly roving eye and [3] new-found interest in vibrant Cubist abstraction. Smith and Dehner married in December 1927, while still students. They moved downtown to Greenwich Village, the informal centre of bohemian life, then to Brooklyn, where a close-knit group of artists and friends surrounded them. In 1929 the treasurer of the Art Students League and his wife invited them, as paying guests, to visit Bolton Landing, a small town on the shore of Lake George in the southern Adirondack Mountains, then about an eight-hour drive north. Entranced by the area’s dramatic rustic natural beauty, the Smiths bought an 86-acre property with a dilapidated wooden [2] shack that had neither electricity nor running water. For the next eleven years the couple spent every summer there, and, in 1940, moved upstate permanently. The rolling mountains, expansive sky and the cycles of nature became vital aspects of Smith’s creative life. Early on they grew their own vegetables, bred their own cattle and rented out their fields as grazing pasture for a neighbour’s cows. The sculptor embraced the pioneering life. 2 The farm at Bolton Landing, 1936 Photograph by the artist The Estate of David Smith, New York 3 Untitled (2 drawings), 1930–1 Tempera on paper 25.4 × 34.6 cm (10 × 13 � in) The Estate of David Smith, New York 8 THE EARly YEARS 9 THE EARly YEARS THE 1930S THE VIRGIN ISLANDS During the Depression, Smith worked for the Treasury Art Relief Project as a technical supervisor for murals. He quit this government-sponsored job in October 1931, when he and Dehner – embracing a dream of the kind of artistic, exotic paradise that Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) had envisaged – left for the Virgin Islands. The new environment inspired Smith, who made numerous drawings and paintings, and experimented with photography for the first time. Upon returning to the United States in the summer of 1932, Smith and Dehner went directly to Bolton Landing, where he continued to use the island ‘treasures’ that he had brought home, incorporating them into fresh hybrid constructions and photographs. His first freestanding sculpture was a coral head, painted maroon. Linear manipulations of steel wire, often combined [15] with wood and bits of coral, were typical of this period. In tandem, Smith also [23] produced photographs ranging from unmanipulated images to complex mon- tages. Many of his abstract, lyrical landscapes include a whiplash line hovering [11] close to the paper’s edge, which developed into a distinctive stylistic trait. From his earliest efforts onwards, he refused to be limited by the preconceived boundaries of any medium. Combining drawing, painting, sculpture and photography, Smith had embarked on a lifelong path of experimentation. ► FOCUS 1 PHOTOGRAPHY IN THE 1930S, P. 2 8 As photography played an important role in Smith’s gradual transition from two dimensions to three, so did the prompting of Jean Xceron (1890–1967), a former teacher and friend, who earlier had encouraged him to focus on making sculpture. Consequently, Smith began to add small pieces of broken [10] wood to his canvases, literally building upwards from the painted surface. These ‘found objects’ lacked intrinsic artistic value, but provided the spark for his constructive impetus. In this way, inspiration and chance became central to Smith’s freewheeling aesthetic. The marvel is that he injected such mercurial qualities into rigid metal. ◄ Smith working on the mould for Growing Forms (1939), prior to casting, c.1939. Photograph by the artist. The Estate of David Smith, New York. create a visually delicate but physically strong structure, one opposed to tradi- 4 Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) tional sculpture based on mass and closed volumes. González, who had an Figure, 1928 Wire and sheet iron accomplished command of handling metal, proved an important model for 50.5 × 18.5 × 40.8 cm [5] Smith. Graham even gave Smith a González sculpture, a small relief of a head (19 ⁷⁄₈ × 7 ¼ × 16 ⅛ in) Musée Picasso, Paris from 1927; in 1956 Smith wrote the article, ‘González: First Master of the Torch’, for Art News to honour the Spaniard’s first American retrospective.