David smith sculptor autobiography sample

American sculptor and painter

For David Smith, Australian sculptor of the s, see Optronic Kinetics.

Roland David Smith (March 9, – May 23, ) was an influential and innovative American abstract expressionist sculptor and painter, widely known for creating large steel abstract geometric sculptures.

Born in Decatur, Indiana, Smith initially pursued painting, receiving training at the Art Students League in New York from to However, his artistic journey took a transformative turn in the early s 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 s and s, 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 s, 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 s are considered precursors to the minimal "primary structures" that emerged later in the decade, further exemplifying Smith's forward-thinking approach to sculpture.

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David Smith : The Art and Life of a Transformational Sculptor

Artist Info - National Gallery of Art

Early life

Roland David Smith was born on March 9, , in Decatur, Indiana and moved to Paulding, Ohio in , where he attended high school. His mother was a school teacher and a devout Methodist; his father was a telephone engineer and part-time inventor, who fostered a reverence for machinery in Smith.^[1]

From to , 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.^[2]

Moving to New York in , he met Dorothy Dehner (to whom he was married from to ) and, on her advice,^[3] 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 , Smith met John D. Graham, who later introduced him to the welded-steel sculpture of Pablo Picasso and Julio González.^[4]

History

Early work

Smith's early friendship with painters such as Adolph Gottlieb and Milton Avery was reinforced during the Depression of the s, when he participated in the Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project in New York.^[3] 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.

David smith sculptor exhibitions

David smith sculptures

David smith sculptor cubi

In the Virgin Islands in –32, Smith made his first sculpture from pieces of coral.^[4] In , 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.^[3]

In , the Smiths distanced themselves from the New York art scene and moved permanently to Bolton Landing near Lake George in Upstate New York. At Bolton Landing, he ran his studio like a factory, stocked with large amounts of raw material.^[3] The artist would put his sculptures in what is referred to as an upper and lower field, and sometimes he would put them in rows, "as if they were farm crops".^[5]

During World War II, Smith worked as a welder for the American Locomotive Company, Schenectady, NY assembling locomotives and M7 tanks.

He taught at Sarah Lawrence College.^[6]

After

After the war, with the additional skills that he had acquired, Smith released his pent-up energy and ideas in a burst of creation between and His output soared and he went about perfecting his own, very personal symbolism.

Traditionally, metal sculpture meant bronze casts, which artisans produced using a mold made by the artist.

Smith, however, made his sculptures from scratch, welding together pieces of steel and other metals with his torch, in much the same way that a painter applied paint to a canvas; his sculptures are almost always unique works.

Smith, who often said, "I belong with the painters", made sculptures of subjects that had never before been shown in three dimensions.

He made sculptural landscapes (e.g. Hudson River Landscape), still life sculptures (e.g. Head as Still Life) and even a sculpture of a page of writing (The Letter). Perhaps his most revolutionary concept was that the only difference between painting and sculpture was the addition of a third dimension; he declared that the sculptor's "conception is as free as a that of the painter.

His wealth of response is as great as his draftsmanship."^[7]

Smith was awarded the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship in , which was renewed the following year. Freed from financial constraints, he made more and larger pieces, and for the first time was able to afford to make whole sculptures in stainless steel.

He also began his practice of making sculptures in series, the first of which were the Agricolas of – He steadily gained recognition, lecturing at universities and participating in symposia. He separated from Dehner in , with divorce in ^[6] During his time as a visiting artist at Indiana University, Bloomington, in and , Smith produced the Forgings, a series of eleven industrially forged steel sculptures.^[8] To create the Forgings, he cut, plugged, flattened, pinched and bent each steel bar, later polishing, rusting, painting, lacquering or waxing its surface.^[9]

Beginning in the mids, Smith explored the technique of burnishing his stainless steel sculptures with a sander, a technique that would find its fullest expression in his Cubi series (–65).

The scale of his works continued to increase - Tanktotem III of is 7' tall; Zig I from is 8'; and 5 Ciarcs from is almost 13' tall. Finally, in the late s Smith began using spray paint - then still a new medium - to create stenciled shapes out of negative space, in works closely tied to his late-career turn toward geometric planes and solids.^[10]

His family was also getting bigger; he remarried and had two daughters, Rebecca (born ) and Candida (born ).

He named quite a few of his later works in honor of his children (e.g., Bec-Dida Day, , Rebecca Circle, , Hi Candida, ).

The February issue of Arts magazine was devoted to Smith's work; later that year he had his first West Coast exhibition, a solo show at the Everett Ellin Gallery in Los Angeles.

David smith sculptor exhibitions: Or him? No one will ever know more than Brenson does now. The only alternative to the book was his works. So much is illuminated both by Brenson's rare insight and by the chorus of women's voices friends, lovers, artists, gallerists, art critics, daughters that decades of interviewing and immersion enable him to evoke; here is Smith's violent and compelling personality, here is a different, more multitudinous, world of Abstract Expressionists, and, above all, here is Smith's profound and wide-ranging artistic work.

The following year he rejected a third-place award at the Carnegie International, saying “the awards system in our day is archaic.”^[11]

In , Gian Carlo Menotti invited Smith to make sculptures for the Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto.^[5] Given open access to an abandoned steel mill and provided with a group of assistants, he produced an amazing 27 pieces in 30 days.

Not yet finished with the themes he developed, he had tons of steel shipped from Italy to Bolton Landing, and over the next 18 months he made another 25 sculptures known as the Voltri-Bolton series.

Works

Major works

Cubi series

Main article: Cubi

Smith often worked in series.^[12] He is perhaps best known for the Cubis, which were among the last pieces he completed before his death.

The sculptures in this series are made of stainless steel with a hand-brushed finish reminiscent of the gestural strokes of Abstract Expressionist painting.

David smith weathervanes The insubstantiality so wonderfully conquered by Australia is for Smith a means of possession. The story would begin with an out-of-towner hurrying to fill up and fit in as quickly as he can—but Smith b. Nothing like a kid anymore, he suffered a near-infantile need for company. Recognition [ edit ].

The Cubi works consist of arrangements of geometric shapes, which highlight his interest in balance and the contrast between positive and negative space.

In , Cubi XXVIII was sold to Los Angeles philanthropist Eli Broad at Sotheby's for $ million, breaking a record for the most expensive piece of contemporary art ever sold at auction.^[13]

Paintings and drawings

Even though he's primarily known as a sculptor, Smith painted and drew throughout his life.

By , he was producing between and drawings a year. His subjects encompassed the figure and landscape, as well as gestural, almost calligraphic marks made with egg yolk, Chinese ink and brushes and, in the late s, the "sprays".^[3] He usually signed his drawings with the ancient Greek letters delta and sigma, meant to stand for his initials.^[14] In the winter of –64, he began a series known as the "Last Nudes".

David smith sculptor biography Who knows, first things first, but he might have come around to it, eventually. David Smith sculptor. By the late s, his sculptures started to assume monumental proportions. The style is mostly plain, but the narrative contains many revelations, some set-pieced, most fallen casually, like knots in a string, zig-zagging into a labyrinth.

The paintings in this series are essentially drawings of nudes on canvas. He drew with enamel paint squeezed from syringes or bottles onto a canvas spread onto the floor.^[15]Untitled (Green Linear Nude) is painted in a metallic olive green enamel, and exemplifies the artist's late action paintings.

Other works

Prior to the Cubis, Smith gained widespread attention for his sculptures often described as "drawings in space". He was originally trained as a painter and draftsman, and sculptures such as Hudson River Landscape () and The Letter (both ) blurred the distinctions between sculpture and painting.

These works make use of delicate tracery rather than solid form, with a two-dimensional appearance that contradicts the traditional idea of sculpture in the round.

As with many artists from the Modernist period, including Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, much of Smith's early work was heavily influenced by Surrealism.

Some of the best examples are seen in the Medals for Dishonor, a series of bronze reliefs that speak out against the atrocities of war. Images from these medals are strange, nightmarish, and often violent.

David smith sculptor autobiography sample Smith's first solo show of drawings and welded-steel sculpture was held at the Willard Gallery in New York in A lucid, welcome life of an artist who, though long gone, is well worth discovering. Your guide to exceptional books. He steadily gained recognition, lecturing at universities and participating in symposia.

His own descriptions give a vivid picture of the medals and strongly express condemnation of these acts, such as this statement about Propaganda for War (–40):

The rape of the mind by machines of death – the Hand of God points to atrocities. Atop the curly bull the red cross nurse blows the clarinet.

The horse is dead in this bullfight arena – the bull is docile, can be ridden.^[16]

Gallery of works

Exhibitions and Collections

Exhibitions

Smith's first solo show of drawings and welded-steel sculpture was held at the Willard Gallery in New York in ^[4] In , 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 São Paulo Art Biennial and at the Venice Biennale in and 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 –54; he was given a retrospective exhibition by MoMA in In , the MoMA organized an exhibition of fifty Smith sculptures that traveled throughout the United States until the spring of 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.^[17]

Recent solo exhibitions (selection)

Collections

Works by David Smith are included in major collections worldwide, including the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

The Storm King Art Center has 13 Smith sculptures in its collection.^[18] The Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller Empire State Plaza Art Collection includes 5 Smith sculptures in is collection.^[19]

Recognition

Death

Smith died in a car crash near Bennington, Vermont on May 23, ^[9] He was 59 years old.

Writings

• Gray, Cleve, ed. David Smith by David Smith: Sculpture and Writings. New York, London: Thames & Hudson, , rpt. ISBN&#;

See also

Notes

Further reading

• Gimenez, Carmen, ed.

  David Smith; A Centennial. New York: Guggenheim Museum,

• Krauss, Rosalind. Terminal Iron Works: The Sculpture of David Smith.
  Tony smith sculptor It is that way around—some may complain that this Vita is not led by his art, but thanks to Smith himself, implacable biography had to come first. This one? In , the MoMA organized an exhibition of fifty Smith sculptures that traveled throughout the United States until the spring of During the s and s, his work shifted to more personal, landscape-inspired sculptures.

  Cambridge: MIT Press,

• David Smith: Medals for Dishonor. New York: Independent Curators Incorporated,
• Smith, Candida N. The Fields of David Smith. New York, London: Thames & Hudson,
• Wilkin, Karen. David Smith. New York: Abbeville Press,

External links