Leon Polk Smith was an American painter. His style has been associated with the Hard-edge school, of which he is considered one of the founders.
Background
Leon Polk Smith was born on May 20, 1906, in Chickasha, Oklahoma, United States. His family was among the nineteenth-century settlers in the W. His parents had arrived in present-day Oklahoma from Tennessee at the end of the great westward movement, probably after the Oklahoma land run of 1889, and had settled on land in what was still called Indian Territory. Smith was the eighth of nine children. Undoubtedly, in his youth, he encountered many occasions at home in which he had to speak loudly and act quickly to defend his rights. By the age of six, he related, he had already decided to become a teacher.
Education
Leon graduated from East Central University in Ada, Oklahoma in 1934 with Bachelor of Arts. Then he moved to New York City in 1936, where he attended Columbia University and received Master of Arts there in 1938.
After high school, Leon worked for a few years on various ranches in Oklahoma, and later he worked building roads and constructing telephone systems in Arizona. These were the years of the Great Depression, and he faithfully sent his parents money to help pay the homestead mortgage. But that was for naught. The family farm eventually was foreclosed. With this sad event behind him, Smith felt free to start on his path to become a teacher as he had promised himself.
Early in his teaching career Smith fell very ill and was confined for weeks in bed. He could not walk and was informed that he had contracted polio. Local doctors said they could do nothing more for him, and it was recommended that he be taken to the famed Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. The trip was saga-filled. The small plane, flying through a winter storm, was forced down into a field because of ice on its wings.
Smith was saved. However, his prognosis was declared to be hopeless by the Mayo staff practically upon his arrival. Before being sent home untreated, he rejected aloud staff predictions that he would not live more than a few months. He declared them wrong. Furthermore, he insisted, in one year’s time he would return again to the teaching post that this sickness had caused him to leave. He further predicted that he would drive himself to work in his own car as he had before. As it turned out, he made his predictions come true.
Perhaps the disease was a paralyzing virus acting similarly to polio, or maybe it was just the force of Smith’s astoundingly strong will that allowed him to overcome the disease. One year later to the very day, he struggled down the front stairs at a relative’s home, one step at a time, sitting as he went. Helped to his feet by a sister-in-law who took care of him during his recuperation, he got to his car on crutches. He drove to the college alone, shifting the gears with both hands but with enough leg strength to clutch and accelerate. There, he was greeted outside the building by his colleagues and students. A few months later he was well enough to resume work.
Eventually, Smith’s restless mind drew him to pursue graduate studies, and he settled on Columbia University’s famed Teachers College. It was recognized as the most important learning center of its kind in the search for new educational methodology. When he matriculated, Teachers College was the domain of the distinguished and widely influential resident professor John Dewey. In class a teacher, Ryah Ludins, introduced him to the geometric works of contemporary European artists, and with her, he visited the Albert E. Gallatin Gallery of Living Art at New York University. Two paintings in the collection by the Dutch artist Piet Mondrian caught his eye like no others. Smith’s visual imagination was transformed. He was deeply inspired by Mondrian’s works, if not fully convinced by the philosophy behind them. A pragmatic American in his approach, Smith took what he wanted from the aesthetic experience and left the theorizing behind.
A year after earning his Master of Arts at Columbia and returning home to Oklahoma, Smith had earned enough to plan his first trip to Europe, in the summer of 1939. He visited the major countries of Western Europe with the exception of Germany and the states on its eastern borders, which were already closed to tourism because of the brewing political circumstances. Once back in Oklahoma, Smith decided that it was time for him to seek a post elsewhere on a more advanced level. He became an assistant professor of art at Georgia Teachers College in Collegeboro.
Smith prospered in Georgia and made influential friends on the faculty. While holding a full-time job, he pursued his art and was inspired by a trip to Mexico. Prophetically, his first one-artist show took place in New York at the Uptown Galleries in January and February 1941. The fifteen paintings and eighteen watercolors were figurative, and reviewers generally found them praiseworthy. In the following year, two more exhibitions followed in rapid succession, and Smith’s reputation was growing. The first of these 1942 shows consisted largely of works inspired by Mexico, and it was also Smith’s first one-artist exhibition in a museum, taking place at the Telfair Academy of Arts and Sciences in Savannah. The second 1942 exhibition, however, was his debut in abstraction and took place at the Pinacoteca Gallery in New York.
Also in the same year, Smith left Georgia when he felt that the state government’s resistance to campus desegregation was too far from his deeply held convictions. He accepted a post as State Supervisor of Art Education in Delaware, where much segregation remained in place but was less obvious. Smith worked against segregation throughout the state’s educational system by helping to integrate teachers’ organizations and their professional conventions. Although he was pleased with his working situation and with the results of his efforts in Delaware, after two years Smith felt it was time to move on. The artist within him, it appeared, had gained from the experience of three consecutive summer-school sessions in New York, and he had grown rapidly in his professional art teaching posts.
Leon had a yearning for New York that had to be satisfied once and for all. In 1944, he determined to return. Lacking funds to remain financially independent, Smith sought a Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation fellowship. In the process of application, he was offered a job assisting at the Museum of Non-Objective Painting (later to become the Guggenheim Museum) by Hilla Rebay, who was director of both the foundation and the museum. She had informed him that he was too late for the current funding cycle but that he could apply the following spring.
It was an important learning opportunity, coming at the right moment for him, to work among examples of art by the leading European geometric abstractionists. As part of the Guggenheim Fellowship that Smith eventually received, he traveled back to the Southwest to proselytize as an art educator for the new abstraction, distributing Guggenheim materials in Oklahoma and New Mexico, where he still had many contacts. Santa Fe had a long-established, growing artists’ community, and he even attempted, unsuccessfully, to organize a show there of some of the Guggenheim’s collection.
Finally, at the beginning of 1945, Smith returned to New York City. He had arrived at his spiritual home at last. He immediately benefited from exposure to new ideas gained though contact with artists throughout the city sharing and exchanging information. Although he resisted joining any artists’ organizations, he remained in touch and counted numerous artists as friends, particularly Burgoyne Diller and Milton Avery among others. The unique scale and configurations of the city, its immense buildings, and interspersed cavernous spaces, continually recalled to Smith the broad sweep of Southwestern landscapes of mountains, canyons, and plains. New York’s grid system of streets seemed to him the perfect urban setting.
Seen from its heights, the city symbolized in actual life all that the discovery of Mondrian’s works had meant to Leon Polk Smith in art. During the next few years Smith established affiliations with various galleries and maintained studio and living spaces in buildings housing other artists, while leaving on occasion for visiting teaching posts. An appointment lasting two years at Rollins College in Florida was followed by a brief residence in Cuba. In 1966, Smith established a summer home on Long Island at Shoreham, which for a time also served as his principal residence. For most of the remaining fifty years of his long creative life Smith remained in New York City. he died there on December 4, 1996.
Leon Polk Smith heralded for his lifelong commitment to simplified shapes, brilliant colors and minimal, pressurized compositions.
Quotations:
''I set out from Mondrian to find a way of freeing this concept of space so that it could be expressed with the use of the curved line as well as straight.''
Personality
Smith possessed all his mental faculties and considerable physical strength to the end of his long and productive life. He also had a quick temper, regarding which, most friends and acquaintances agreed, it was best not to be on the receiving end.
Interests
Artists
Piet Mondrian
Connections
Smith was survived by his companion of 45 years, Robert Jamieson.