David Smith was an American sculptor who represented abstract expressionism in the post-war period.
The artist was known for his massive welded geometric sculptural compositions made from metal in a variety of techniques from Cubism to Surrealism and Constructivism. He also produced paintings and drawings.
Background
David Smith was born on March 9, 1906, in Decatur, Indiana, United States. He was a first-born of two children into a family of Harvey Martin Smith, a telephone engineer and amateur inventor, and Golda Stoler, a schoolmaster.
Smith’s great-grandfather was a blacksmith, and from an early age, the young boy used to the atmosphere of the factories where he often played.
When David was fifteen, the family relocated to Paulding, Ohio.
Education
David Smith received his general education at Paulding High School which he finished in 1924.
A year later, he entered the Ohio University in Athens where he had studied till the summer of 1925 when he interrupted his training to earn his living at the Studebaker automobile factory in South Bend, Indiana.
The autumn of the same year, Smith tried to pursue his education at the Notre Dame University in Indiana but dropped out after only two weeks and started to work.
In 1926, David Smith moved to New York City where he enrolled in the evening painting classes of the Art Students League. He became a full-time student in the autumn of 1927 and graduated in five years. One of his teachers at the institution was John Sloan. The same period, Smith attended some classes at the George Washington University.
The next year David Smith studied privately with the Czech painter Jan Matulka, who pushed his pupil to combine objects with canvases and introduced him to cubism and constructivism.
David Smith started his career at the Studebaker automobile factory in South Bend, Indiana at the age of nineteen where he worked as a spot welder and riveter. While at the factory, he learned working techniques with metal, like soldering and spot-welding which he would use later in his artworks.
In between the art classes, Smith found a job at the Studebaker Finance Agency in 1926. Later, after his arriving in New York City, the artist collected various jobs to earn his living, like a taxi driver, salesman and carpenter.
Smith became acquainted with many artists who worked abstractly, and they encouraged him to work in that style. The early sculptural compositions were made with the use of wood, wire and coral. The photos of welded-steel sculptures by Pablo Picasso inspired the artist to take on the welded sculptures the first of which was made in 1933. From 1934 to 1940 Smith rented a studio space at the Terminal Iron Works in Brooklyn.
The characteristic sculptures of this period included struck bronze medals called Medals of Dishonor in which the artist attacked such social topics as war propaganda, bacterial warfare, prostitution and others.
The debut solo-show of the artist was organized in 1938 at Marian Willard's East River Gallery. In a couple of years, Smith installed the factory-like studio in Bolton Landing, New York and supported himself by working part-time for the American Locomotive Company in Schenectady as a welder.
The artworks by Smith were demonstrated at the travelling exhibitions held by the Museum of Modern Art in 1941.
After 1944, however, he concentrated on sculpture except for several short-term appointments as a teacher at Sarah Lawrence College, the University of Arkansas, Indiana University and the University of Mississippi.
The next decade began from the São Paulo Art Biennial of 1951 where David Smith presented the United States.
By this time, the artist finally elaborated his personal style and began a sustained commitment to working in series, beginning with the Agricolas (1951-1959). These sculptures are composed of farm machinery pieces, hence the title, which is Latin for "farmer." Smith welded the parts together so that the original function of the implements was obscured, transforming the sculpture into an abstract construction. In 1952 the artist began the Tanktotems (through 1960), which were anthropomorphic in character, and in 1956 the Sentinels (through 1961), so named for their extreme verticality and watchful air.
David Smith achieved a new monumentality in terms of scale and sculptural power in the Zigs (1961-1964), each of which shares an interest in reductive geometry (both planar and modular) and in surface texture. Theses massive sculptural compositions were similar to drawings in space. Some of them were admired by the public at the Venice Biennale of 1954 and of 1958.
The Museum of Modern Art gave Smith a one-man show in 1957 where he demonstrated 34 of his sculptures.
He had two other important one-man shows in New York City – at French and Company in 1959 and at the Otto Gerson Gallery in 1961. Besides, the artist had his one-man show at the Everett Ellin Gallery in Los Angeles a year before.
In 1962 he was commissioned to make 26 sculptures for the Festival of Two Worlds at Spoleto, and went to Italy to execute them.
David Smith began his final series, the Cubis, in 1961, although he did not return to the series until 1963. Many of the sculptures remained unfinished.
Quotations:
"Art is the raw stuff which comes from aggressiveness by men who got that way fighting for survival."
"Art is a paradox that has no laws to bind it. When art exists it becomes tradition. When it is created, it represents a unity that did not exist before."
"Art has its tradition, but it is a visual heritage. It is an inner declaration of purpose, it is a factor which determines artist identity."
"Art before my time is history explaining past behavior, but not necessarily offering solutions to my problems. Art is not divorced from life. It is dialectic."
"What [steel] can do in arriving at form economically, no other material can do. The metal itself possesses little art history. What associations it possesses are those of this century: power, structure, movement, progress, suspension, destruction, and brutality."
"The sculpture work is a statement of my identity. It is part of my work stream, related to my past works, the three or four in process and the work yet to come. In a sense it is never finished. Only the essence is stated, the key presented to the beholder for further travel."
Membership
National Council on the Arts
,
United States
February, 1965
Personality
David Smith named many of his late sculptures after his daughters Rebecca and Candida, for example, ‘Bec-Dida Day’ of 1963, ‘Rebecca Circle’ of 1961 and ‘Hi Candida’ of 1965.
Quotes from others about the person
"He is learned and curious. He is obsessive, embattled, contradictory, and fierce. He is an artist of the utmost seriousness and commitment." Michael Brenson, art critic, art historian
Connections
David Smith was married twice. His first wife became Dorothy Dehner in 1929. The couple had lived together for twenty-three years.
On April 6, 1953, Smith married Jean Treas. The marriage produced two daughters named Rebecca and Candida. David and Jean divorced in 1961.
David Smith: Painter, Sculptor, Draftsman
The book by Edward F. Fry and Miranda McClintic examines the development of the work of the distinguished American artist David Smith
David Smith Invents
The book by Susan Behrends Frank accompanied by an enlightening essay from Sarah Hamill is the first book to focus on the output in all media of the artist's last fifteen years