Background
Robert Smithson was born on January 2, 1938, in Passaic, Passaic County, New Jersey, United States. He was the son of Irving Smithson and Susan Duke.
1969
Wistman's wood, Dartmoor, Wales, United Kingdom
Robert Smithson
Manhattan, New York City, New York, United States
Robert Smithson studied at The Art Students League of New York from 1953 - 1955.
Brooklyn, New York, United States
Robert Smithson studied at The Brooklyn Museum Art School in 1956.
Great Salt Lake, Utah, United States
Robert Smithson at the site of Spiral Jetty (1970)
Robert Smithson at his Spiral Jetty
Robert Smithson
essayist filmmaker painter sculptor
Robert Smithson was born on January 2, 1938, in Passaic, Passaic County, New Jersey, United States. He was the son of Irving Smithson and Susan Duke.
Robert Smithson was largely self-taught. He earned a two-year scholarship to the Art Students League in New York City from 1953 till 1955, and studied briefly at the Brooklyn Museum School in 1956.
Robert Smithson served in the United States Army Reserves in 1956 – 1957, after which he moved to New York. In the late 1950s, he was painting, drawing, and making collages. Smithson's first solo show was held at Artists Gallery in New York in 1959.
Taking up sculpture in 1964, he produced Minimalist and geometric works. Visits to quarries, industrial sites, and abandoned wastelands in New Jersey and neighboring states began to impact his art in 1966. The places he explored soon expanded to include the American West and Southwest, deserts in particular. Among those accompanying him on various trips were Holt, Carl Andre, Michael Heizer, Donald Judd, Robert Morris, and Claes Oldenburg. Smithson worked on his Photo-Markers and Sites/Nonsites in the mid- to late 1960s.
With fellow earthwork artists, he moved his investigations into desolate remote landscapes. Using non-traditional materials and frequently involving large earthmoving equipment in their creation, his sculptures engaged the questions of permanence, materials, and the site specific elements of weather, climate, and topography at all levels of scale.
Smithson wrote many theoretical essays and variations on the travelogue genre. One such illustrated piece, "A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey," published in a 1967 issue of Artforum, was a tongue-in-cheek guide to such highlights as a sandbox and industrial piping. In 1968, photographer Bernd Becher accompanied Smithson through West Germany's industrial Ruhr Valley. The next year, Smithson traveled with Holt and his dealer Virginia Dwan to Mexico, a trip that spawned the Yucatan Mirror Displacements (1969), the photographic essay "Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan" (1969), and the related Performance Hotel Palenque (1972). In addition, Smithson visited Stonehenge and other prehistoric sites of England and Wales in 1969. Meanwhile, his proposed large-scale project for an island in British Columbia was terminated as a result of environmental concerns.
In 1971, he completed Broken Circle/Spiral Hill at a quarry near Emmen, the Netherlands. Interested in "reclaiming" American land for large-scale art, Smithson presented more than fifty proposals to various strip-mining companies, but was stymied in these efforts. On July 20, 1973, Smithson died in a plane crash, while surveying sites for his work Amarillo Ramp in the vicinity of Amarillo, Texas.
Quotations: "One's mind and the earth are in a constant state of erosion, mental rivers wear away abstract banks, brain waves undermine cliffs of thought, ideas decompose into stones of unknowing, and conceptual crystallizations break apart into deposits of gritty reason. "
On June 8, 1963 Robert Smithson married Nancy Holt.