Tony Smith was an American sculptor, architect and visual artist. He is considered as one of the first artists who brought Minimalism to American sculpture and as the person who pioneered the environment sculpture.
Background
Tony Smith was born on September 23, 1912, in South Orange, New Jersey, United States. He was a second from seven children into a family of a mechanical engineer owning the family waterworks factory, and his spouse, a housewife.
When Tony was three years old, the family visited the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco. The neo-classical Palace of Fine Arts by Bernard Maybeck and the ancient Taos Pueblo in New Mexico impressed the boy a lot and influenced his future art.
A year later, Tony was diagnosed tuberculosis which remained during his school years. All this time, the boy was cured by a nurse and tutored by a private tutor at the one-room prefabricated construction in the backyard of the home.
It was this time when Smith created the prototypes of his future sculptural compositions using the medicine boxes.
Education
Tony Smith received his elementary education at home being cured of his tuberculosis. From time to time, he attended Sacred Heart Elementary School.
After his recovering from the illness around 1926, Smith studied at a Jesuit high school in New York City called Saint Francis Xavier High School.
In 1931 he attended Fordham University and Georgetown University, but left the institutions in a year dissatisfied with the curriculum and came back to New Jersey. While working on days, he attended the night classes at the Art Students League. He attended the anatomy course of George Bridgman, drawing and watercolor classes of George Grosz and learned painting with Vaclav Vytlacil.
Five years later, Tony Smith enrolled at the department of architecture at the New Bauhaus (currently IIT Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology). There, Smith had been taught for a year by Theodore van Fossen who collaborated with the artist at the early forties as a professional partner.
Then, Tony Smith became an apprentice of the architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Although Smith learned the professions of a bricklayer, carpenter and construction supervisor at Wright’s studio, he did not receive an official certificate.
Tony Smith started his professional career in January 1932 when he opened a New Jersey bookstore selling the second-hand literature. He spent a couple of years working at the family waterworks factory.
In 1940, Smith founded his own architectural business but didn’t drop to paint and draw. He had worked as an architectural designer till 1960s. Among his projects of the time were the houses for many of his art colleagues, such as Fritz Bultman, Theodoros Stamos, Fred Olsen and Betty Parsons. To support himself, the artist combined his architectural practice with teaching activity which he started about the early 1940s.
At the beginning of the new decade, Tony Smith joined his wife, an opera singer Jane Lawrence, on her tour in Heidelberg, Germany. The artist traveled throughout the country visiting the ruins of the Second World War. It was during the trip when he created his painting series called Louisenberg showing colorful geometric grids of monotonous natural figures.
In 1956, Tony Smith joined the teacher’s staff of the Delahanty Institute in New York City where he had taught till 1957. This year, the artist occupied the teaching post at Pratt Institute where he spent a couple of years. Later, he also gave lessons at Bennington College in Vermont. He combined his teaching activity with a job of a draftsman for the architectural firm Edelbaum and Webster. While at Pratt Institute, Smith produced his first three-dimensional work dubbed ‘Throne’.
At the beginning of the following decade, the artist suffered from a car accident after which he continued to work on sculpture creating the small geometrical compositions from paper and cardboard modules as he did in his childhood. Later, these tiny pieces transformed into larger compositions formed from plywood and painted black. The first sculptural composition made in that style which provided Smith with the acclaim as an influential artist became six-foot cube titled ‘Die’. This one was followed by his debut steel sculpture, ‘Black Box’.
Although Tony Smith was active as an artist, he firstly took part at the group exhibition only in 1964 organized at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut. In a couple of years, his art was shown at ‘Primary Structures’ show at the Jewish Museum in New York City. The presentation was important in the development of Minimalism. The same year, he had his debut personal exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art associated with the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. In 1968, Tony Smith participated at Documenta IV in Kassel, Germany. The artist exhibited his work around the United States and was featured in ‘Artforum’ and ‘Time’.
The last year of the decade Tony Smith accepted the invitation to teach at the University of Hawaii in Manoa. This period, he became fascinated with the exterior design and created some site-specific projects which however weren’t realized.
In addition to above-mentioned educational institutions, Smith also taught at New York University, Cooper Union and Hunter College.
One of his last sculptural series was Groves created to be installed in American parks and squares.
Tony Smith was an accomplished artist equally successful in sculpture, architecture and visual art. He contributed to the development of Minimalism in the United States – his sculptural composition ‘Die’ is considered as one of the exemplar works of the movement.
In addition to artistic activity, Smith was a talented educator who transmitted his knowledge to such artists, as Larry Rivers, Robert Goodnough, accomplished representatives of Abstract Expressionism, Robert Morris and Alice Aycock.
The artist’s genius was marked by the Award of Merit Medal for sculpture from the American Academy of Arts.
Nowadays, Smith’s paintings are included in many private and public collections around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., Menil Collection, Houston, the Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller Empire State Plaza Art Collection in Albany, New York, Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Denmark, and the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, the Netherlands. Some pieces of art can be also found in Pace Gallery in New York City. Smith’s sculpture called ‘Smoke’ is placed near the Ahmanson Building of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
The centenary of the artist’s birth was commemorated by multiple events on September 23, 2012, organized at the National Gallery of Art, the Seattle Art Museum, at Bryant Park in New York City and at the Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Germany.
In 2009, a sculpture called ‘Duck’ by Tony Smith was purchased for $842,500 at Christie's New York City.
Quotations:
"The grid, the module, is still the basis of architectural order and freedom. It unifies what is similar and emphasizes what is dissimilar."
"It is the clear realization of the cube in space which we cannot see, which informs and makes significant all that we do see."
"Craftsmanship and art are much closer than artists seem to be willing to admit."
"I had always been impressed by systems of order. I always felt that instead [of] reducing a subject they lent to it an air of mystery."
Membership
American Academy of Arts and Letters
,
United States
1979
Personality
Tony Smith was a sociable person. This streak helped him to have a lot of friends among well-known artists of his time, including Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still.
Physical Characteristics:
According to an art historian Phyllis Tuchman, Tony Smith was “a gaunt, bewhiskered Irishman with an indefatigable spirit and a raconteurial manner.”
In 1961, Smith was a victim of a car crash. As a result, he developed a blood disease called polycythemia.
Connections
Tony Smith married an opera singer, Jane Lawrence, in 1943 in Santa Monica. The only witness of the celebration was Tennessee Williams.
The family produced three children Chiara, Seton and Beatrice. The girls followed their father's steps and chose artistic careers. Chiara known as Kiki Smith, and Seton are artists, and Beatrice, Seton's twin, was the underground actress. She died in 1988.
Tony Smith: Architect, Painter, Sculptor
The book published in conjunction with a 1998 exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York City, presents Smith's life and work in all mediums, including critical essays, writings, interviews, an illustrated chronology, and letters by Smith and his friends, relatives and colleagues