David Smith

Acquired by the present owner directly from the artist

New York, French & Co. Inc., Scuplture by David Smith, February 1960, cat. no. 3, illustrated
New York, Otto Gerson Gallery, Selections: Paintings, Sculpture, Summer-Fall, 1960

Rosalind Krauss, The Sculpture of David Smith, A Catalogue Raisonné, New York and London, 1977, cat. no. 477, illustrated

David Smith was a key figure of Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s, the only sculptor whose innovative work ranks with painters such as Pollock and de Kooning, both in terms of quality and far-reaching influence. Similar to his painterly contemporaries, Smith absorbed the precedents of European Modernists, primarily Pablo Picasso and Julio Gonzalez, in his explorations in the 1930s and 1940s toward a new kind of sculptural invention and abstract vocabulary. Walking Dida represents the synthesis seen in great American art of the 1950s, which integrated movements such as Surrealism and Synthetic Cubism, while discovering unique means of expression.

Smith was the essence of American individualism, refusing to choose one convention or form above another, and striving to achieve a singular vision and unique artistic identity. Smith created one of the most consistently confident and individual bodies of work in the 1950s, establishing a new kind of sculptural invention that used innovative techniques and material to create a fusion of abstraction and figuration. Smith created volume from an innate genius for organizing negative and positive space. Added to this talent, Smith also has a love for Surrealist lyricism and line that brought a more sinuous and poetic element to the overt solidity of his art. This combination of artistic impulses and gifts produced elegant sculptures of volumetric presence, created around open spaces rather than carved from solid blocks or cast in weighty forms as in more traditional sculpture. Smith acknowledged the debt to Cubism in this aesthetic precept. ``Cubism, essentially a sculptural concept, originated by painters, did more for sculpture than any other influence …Cubism freed sculpture from monolithic and volumetric form…, [and] the poetic vision in sculpture is fully as free as in painting. Like painting, sculpture now deals in the illusion of form as well as its own particular property of form itself.’’ (David Smith, 1955 from Garnett McCoy, ed., David Smith, New York, 1973, pp. 116-117).

Titled after the artist’s young daughter Candida, the verticality and central geometric `torso’ of Walking Dida retain vestiges of the more overt figural and landscape references from Smith’s earlier works of the 1930s and 1940s. Yet as a work of Smith’s mature period of the 1950s and early 1960s, Walking Dida is more abstract than literal, and successfully exploits the three-dimensionality of Cubist space with an alternation of solid and negative space and subtly shifting planes of depth. The dominant vantage point of Walking Dida appears to be frontal, anchored by the unifying elements of rectangle and circle which provide a linear sense of contour. Yet the static and shallow perspective implied by a simplistic frontal format is confounded by Smith’s subtle inferences of motion and volume. Composed around the central `torso’ of the rectangle, the off-center circular `head’ and the kick of the diagonal `leg’ both convey a sense of the walking figure, leaning forward and moving to the viewer’s right. Smith’s well-placed incursions of arcs give a similar sweep toward the right that further implies motion. Both the diagonals and the arcs also contribute to the sense of volume in Walking Dida as they add depth behind the central rectangle as a counter-balance to the circle and diagonal that adds texture to the front of the rectangle. Richly suggestive, yet wholly abstract, these subtle incursions and disruptions around the central vertical motif create a sense of volume and motion as they push out of plane from the frontal contour in Walking Dida.