David Smith

Estate of the artist
Marlborough-Gerson Gallery, New York
Helen W. Benjamin, New York (acquired from the above in 1967)
Sothebys, New York, May 8, 1996, Lot 3
Acquired by the present owner from the above

David Smith embodied an independence of spirit that characterized many of the American artists coming of age in the 1930s and 1940s, when social as well as artistic ideologies were in ferment. These artists combined a refusal to choose one convention or form above another with a forceful determination to achieve a singular vision and an artistic identity. Smith created one of the most consistently confident and individualistic bodies of work from this period, establishing a new kind of sculptural invention that used innovative techniques and material to express a fusion of abstraction and figuration. Combining modern technologies and materials derived from machinery and industry, Smith conveyed volume through an innate genius for organizing negative and positive space. Added to these physical properties, Smith had a love for landscape and Surrealist lyricism that brought a vibrantly poetic element to the overt Cubist solidity of his art. Still Life Construction is an early example of Smith’s sculptural alchemy, in which welded or forged metal becomes a composition of elegant yet weighty and volumetric presence, created around open spaces rather than carved from solid form like traditional stone or wood sculpture.

In the 1930s, Smith journeyed from the easel and canvas to his true avocation as a sculptor, culminating with his first one-man show in 1938 at Marian Willard’s East River Gallery in New York. Still Life Construction, executed in 1938, stands at the culmination of this period. In its three dimensional sweep and angled elements, Still Life Construction also reveals the future direction of Smith’s greatest works in which any biomorphic or Surrealist component becomes evermore subservient to his concerns for formal structure.

Smith acknowledged the influence of Pablo Picasso, Julio González and Alberto Giacometti in his transition from painting to sculpture. Like Gorky and de Kooning, Smith was introduced to the art of the Modernists primarily through John Graham, a highly sophisticated connoisseur and authority on primitive and modern art. Graham was keenly aware of the young talented artists in New York in the 1930s and, moving between New York and Paris, he brought his protégés into contact with the latest developments in Paris. During visits with Graham in the early 1930s, Smith first encountered the welded sculptures of Julio González in the French Cahiers d’Art, and Smith and his wife also toured the museums and galleries of Paris with Graham during a trip to Europe in 1935. His encounter with the work of González awakened Smith to the possibilities of working with iron and steel – material he had already handled in an earlier job at a Studebaker automobile plant in 1925. Smith’s earliest experiments with sculpture now found their perfect medium, and he began a relationship with the Terminal Iron Works, a machinist shop on the Brooklyn waterfront near his home, where Smith would have the room to experiment with his first welded sculptures in 1933.  The influence of González’s metal Heads, welded in steel or combining found objects, was emerging in Smith’s earliest sculptures such as Agricola Head and Saw Head of that year. However in the process of exploring a great variety of approaches and media, Smith soon progressed to a more spatially complex and less figurative sculptural form. Whereas González and Picasso retained the identity of their collaged elements or source subjects – the tension between the real and the ready-made – in their Cubist collages and sculptures, Smith soon transformed these elements into neutral components that disappear into the reality of the abstracted composition as a whole.

Focusing on table-top constructions and tableaus in the mid-1930s, Smith was fully alive to the stylistic importance of Cubism and its aesthetic possibilities. As he stated in 1955, ``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.’’ (Garnett McCoy, ed., David Smith, New York 1973, pp. 16-17). Smith’s translation of Synthetic Cubist painting into three-dimensions is evident in Still Life Construction with his use of line as contour and the alteration of solid and negative space. The horizontal sweep of the sculpture is grounded in the moon-like sliver that extends the width of the composition, atop the vertical support, yet this implied two-dimensional plane is subverted throughout the rest of the composition. Thin rods of iron dance toward and away from the horizontal plane, as they snake and crisscross from one end of the sculpture toward the other. This sinuous and independent dance is anchored by more geometric solidities, such as triangles and grill-like rectangles that bend away and toward the viewer as pictured here, striving to contain the more languid and curvilinear elements within the whole. As the viewer moves around the sculpture, the angles and spatial complexity of Still Life Composition belies its title, as the shifting perspectives of the composition take on an organic and activated quality.

The three-dimensionality of Cubist form, suffused with the lyricism of linear Surrealism, in Still Life Construction is an early example of Smith’s genius for balancing Void and Solid, form and content, crude material and poetic spirit that is the hallmark of his masterpieces to follow in the 1950s and 1960s. Smith was the essence of American individualism, refusing to choose one convention or form above another, and in the work of the late1930s, his endeavors result in works that surpass the influence and defy the restrictions of past masters, opening the way for an oeuvre that is key to the development of American Art in the last half of the 20^th Century.