David Smith

Rosalind E. Krauss, The Sculpture of David Smith: A Catalogue Raisonné, New York and London, 1977, cat. no. 65, fig. 65, illustrated

“Before knowing what art was or before going to art school, as a factory worker I was acquainted with steel and the machines used in forging it.  During my second year in art school I learned about Cubism, Picasso and González through Cahiers d’art.  From them I learned that art was being made with steel – the materials and machines that previously meant only labor and earning power.”
-- Karen Wilkin, David Smith, New York, 1984, p. 12

Untitled from 1937 is a harbinger of the restless investigation and astonishing inventiveness that would catapult David Smith to the pinnacle of Modern American sculpture.  Executed only four years after Smith first began to experiment with welded metal forms, Untitled is an important early sculpture that reveals Smith’s early Cubist influences while suggesting his new, developing mode of expression. 

Born and raised in Decatur, Indiana, Smith received neither formal training nor broad exposure to the arts as a young boy.  His oeuvre was more informed by his engineer father and early work experiences than by knowledge of art history.  In 1925, Smith worked at the Studebaker plant in South Bend as a welder and riveter – his early experiences and familiarity with iron and steel would later guide his artistic vision and allow his technical mastery of sculpture.  Moving to New York in 1926, Smith began his studies at the Art Students League, then the most progressive art school in the nation.  Over the next five years, though Smith would study primarily as a painter, his exposure to such artists as Picasso and González would turn his mind towards three-dimensional representation and the possibilities of sculpting in metal.  With a free and open mind, unfettered by constraints of accepted artistic norms, Smith began his life-long experiments with welded metal forms in 1933 and would soon move his studio into the Terminal Iron Works Factory where the welders would improve his technical skills.  His ingenuity and familiarity with the medium allowed him to produce an innovative body of early sculpture – such as the present work – that achieve a unique plasticity of form, balance and beautiful dichotomy between positive and negative space.   Here in Untitled, the Cubist undertones inform the humanoid figure and create a true sculpture in the round with pleasing and interesting angles and line visible from all vantage points.  Untitled is a strong example of David Smith’s early endeavors with three-dimensional form and an important work in his oeuvre.