Page 11 - Studio International - August 1966

David Smith : a major American sculptor

A personal appreciation by Robert Motherwell

The David Smith (1906-1965) `I hope you can interpret—try ... you know me and how I stout. We left each other late at night, wobbly but
Retrospective opens at the speak—add it up and guess when in doubt.' David Smith, walking. In those days I was full of French Symbolist
Tate Gallery on August 19.
the great contemporary American sculptor, wrote that aesthetics, of Rimbaud and Mallarmé, and of Andre
Captions with this article
are based on material supplied to an English critic in a letter. Smith was referring to his Breton, of the possibilities of representing reality in-
by Robert Motherwell. handwriting, which, in fact, was clear enough. And so directly but passionately in one's medium. I still can see
was his sculpture, based as it was on the Cubist collage, David saying, with his characteristic bluntness and inal-
with welding replacing glue, with three dimensions func- terable sense of his own identity, 'I don't know about
tioning instead of two, with an aesthetic weight and large- those guys, I don't read French, but I don't need them.
ness of scale that Parisian Cubists never dreamed of. That I've read James Joyce!' He was right, all of it is in
in turn made Smith not only the sculptor most related to Ulysses, and I looked at him with a sudden intellectual
David Smith, a noble and
hard-working artist of our native Abstract Expressionism, but a major American respect that did not diminish as my affection for him
tremendous appetites and sculptor of international esteem and influence. continually grew.
stamina, in welding clothes.
He produced much more I knew him for more than fifteen years, ever since that When, as a young American sculptor in the 1930's, David
sculpture than was physically afternoon that we met by prearrangement (but unknown added Picasso to Joyce for his points of reference, when
and economically possible to to each other) in 1950. We instinctively tried to drink he was possessed of a continual fascination with the
exhibit: 'because I have to'.
Photo : Alexander Lieberman each other under the table on Irish whisky and Guinness ancient sculpture of the Near East, and, when from
economic necessity, during the Depression, he learned
the welding of iron in locomotive and automotive works,
he had as economical, relevant, and adequate back-
ground for making an essential contribution to modern
art—with its proper obsession with the nature of the
medium—as could be imagined. That background served
him well. When you saw his burly figure in workman's
clothes, you sensed a cultivated man who knew his
ancient and modern art intimately, including all the
most recent developments. When you saw him in Irish
tweeds and with Monte Cristo cigars those past years,
you were aware still of a man who spent most of his days
cutting and welding hunks of steel often far too heavy for
a single man to lift, driving his professional helpers as
hard as himself, knowing that the workings of the greatest
national economy the world has ever known were inade-
quate, not only to absorb his prodigious amount of
work, but even to exhibit much of it. Some of his last
great iron 'wagons' on wheels were too large and heavy
even to be moved unless there had been a fantastic
private railroad spur to his Adirondack mountain place
where he lived and worked.
He bought hundreds of acres in mountains there for a
few dollars during the Depression. He himself built the
studio-house out of concrete blocks and iron, to which in
recent years he had added further factory-like studios.
It was not an especially comfortable place, especially
for women, but on its grounds, like sentinels, stood the
greatest permanent one-man show of heroic contempor-
ary sculpture in the Americas. A folk song runs: 'It takes
a worried man to sing a worried song'. Well, it took an
iron will to have made all those weighty iron sculptures
strewn about his mountain landscape, each silhouetted
against an enormous sky.
Typically, his bitterness about his years of struggle
during the Depression and the 1940's was mainly about
his inability to afford then to make as monumental
sculpture as he could later on.
Eventually he bought up ancient tractors with gigantic
steel wheels, and even an enormous old road grader. He
wanted to incorporate them into sculpture, sculpture so
tremendous that this industrial machinery would have
no larger role in the whole sculptures than the clock-
works have in a grandfather clock, or the elevator in an
elevator shaft.
He was originally a Hoosier from Indiana, and a streak