Page 17 - Studio International - August 1966

where he lived. His retreat to the country—he did not riveter in Indiana, made his way East to Washington,
think of it as a retreat—was an act of self-confrontation. D.C., eventually to New York City. In 1927, he began
Slowly, he built and equipped a machine shop where he to study painting at the Art Students' League; four years
could make the heroic welded steel sculpture that em- later, he turned to sculpture; in 1933, he began to weld.
bodied his complex feelings. His loneliness and dedica- The early thirties were tough years, lived in the shadow
tion were the imperatives of his art; he didn't like to be of the Depression. In America, government support for
lonely and dedicated, but there it was: the sculpture he the arts provided their buffer against poverty; and the
wanted to make required this life of him; so to speak, stimulus of partisan politics, in aid of the future, gave
loneliness and dedication made his art available to him. painting and sculpture an uneasy doctrinaireness. Like
I've encapsulated what took a long time to happen. other artists, Smith was caught up in the quarrels of
Smith did not come to himself all of a sudden and light the time. But he had already a sense of the artist's singu-
out for the hills. As with so many important artists, his larity, of his being only an individual voice and not a
early years were fumbling. He was a Middle Westerner, spokesman. Years later, he was to say when asked what
Looking across the fields on born in Decatur, Indiana, in 1906. He had a restless he felt to be the significance and influence of his work,
David Smith's mountainside
Photo : Ed Cornachio adolescence, studied at Ohio University, worked as a `I don't know and I don't care. I am selfishly working to