Page 26 - Studio International - January 1968

'There are many imponderables in the history of this
period, especially in the years between the wars, when
American intellectuals (and wastrels) took Paris really
seriously. What comes clear upon the immediate results is
how little American sculptors responded to the challenge
of their Parisian experience (quite as little as those at home
responded to developments in American painting). The
striking exception is David Smith. He came to see how the
spatial discoveries of the Cubists, the free imagination of
the Surrealists, and the technique of welding could be
brought together to make a sculpture of power and
freshness. Smith's work, as it develops, is rich in formal
concerns, but these are often a secondary factor in the
impression the work makes upon the observer. What
comes first is sheer visual impact, a sense of vitality and
commitment; the sculpture does not merely exist; it is a
positive act, even an aggressive one. The particular quality
of energy and decisive gesture shared by so many of
Smith's works, their generous scale, and difficult, im-
personal materials, distinguish them from European
works, from Cubist or Surrealist sources, or those that use
welding techniques and iron or steel. Smith's work has a
different character from that of Gonzalez or Picasso,
Barnett Newman
from whom he learned, but the difference does not come
Broken Obelisk
from eccentricity, or from personality, at the expense of
formal invention. The difference comes from invention
Robert Murray
Spring 1965 itself, from an alternative vision of how these principles
steel painted green and materials may be used.
Betty Parsons Gallery Oddly enough, Smith's first vital contact with modern
European art was not in a museum or gallery, and cer-
tainly not in Europe; it was in the pages of the art maga-
zines and in the conversation of New York painters. It
was already almost enough. Smith's European travels of
1935-6 were a confirmation of his original insight.
Other sculptors in American picked up Europe in
various ways. Richard Lippold came to Constructivism
through industrial design, Theodore Roszak through the
ideas of Moholy-Nagy. As the Second World War ap-
proached, more and more refugee artists settled in
America; these men exerted an influence—not necessarily
positive—but its impact upon sculpture was felt in the
main indirectly, through the altering attitudes and con-
cerns of American painters. In the 1940s the Abstract
Expressionist revolution was made; it was largely an act
of self-discovery, a clarification of standards. The effect
was to free American painting from the dominance of the
School of Paris, without, however, repudiating the major
discoveries of modernism. It was a revolution by adapta-
tion and only understood to be one when it was over.
David Smith's individualism, energy, and method of
working related to the values fostered by the painters
associated with Abstract Expressionism (there was never
a movement). The pursuit of a powerful image expressed
only in essentials, generous in scale, risked in the very
processes of achieving it— these became the sine qua non of
the new art. In short, a number of intangible qualities,
along with a certain puritanical regard for limiting the
means to expression even as one enlarged the scope of it,
a sense of the sublime realized in scale or energy, became
the American thing. Smith was the first of the American
sculptors. Others associated early on with what might be
thought of as the Abstract Expressionist attitude were