Page 34 - Studio International - January 1971

Four sculptors part 4: David Smith

William Tucker

The very recentness of the main body of David virtually on his own; these elements charac- tion of Picasso's radical ambition. Smith, by
Smith's achievement, in comparison with that terize his work, yet do not comprise it. contrast, started out from a virtual vacuum
of Picasso, Brancusi and Matisse, all of whom As a young man Smith studied painting; the both of craft skills and of given imagery. Both
had established the principles of their sculpture friends and teachers through whom he had to be acquired; the awkwardness of much
by 1915, and the inopportuneness of his death acquired an interest in the latest developments of Smith's pre-war sculpture is no affectation,
(in 1965), leaving an œuvre manifestly incom- in European art were painters. It was while he just as the achievement of a piece like the Leda
plete, present great difficulties in 'placing' his was naively re-enacting the development of of 1939 is doubly remarkable; not only can it
work in the central line from Rodin, with Cubism in his own work, by attaching objects stand comparison with anything being done in
whom perhaps he has more in common than to the surface of his pictures, that he discovered Europe at that time, but it signals the mastery
his predecessors. Moreover the very extent and in reproductions of the Picasso-Gonzalez metal in sculpture of an artist who had grown
diversity of his work, the alienness of the funda- constructions of 1929-31 a model for the use entirely within the framework of construction
mentals of his sculpture, its flatness and fron- of iron as a serious art medium. His first as sculpture, and had learned about metal as
tality, the dominance of part over whole, to attempts at sculpture—such as Chain Head, Saw he grew in sculpture, and had fought with his
conventional European sensibilities who can Head and Agricola Head, all of 1933—are in progressively sophisticated use of the material
still claim Picasso and Brancusi as their own comparison to their inspiration technically and to make an inherited imagery his own. What
through their residual reference to the figure stylistically unsophisticated, but original in remains personal and distinctive about the
or employment of volume; and importantly preserving intact elements—such as chain, early work however, is not imagery or technique
the interpretation of Smith's art in terms of its cogs, etc.—which give the pieces their peculiar but the mode of assembly: almost always, in
roots in painting by critics whose taste and character and which although raw and un- comparison to his European models, shallow
ideas have been formed by painting, a tendency assimilated at this early point demonstrate the and frontal and the part stressed and developed
encouraged by Smith's own sympathy and `bad manners' of Smith's stance, in deciding at the expense of the whole. One can see Smith
alignment with painting, almost inevitable in what was and was not proper to sculpture, conscientiously learning to extend and enrich
the absence of any substantial American tradi- from the outset of his career. During the 30s his formal vocabulary and syntax; from the
tion in sculpture, and the overwhelming one observes Smith simultaneously learning first pieces built around the characteristic
achievement of his painter contemporaries; both how to use steel in terms of its own density of found parts he goes on to a group of
these factors have hindered appreciation of structural and expressive properties and how horizontal sculptures in which variety is
Smith's significance for modern sculpture. to manipulate a more sophisticated vocabulary achieved by the varied bending of round bar
Again, qualities of personality, as abundantly of form deriving largely from Giacometti's of equal thickness and the profiling of flat sheet
manifest in the sculpture and his own published sculpture and Picasso's painting and drawing. as in the Reclining Figure of 1936. Then Smith
writings, have preoccupied his contemporaries One should remember that Picasso called on extends his control over the shaping and con-
and partisans. Smith's enormous ambition Gonzalez to help with metal constructions trast of both linear and planar elements, as in
and energy; his appetite for the most varied because Gonzalez had long been an adept the Leda; and, becoming acquainted with arc-
source material; the quality of technical craftsman in metal, and could through his welding, learns to construct closed volumes by
resource and invention in a field where he was existing skill provide a vehicle for the realiza- assembling and seaming the external surfaces
(e.g. Structure of Arches, 1939).
If by the war Smith had on his own acquired a
I&2
method of making sculpture that was more
than adequate to the demands of a borrowed
imagery, the next decade largely saw him
struggling with the same intensity to produce
a mode of expression more specific to his iden-
tity in time and place than the generalized
cubist/surrealist idiom then current. The
Medals for Dishonour which Smith made in
1939-40 show not only the chaotic violence of
his emotions in a form that imposed virtually
no structural limitations on his invention, but
the need to find specific and personal equiva-
lents for his own social feelings.

II
When he returned to sculpture after the war,
this search for a private but satisfying imagery
continued; to a greater or lesser extent per-
sonal images dominate or interchange with
the resources of the constructive technique:
bird and insect motifs, spines, claws and beaks,
are after all close to the tensile character of the
metal itself. Many, perhaps most, of the
sculptures of the post-1945 period suffer from

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