Forging ahead

‘I am going to work to the best of my ability to the day I die, challenging what’s given to me,’ the American artist David Smith told an interviewer in 1964. Tragically he was killed in a car crash the following year, and one of the most original and inventive of 20th-century sculptors was lost, at the height of his powers. (Of course, Providence may have known what it was up to — one of his friends claimed that Smith was planning a mile-high sculpture when he died, as well as things the size of railway trains. Such megalomania would have forfeited the human scale on which he habitually worked, and who’s to say whether that would have been a good idea?) On the basis of the radical work he did complete, David Smith is unquestionably one of the great artists of modern times, but he is comparatively little known here. On the 100th anniversary of his birth this well-chosen exhibition pays tribute to a hugely influential artist.

The son of an engineer and the direct descendant of a blacksmith, David Smith (1906–65) worked in his late teens as a welder and riveter in the Studebaker motor factory. Formal art study included a spell at the Art Students’ League in New York, and to begin with he concentrated on painting. Then reproductions of the forged iron sculpture of Picasso and González showed him his true path. Welded steel was a decidedly modern material with little weight of history attached to it, and Smith developed it with energy and passion. Influenced by Surrealism and Cubism, he was a man of contradictions, whom his friend Robert Motherwell described as: ‘delicate as Vivaldi, and as strong as a Mack truck’. The sculptural force within him erupted through a riotous breeding of images in the subconscious, bodied forth in scrap and found objects.

This exhibition begins with lots of small things — it’s not until the fifth gallery that the show really begins to open out — but the earlier rooms provide a useful introduction.