‘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. In ‘Saw Head’ of 1933 can be seen the influence of González, in the descriptive use of implements: a strainer, metal shears and circular saw-blade to make a face. ‘Aerial Construction’ (1936), in painted iron, is more interesting, exploring planes and lines in a Cubist-derived way. The sequence of 15 bronze wall plaques in Room 2, entitled ‘Medals for Dishonor’, are a chunky indictment of war, highly detailed and figurative, and were inspired by ancient Sumerian seals. In Room 3, rather densely populated with a dozen medium-sized sculptures on plinths, the early work of Giacometti emerges as a formative influence. In these works there is usually rather too much going on. Although impressive, their complex narratives, with episodes or events brought loosely together, do not quite unify. Harps and blades, saws and cogs, prongs and chains bear witness instead to an almost baroque taste for embellishment. In this room, the one work which stands out for its clarity of design is ‘The Forest’, a lovely and evocative sculpture.
Room 4 introduces drawings and four smallish sculptures. One is a pierced sheet of metal from 1945 called simply ‘Steel Drawing’. I liked the ink drawings around it, and particularly the two abstract but map-like landscape drawings of the Virgin Islands, and a later one, using watercolour, of the Hudson River. The other sculptures here demonstrate Smith’s interest in hieroglyphs. ‘The Letter’ is a grid of pictograms, but the prize goes to ‘24 Greek Y’s’, a painted steel invention from 1950. Room 5 really shows how much the sculptures benefit from being read in space but against the backdrop of a white wall. Hence the logic of blocking off the window in Room 6, and building more walls in the later galleries. (Smith made his sculptures to be seen in the open air against the sky, the grass and the trees. In the aseptic world of the museum gallery, white walls stand in for sky.) These are landscape sculptures, inventive and pioneering, particularly ‘Agricola IX’ and the cosmic blue-black ‘Star Cage’. Ironically the two with actual place names, ‘Australia’ and ‘Hudson River Landscape’, are more reminiscent of agricultural implements, and consequently less original.
Smith developed his impressive technique using steel to draw in space, with his complementary instinct towards three-dimensional collage, and referred to these assemblages as ‘the savage idols of basic patterns’. The line is intense, and often witty in the abbreviation and juxtaposition of forms, but a new impetus becomes apparent in Room 6. Here are eight standing figures, positioned directly on the floor (the plinth has been discarded), in postures many and various, as if in some chivalric guide to etiquette. (Perhaps this is a rococo counterpart to the earlier baroque inflection in Smith’s work, before the grand simplification of his mature style.) The room seems somewhat crowded, each ‘personage’ having rather a lot to offer when considered singly. Some pieces combine the linear with the planar, and the blocky sentinel ‘5 1/2’ even anticipates Donald Judd’s later geometric stacks. Gesture and movement are at a premium in this group.
A visit in 1962 to Voltri, near Spoleto in Italy, was a defining moment, when Smith set up studio in an abandoned welding factory. He made 27 sculptures in 30 days from the scrap metal and abandoned tools. Assemblages such as ‘Voltri XVI’ and ‘Voltri-Bolton X’ show his excitement in discovering this cache, but they aren’t as thought-through and inventive as ‘Voltri VII’, a wagon with five personages like human question marks standing proud in it. In Room 8 are two rather beautiful sheet pieces from Italy, one on wheels for ease of movement. Much of the scrap was taken back to Smith’s studio at Bolton Landing in the Adirondacks, where he continued to work on it. There he placed his sculptures in fields to interact with the landscape, and some of the most poignant photographs in the catalogue are of the pieces in the snow. (The catalogue is hefty and unwieldy. The Tate should have taken a leaf from Smith’s book and put wheels on it.) The show ends with a couple of ziggurat sculptures and a clutch of stainless-steel ‘Cubi’s, textured with a mechanical grinder to reflect landscape light. Those who admire Anthony Caro’s work will be fascinated by this exhibition: an impressive demonstration of top-level sculptural thinking.
Timed to coincide with the Tate’s survey is another show of Smith’s work, this time in a commercial gallery. Personage at Gagosian (6–24 Britannia Street, London WC1, until 9 December) is typical of a new breed of commercial exhibitions, which borrow works from prominent collections to put beside items for sale. The effect is to reduce the distance between the commercial sector and the museum, which can be of benefit to the great viewing public; but you can rest assured that it’s not done for philanthropic reasons. Gagosian has vast handsome galleries near King’s Cross and can put on a show which looks like a museum display, and sometimes equals one. (The Bacon exhibition back in the summer was a case in point.) At the time of writing I haven’t seen Gagosian’s David Smith show, which includes sculptures, paintings and drawings, but with loans from the Tate and the Reina Sofia in Madrid, it should be of a high quality. If you don’t feel like paying the Tate’s £7 admission fee, you could do worse than pop over to Britannia Street.
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