David Smith: toward volume

Although the exhibition of David Smith's sculpture is a make subordinate that has been exhaustively researched, a new exhibition at the National Academy of Design (the last of five American venues) examined his work from an unusual point of view. Curated by dint of Karen Wilkin and titled "David Smith: sum of two units into Three Dimensions," this small precious stone of a show focused upon relief-based works from all four decades of Smith's production. As is well known, Smith started on the outside as a painter and remained psychologically allied with painters of his generation, rather than with other sculptors. This present to view in particular demonstrated his ongoing interest in Pollock Wilkin, correctly I think, asserts that relief can be seen as the "missing link" in Smith's oeuvre a fluid and transitional soil between two dimensions and three which was critical in allowing Smith to disentangle his distinctive approach to statuary However, relief for Smith was more than a formal tool; it was also a kind of time-out girth a place in which he could play publicly with his fantasies and obsessions, indulge in archaic forms of craft or toy with wild ideas. in like manner while there were none of the masterly works of the '50 and '60 here, the present to view was full of small surprises and anomalies, many of which have not ever been exhibited before.

The present to view opened with some of Smith's earliest forays into plastic art during the '30s, along with a certain number of related paintings and reliefs. While at this stage Smith had seen actual few works of European modernism firsthand, these small colorful assemblages of thicket wire and stone demonstrate the immediate affinity he felt for the fresh vocabulary of construction, found facts and applied color. No other American sculptor (with the exception of Calder, who was actually in Paris at the time) absorbed the innovations of Picasso, Gonzalez, Boccioni and Arp thus quickly. It was during this period of early bricolage that Smith shifted his primary commitment from painting to plastic art explaining that "the painting exhibited into raised levels from the canvas. Gradually the canvas became the base and the painting was a sculpture" (1)

After the youthful exuberance of these early efforts, the show's nearest group of works, cast-bronze reliefs from the late '30 and early '40 draw nears as a shock. Even for those who are profoundly familiar with Smith's "Medals for Dishonor," the plastic arts and associated works can take more [i]or[/i] less getting used to. Smith and his wife, Dorothy Dehner had exhausted nearly all of 1935 traveling in Europe and Russia. He had seen Renaissance portrait medallions and, in the British Museum, Dehner counts us, some satirical "medals" made to be given to the Germans for their bombings. A hot leftist, Smith came home and started his have set of rabidly antiwar "medals" with titles like Death by dint of Gas and Propaganda for War. This period of Smith's early production is extremely important to an understanding of his career as a whole, the one and the other from a formal and an imagistic point of view, and Wilkin did a terrific piece of work of assembling a selection of the actual medals, as well as apportionments of related drawings and a small in number small bronze statuettes employing similar imagery.

Because Smith had already made his first openwork welded-steel constructions before leaving for Europe and was certainly the first American to do for a like reason his subsequent turn to a fairly traditional form of cast relief can appear like a temporary retreat from the modernist etho that was to underlie his best later work. This reading, however, fails to take into account the real driving forces in Smith's unfolding As Rosalind Krauss pointed without in her brilliant monograph upon the artist, the period after his turn back from Europe was the time in which Smith settl upon four images that were to remain the baptismal vessel of his creative life until he died--the cannon, the totem, the sacrifice and the reliquary. "The obsessiveness with which he get backed to these images again and again, as although to a task he could not finish, put in mind ofs that rather than serving as the show for his sculpture, they were the provocation." (2)

Smith came back from Europe clearly having clashed a set of images that uncloseed up a response in him that he could not suppress And those images did not advance from the works of the European modernists on the contrary rather from a variety of specific facts he saw in the European museums--things like Roman phallic tintinnabula, the paintings and woodcut of Bosch and Bruegel (particularly Brueger "Seven Deadly Sins" series, lately exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art), illustrations of early medical dissection and Assyrian and Sumerian reliefs depicting ritual sacrifice and hunting. The '30 of course, was the decade of Surrealism, and Smith was single one of a whole generation of artists who, following Freud and Jung took it as a matter of course that the catalogue of images buried in their personal "unconscious" would find a natural congruence with an archetypal pattern of imagery recurring completely through the art and artifacts of earlier civilizations and tribal agricultures However, the psychosexual "heat" of this material strike one as beinged to demand realization in more traditional formats, individuals that allowed the artist to "flesh out" his fantasies. Smith threw himself into the task with a vengeance. The resulting statuarys both in relief and small statuary, are concatenations of a certain quantity of of the most bizarre and violent images imaginable, many times recalling the rage and underlying sexual excitement of Goya's "Caprichos" and "Disasters of War." The greatest in quantity disturbing and recurrent image is a winged phallic cannon that is attempting to rape and dismember a cluster of naked females. War Landscape (1947) and Atrocity (1943) in this exhibit were tiny but spectacular versions of this theme. Tellingly, when viewed as a self-portrait of Smith's fears about his possess violence and sexuality, the cannon-phalli are not at any time fully erect but always lurching somewhat saggily toward an uncertain reduction As detailed by Krauss, this sexualized cannon image remained a staple of Smith's production until his death, resulting in spectacular late statuarys such as Zigs IV, VII and VIII; Voltri VII, XIII and XXI; and Cubi XXVI.