{"data":{"id":"1240","type":"artist","attributes":{"id":1240,"topgoose_id":691,"tms_id":1240,"display_name":"Tony Smith","sort_name":"Smith Tony","display_date":"1912–1980","begin_date":"1912","end_date":"1980","biography":"\u003cp\u003eTony Smith produced abstract, geometric, and mathematically derived paintings, drawings, architectural designs, and— beginning in the late 1950s—sculptures, the work for which he is best known. Smith studied painting and architecture in the 1930s and, following an apprenticeship under Frank Lloyd Wright, designed private residences for twenty years. He considered form, scale, mass, and voids as essential components of his architectural work, and while these same considerations surfaced in his two-dimensional paintings, they proved fundamental to the sculptures.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAlthough Smith’s peers in the 1950s were first-generation Abstract Expressionist artists such as \u003ca href=\"/artists/1039\"\u003eJackson Pollock\u003c/a\u003e, his commitment to modular, regularized, and industrially fabricated units anticipated the concerns and methods of the Minimalist sculptors of the 1960s. To make \u003ca href=\"/collection/works/4891\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eDie\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/a\u003e, a six-foot, hollow steel cube raised slightly off the floor to reveal all twelve of its edges, Smith gave his specifications to fabricators at a welding company. As he explained, “I just picked up the phone and ordered it.” Unlike the younger Minimalist artists, however, Smith did not reject allusive references. He derived \u003cem\u003eDie\u003c/em\u003e’s shape and size from ancient sources, including a description by the Greek writer Herodotus of a cubic chapel carved from a single stone, and studies by the Roman architect Vitruvius of ideal human proportions.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe sculpture’s evocative title suggests an unmarked die or, more morbidly, the act of dying. The dimensions, as he suggested, point to the latter: “Six foot box. Six foot under.” Yet Smith was primarily concerned with the living viewer’s perceptual and bodily experience of \u003cem\u003eDie\u003c/em\u003e. Its scale,\nhe felt, should register as smaller than a\nmonument but larger than an object.\u003c/p\u003e","on_view":false,"artport":false,"biennial":true,"collection":true,"ulan_id":"500028102","wikidata_id":"Q551899","created_at":"2017-08-30T15:48:42.000-04:00","updated_at":"2026-04-10T07:01:29.773-04:00","links":{"artworks":"/api/artists/1240/artworks","exhibitions":"/api/artists/1240/exhibitions"}}}}