Tony Smith
1912–1980
Tony 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.
Although Smith’s peers in the 1950s were first-generation Abstract Expressionist artists such as Jackson Pollock, his commitment to modular, regularized, and industrially fabricated units anticipated the concerns and methods of the Minimalist sculptors of the 1960s. To make Die, 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 Die’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.
The 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 Die. Its scale, he felt, should register as smaller than a monument but larger than an object.
Introduction
Anthony Peter Smith (September 23, 1912 – December 26, 1980) was an American sculptor, painter, architectural designer, and a noted art theorist. As a leading sculptor in the 1960s and 1970s, Smith is often associated with the Minimalist art movement.
Wikidata identifier
Q551899
Information from Wikipedia, made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License . Accessed May 23, 2025.
Country of birth
United States
Roles
Artist, architect, painter, sculptor, teacher
ULAN identifier
500028102
Names
Tony Smith, Anthony Smith, Anthony Peter Smith, Tony I Smith, Tony Peter Smith, Tony. Smith
Information from the Getty Research Institute's Union List of Artist Names ® (ULAN), made available under the ODC Attribution License. Accessed May 23, 2025.
