David Smith
Hudson River Landscape
1951
Not on view
Date
1951
Classification
Sculpture
Medium
Welded painted steel and stainless steel
Dimensions
Overall: 48 3/4 × 72 1/8 × 17 5/16in. (123.8 × 183.2 × 44 cm)
Accession number
54.14
Edition
Unique
Credit line
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase
Rights and reproductions
© Estate of David Smith / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
David Smith worked in welded steel to produce what he called “drawings in space.” In Hudson River Landscape, he transformed steel agricultural tool fragments and foundry castoffs into a semi-figurative sculpture. As its title indicates, this work is a landscape, one that, in the artist’s words, “came in part from dozens of drawings made on a train between Albany and Poughkeepsie, a synthesis of ten trips over a 75 mile stretch.” The sculpture includes abstracted, but recognizable forms evoking clouds, railroad tracks, and stepped terrain; the spring-thawed, ice-laden Hudson River is airily frozen in steel. But formal considerations are also important. Smith capitalized on steel’s tensile strength and his own welding virtuosity to construct new sculptural forms that balanced mass and weightlessness. While Hudson River Landscape’s outlined, rectangular format recalls Smith’s training as a Cubist painter, the sculpture’s almost calligraphic line moves swiftly in space with a sense of animation and energy akin to the gestural paintings of Smith’s Abstract Expressionist colleagues.
