David Smith: Cubes and Anarchy

Narrator: Welcome to David Smith: Cubes and Anarchy. Smith was a master of modern sculpture. He worked in a broad range of media and explored a rich variety of themes, materials, and subject matter. The works in this show exemplify his life-long interest in geometry. A deep commitment to human forms, feelings, and movement, however, underlie many of his most abstract works.

The large sculptures you see in this room come from the 1960s—the last decade of Smith’s life. We’ll see earlier works today too, but the exhibition does not follow a linear path from his earliest sculpture—produced in the 1930s—to his death in 1965. Instead the show explores the artist’s enduring formal interests, drawing new visual connections between them.

Smith was born in Indiana in 1906, and came to New York as a twenty-year-old. He studied at the Art Students League from 1927 to 1932. He began as a painter, but a decisive moment came in 1932 when he saw a copy of the French art journal Cahiers d’art. It reproduced welded steel sculptures by Pablo Picasso and his fellow Spanish artist Julio González. Smith himself had worked as a welder in a Studebaker factory in 1925. He was excited by the idea of merging art with the methods of modern industry. He was also inspired by the way that Cubism’s overlapping shapes and abstract forms lent themselves to the production of deeply personal, yet enigmatic meaning.

In 1929, Smith bought a former fox farm in Bolton Landing, New York—some two hundred miles north of New York City, in the Adirondack Mountains near Lake George. He moved there full-time in 1941. In the 1950s, he began installing his sculpture in the fields surrounding his home and studio. He ultimately filled the fields with his sculpture, creating a dramatic interaction of art and nature. In a sense, Smith’s were among the first environmental sculptures—open and responsive to their surroundings.

Narrator: Cubi V is eight feet tall, and composed entirely of steel boxes that were fabricated to Smith’s specifications. But the sculpture doesn’t feel coldly industrial or unapproachably large. Energy spins out from its central square, and comes to a kind of exclamation point in the box that tips off-axis. It’s a lyrical, playful balancing act—one that echoes the joyful motion of the human body. We are focusing today on Smith’s use of geometry. Some artists who emphasized geometric form wished to achieve pure abstraction. Smith wasn’t one of those—he never wanted to get representation out of his work.

Michael Brenson: He wanted to give people something that they could respond to, some kind of associative trigger.

Narrator: Michael Brenson is a writer and critic. He’s writing a biography of David Smith.

Michael Brenson: And that trigger very often for him was connected with certain ceremonial or ritual purposes. He never explained his work. He wrote a lot. He talked a lot. But he was extremely reluctant to explain his work. I think one of the reasons for that is that he was so committed, almost ideologically committed, to the freedom of interpretation of people in front of it.

Narrator: To make Lectern Sentinel—and the other sculptures in this exhibition—Smith welded metal elements together. For centuries, sculptors had carved or molded sculpture. Smith’s work is constructed. It’s an approach to sculpture that comes out of collage, a technique first employed by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque in 1912.

Compared to traditional artworks, collage and constructed sculpture feel provisional. We can see how all of the pieces were put together, and we can imagine taking them apart. A skeptical, experimental spirit is built into the techniques—and this spirit pervades Smith’s work.

Still, while Smith questioned sculptural tradition, he didn’t reject it. Welding may have allowed him to compose a work out of disparate parts. But in chemical terms, welding creates a single, fused piece of metal. The sculpture is tremendously strong and stable. Smith has dramatized its weight with the long, firm horizontal that sits atop the shifting column.

Peter Stevens: By putting that firm, horizontal top to the sculpture, he is giving us a clear structural—one of the few points of reference that are not about motion, that is about a kind of stasis, that's about staying still, a kind of calm.

Narrator: Peter Stevens is director of the David Smith Estate.

Peter Stevens: And that is what a sentinel is. A sentinel stands still and watches and is not an active participant in its environment. It is watching. That little circle that is created by the pipe, from one view it becomes an open, very thinly drawn circle. And then, as you walk around it, it becomes closed.

So it's like an eye that opens and closes, that is watching us. So the sculpture turns the tables on the viewer. Instead of just simply being an object that we look at, it is also, in a sense, returning our gaze and creating this kind of almost solemn presence that I think is what the Sentinel meant to Smith.

Michael Brenson: He wanted to give people something that they could respond to, some kind of associative trigger.

Narrator: Michael Brenson is a writer and critic. He’s writing a biography of David Smith.

Michael Brenson: And that trigger very often for him was connected with certain ceremonial or ritual purposes. He never explained his work. He wrote a lot. He talked a lot. But he was extremely reluctant to explain his work. I think one of the reasons for that is that he was so committed, almost ideologically committed, to the freedom of interpretation of people in front of it.

Narrator: In Circle III, Smith used paint to dramatically separate the three elements of this sculpture—the base, the circle, and the horn-like arc on top. Smith’s Circle series included five sculptures. When they were completed, he lined them up in the field outside his Bolton Landing studio so that visitors could see through one sculpture to the next. The installation came together to form a multicolored series of concentric circles. Michael Brenson.

Michael Brenson: So they read as if it was a painting that had turned into a sculpture.He had taken a pictorial idea and then he asked himself, "How do I make some kind of sculpture out of that?" This goes back to a key issue in Smith's work almost from the beginning, which is the relationship between sculpture and painting. Because he did begin as a painter. He did say at a certain point that he put the canvas down and then started to build off of it and the sculpture began to emerge that way.

Narrator: Smith’s first influences were primarily painters. Picasso was important to him early on, and he responded to the Surrealists during the 1930s. American modernist art first gained international attention in the 1940s and '50s. At that point, most of Smith’s significant peers were painters such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning. In the 1960s, that began to change. Minimalism and other sculptural movements came to the fore. Artists from Donald Judd to Richard Serra struggled to differentiate themselves from Smith’s achievement. These efforts lent the new sculpture much of its intensity, and continue to underscore Smith’s deep importance to modern art.

Michael Brenson: He wanted to give people something that they could respond to, some kind of associative trigger.

Narrator: Michael Brenson is a writer and critic. He’s writing a biography of David Smith.

Michael Brenson: And that trigger very often for him was connected with certain ceremonial or ritual purposes. He never explained his work. He wrote a lot. He talked a lot. But he was extremely reluctant to explain his work. I think one of the reasons for that is that he was so committed, almost ideologically committed, to the freedom of interpretation of people in front of it.

Narrator: Untitled (Candida), is one of the very last works that Smith made. It’s also one of the flattest—overall, it’s less than an inch deep. Peter Stevens.

Peter Stevens: It's a painterly space that we are experiencing. In fact, as we walk around the sculpture to see the side of it, it disappears. It becomes a line.

This kind of frontal pictorial view is heightened in this sculpture by the fact that he leaves the center of the sculpture empty.

Narrator: The pictorial space in the middle of the work opens it up to the surroundings. The same is true of the burnished surface of the work, which is covered with reflective gestures. Smith made these marks with his electric disk grinder, a machine usually used to polish and smooth the surface.

In 1964, the poet and curator Frank O’Hara asked Smith about his surface.

David Smith: It was finished up to show a brightness, so that brightness reflects the sky, the golden of an afternoon sun, or the hard blue bright sun. Yeah, sometimes the green of the mountains gets in. It has a very gentle reflective quality.

I intended the reflective surface to be part of the concept. But the polishing is not so important. Any more than the brush stroking is important in a picture. It’s the concept of a form, or the concept of a content.

Narrator: When Smith says that he intended the reflective surface to be part of the concept, that doesn’t mean he meant it to merge perfectly with the sculpture’s form. The surface flickers—it seems fleeting and immaterial. The steel is of course heavy—definitively solid and strong. There seems to be a conflict between our visual experience of the surface images and our encounter with the sculpture as a thing. For Smith, this conflict was important. Its charge meant that the sculpture was more likely to linger in our visual memories.

Peter Stevens: This work is a study for sculpture. It clearly could be translated into a sculpture similar to several of the sculptures in this exhibition.

Narrator: To make this work, Smith laid objects on a piece of paper and sprayed enamel over it. Peter Stevens.

Peter Stevens: When he removed the objects, the original objects, a kind of ghost‑like image would remain. That image is really the absence of all the objects that he had removed. So the drawings become a kind of poetic reference to sculpture, but really what you're seeing is the space around what would be a sculpture if you were seeing it as a kind of pictorial image.
Seeing his sculpture as a pictorial image was very important to him because he felt that an image was how you would be open to a work of art. It's through an image that you interpret and through an image that you remember something.

So these sprays are like a memory of an object. I think that that poetry was very important to him.

Narrator: In Cubi XXI, a diagonal pole leans against a kind of brace. This echoes classical marble sculpture, which often requires a support element to hold the work upright. By mimicking that structure in welded steel, Smith was making a kind of joke—marble is a relatively soft material, and steel is anything but. Antiquity was on Smith’s mind when he made all of the Cubi—the series title is a Latinized word for “cube” that he made up. But here again Smith points to the sculptural tradition in order to alter it from within. Michael Brenson.

Michael Brenson: The Cubis are unusual in a number of ways, one of which that the parts are fabricated.

They do come, to some degree, out of found objects. I know that he had these brandy boxes in his basement, or brandy boxes also lined up on the windowsill of the house. Then these brandy boxes became the boxes for the form on which the Cubi were based. Which is a way of saying, too, that in Smith everything is personal. Everything, even if it's not evident, really everything has some very personal connection to his everyday life.

And the second is that Smith didn't always do the welding on these. There is maybe more of an industrial conversation here or conversation going on with industrial processing, with assembly line products.

Narrator: Smith made all of the Cubi between 1961 and 1965—a time when younger sculptors often used industrial fabrication. The Cubi may respond to those works. But if so, Smith didn’t idealize the assembly line—as the Minimalist Donald Judd did when he said that a composition should simply present “one thing after another.” On the contrary, the Cubi demonstrate that Smith could create personal meaning even in unlikely circumstances.

Narrator: One of the most interesting parts of the sculpture Zig IV—though not one of the most noticeable—is the small wheeled cart it sits on.

Charles Ray: The space underneath that cart is a kind of a beginning point or a gate to the sculpture.

Narrator: Sculptor Charles Ray.

Charles Ray:And it's like the space underneath this table. It's our everyday space. I don't have to tell you anything about the space underneath the cart. You know that maybe there's a quarter underneath the cart. Right? But God's maybe not underneath the cart. But a gum wrapper or a crack in the cement or an ant or a bug or a spider is underneath the cart.

You begin there and you go into another much more difficult space to describe. And perhaps you would never get to that kind of space if you didn't have somewhere in the sculpture that everyday space in this particular one.

Narrator: An L-shaped form projects out near the sculpture’s top corner.

Charles Ray: But the space, as you go up and around it, that the L makes and that the other elements make, that sort of tie a dimensional space into a knot. It kind of leaves a third dimension. You can only tie your shoe in the third dimension. You can't tie a knot in the fourth dimension. Space is sculpture's primary medium, and it's really magical and difficult, and you can't talk about it.

Narrator: Michael Brenson reacts to Cubi I.

Michael Brenson: One of the interesting questions that this sculpture raises for me, it's Cubi I but it wasn't the first Cubi. The first two Cubis were, in fact, Cubis IX and III. They were made in October and November of 1961. This sculpture was made a year and a half later. So what is he doing?

I don't think he did that with any other series. I think they were all numerically sequential and made that way. So why here?

My sense is that he sort of had this idea with him, always one thing led to another. He was not a linear. He didn't believe in linearity. It was a work stream. So that kind of logic of one thing after another thing after another thing after another thing in which everything would be perfectly related to what came before wasn't part of him.

His mind worked more in leaps than that. He wasn't someone who existed within the kinds of ... He didn't like boundaries and his mind didn't work that way. But I ask myself why is this called "Cubi I"? Then I sort of feel like, "Well, maybe this is the mother form." I know it's talked about as being largely abstract, but maybe it isn't. Maybe one can read the diamond on the body as the belly of a really huge female.

Maybe the cubes that rise out of that then begin to form the top of the body, the body, both breasts and shoulders, and head . . . And maybe this is a great fertility figure, almost like one of the ancient—the Venuses of Willendorf or whatever—and maybe this is his version of it.

Narrator: Take a moment to move around this sculpture, Zig III. Peter Stevens.

Peter Stevens: It's interesting that Smith, who avidly photographed his work and photographed collaged views of his sculpture, photographed this sculpture more than any other work that he had made. It is one of the most complex sculptures in terms of its multiple views.

It's a form that radically changes from what appears to be the side. We have an absolute signature totemic Smith image, almost like a cross with a vertical and a horizontal. It's very closed, very dense, and weighted, and in a sense, relates to the kind of imagery that we get in some of the Cubis. As we walk around to what seems to be, again, more the front or the side, we get this opened‑up transparency of looking through the sculpture into the world.

When Smith made Zig III, he painted the sculpture the three primary colors: red, yellow, and blue. We can still see the remnants of those colors underneath the unifying surface of the kind of scumbled, black oil paint that he put over these three primary colors. So he's unified the entire sculpture with this black surface. At the same time as giving us, if we really look into the sculpture, this sense of this earlier form that it had: referencing Mondrian, referencing the kind of pure geometric abstraction's interest in these primary colors.

So he's creating, in a sense, a subtle double approach to this sculpture.

Narrator: As modern as this work is, Smith yet again brought in elements of the ancient past. The series title “Zig” playfully abbreviates “ziggurat,” the name of the ancient Mesopotamian step pyramids.

Sarah Hamill: In this work, Smith has made a series of different forms, cubes, angles, and grounded them together on a pedestal.

Narrator: Sarah Hamill is an assistant professor at Oberlin College. She’s written extensively on David Smith, and her book on his photography is scheduled to come out in 2014.

Sarah Hamill: What he did after that was he coated it in a protective coating that was commonly used in industry. He put a powdered glass coating on it and he baked it in a furnace. That powered glass dissolved to form the colors that you see on the surface. So there are different modeled effects that appear. They're blue and black, and they are irregular.

Smith was really interested at the time of thinking about a way to make sculpture polychrome. And he talked about different ways this could happen in a 1940 essay that listed all the different ways that contemporary sculpture could and should make use of industrial applications of paint. He was arguing against a commonly held view that sculpture needed to be white as in marble or brown or green as in bronze with different patinas on it.

In the 1930s, what he did was meticulously research these kind of industrial coatings and chemical color reactions for how industry could be used to make steel sculpture.

Narrator: David Smith first began taking photographs in the early 1930s. His first pictures were experimental. He made double exposures, and used collage techniques analogous to those he was exploring in sculpture. As time went on his use of photography became more pragmatic. Sarah Hamill.

Sarah Hamill:  In the mid 1940s after he moved up to Bolton Landing, New York, which is around 200 miles north of New York City, he started photographing his works himself. Previously, professional photographers who had been hired by his dealer were the photographers of his work.

If you look at some of his photographs, what you'll notice is that he's not photographing them in ways that many sculptures were photographed at the time. He doesn't use a drop cloth as a backdrop. He doesn't use artificial lighting. Instead, he places his sculptures outside in the landscape surrounding his Bolton Landing studio and photographs them in relationship to that landscape. He uses ambient light. He also repeatedly used low vantage points and these vantage points had the effect of flattening his sculptures to a single plane.

One of the things that I think is important about his photographs is that in them, he's testing out different ways of viewing his work.

Sarah Hamill: This photograph is a photograph taken in Smith's fields, where he installed a lot of his sculptures in rows and grids outside of his sculpture studio and his house.

Narrator: Sarah Hamill.

Sarah Hamill: Zig III is framing Two Circle Sentinel, and then off to the right is Zig II. What we're looking at, then, is a comment on photography as a framing device. The photograph is framing the sculpture, and the sculpture is then framing another.

Narrator: The traditional function of a frame is to set an object off from the surrounding space—to clarify it and to make it stable. We’ve seen that Smith played with the stabilizing conventions of sculpture. Here he does the same thing with the picture frame. Zig III may frame the works behind it—but it also merges with them.

Sarah Hamill: In many of his photographs of his sculptures in groups, what he did was he created images of them joined together so that. . . the sculptural space and forms composed a cubic picture. And here what we see is Smith using photography as a way to think about pictorial space using his sculpture.

Sarah Hamill: In this photograph, Smith has pictured a number of his different Voltri‑Bolton works outside his sculpture studio. You can see the sculpture studio; it's the cinder block structure off to the right.

Narrator: The title of these works—Voltri-Bolton—joins two place names. Smith had an artist’s residency in Voltri, Italy in 1962. While there he collected steel scrap from abandoned factories and sent it back home. A year later, he combined these materials with metal that he found in Bolton Landing. Sarah Hamill.

Sarah Hamill: So what we're looking at, then, are a number of different works that were made from these parts. And one of the things I think the photograph is doing is suggesting that they be read almost as human things. They are kind of positioned as a group waiting outside the sculpture studio, but they're also forming an overlapping series of shapes.

Smith often used this area of his studio to store different steel parts, and in fact we can see some of these on the right‑hand side of the photograph just under the snow. . . So it's interesting that he's photographing these Voltri‑Bolton works right where he keeps and stores his material for future sculptures.

It's unclear whether he wants us to view these works as anthropomorphic, as being quasi‑human things standing outside this studio, or if he wants us to read them as pieces of metal that are all kind of cobbled together in this great heap. The photograph is a little bit ambiguous about which way he wants us to go, whether figural or material. The photograph suggests something in between.

Narrator: One phrase that is often associated with Smith is “drawing in space.” Welding steel allowed him to produce long, daringly thin lines. 17 h’s, for example, branches out from one zigzagging vertical. This kind of delicate sculptural draftsmanship was impossible in bronze and other traditional materials.

Some of Smith’s sculptures are also like drawings in space because they are relatively flat—like pictures built into three dimensions. The letter-like forms of 17 h’s emphasize that two-dimensionality. The sculpture is almost like an invitation to read language from a page. Peter Stevens.

Peter Stevens: In 17 h's, he's a created a clearly abstract, unreadable text. So the only meaning it could possibly have is what the viewer would bring to it and the sense that these h's become little chairs, little figures, or simply abstract shapes put into a kind of configuration.

Language was a very important system for Smith. He saw his work as a language and as a language that was more open, more humane, than the written language. He was distrustful of words. He felt often that words were used as ways of limiting thought and creativity, particularly words about art.

Peter Stevens: The painting in this sculpture really evokes a history and a tradition of paintings, geometric abstract paintings.

Narrator: Peter Stevens.

Peter Stevens: Smith has created from a kind of frontal view a shallow relief of a very painterly object that becomes as an image a free‑floating painting. He uses the diamond by painting it in the yellow, the red, and white, a kind of ambivalent sense of three dimensionality. The white and yellow become a flattened‑out diamond. The red becomes a shape in and of itself, and the volume of that form is something that you really can't see all at once.

Narrator:  In a 1964 interview with the poet and curator Frank O’Hara, Smith tied the relationship between painting and sculpture back to the early twentieth century.

David Smith: My knowledge of art started with Cubism. And in the very great days of Cubism, of early Cubism, there was no difference in the concept between the sculptural form and the painting of it. They were about equal. You know, it wasn’t painted sculpture. And it wasn’t sculpture painted. They were just—it was just a natural alliance.

I think color adds another challenge to me. And if you use a monochrome color, it would be easier for me to paint it red yellow or black, or white, and let it sit there. But surfaces, planes, have their own properties in form as well as in color. And then color adds another challenge. And I don’t like pretty colors. I like kind of raw colors.

I like the color to produce another challenge. It adds another challenge—a dimensional challenge in the concept of the work.

Narrator: This tall, thin sculpture was a breakthrough for Smith. When he made it in 1955 he had been working in a very linear manner, making drawings in space that were meant to be viewed frontally, like a picture. Here he carries the assertive gestures of line drawings into the round, creating a rhythmic play of planes and edges. The sculpture’s boxy geometry also looks forward to the Cubi, a series he would begin in 1961.

Narrator: In Tanktotem VII, Smith again creates a tension between the sculptural object and painted surface. Sarah Hamill.

Sarah Hamill: As we walk around the work, what we notice is that the two sides do not seem to add up to a stable whole. The work is elusive. The work is difficult to understand because when we walk around it, we can't make sense of how the black and white pieces add up. On one side, they form one composition. On the other side, they form a completely different composition. Here, what we see is Smith using color to shape space.

What happens when we walk around this sculpture is that we realize that color is guiding our experience of the work and it asks us to look at it and then look at it again to make sense of how all of these different shapes combine to form an object.

Paint is not necessarily an incidental facet of the object, but it's really important to how the object relates to space.

The concave piece is a top of a boiler tank that he cut off and used in all of his Tanktotem sculptures. The "tanktotem" name comes from the cut ends of the boiler tanks, and he would order these parts and kind of keep them outside his studio and use them in different kinds of sculptures. Some of the other parts might have been found objects, they might not have been. They might have been specially cut. For instance, the arching shape on this Tanktotem might have been a piece that he cut himself, the same with the rectangle. He combined found objects in with objects that he cut himself as a way of unifying the found objects. 

Peter Stevens: Fifteen Planes elevates an array of rectilinear forms, burnished stainless steel, above our eye level on two tall verticals. 

Narrator: Peter Stevens.

Peter Stevens: It's a kind of a play on our notion of sculpture and the necessity that sculpture has to have a way of supporting itself against gravity. His desire to have an uplift and a kind of defying gravity in a lot of his sculptures had to be mediated by the fact that they did actually have to answer to the laws of gravity.

So this sculpture is a form of play on that upward thrust, that sense of motion, that sense of twirling that, with a few elements relating to the right angles of gravity and then the rest seemingly randomly flung into space, we have both aspects of what he sees as the limitations and the freedom that sculpture affords him.

Michael Brenson: One of the first things one could say about it is that although this sculpture is called The Hero, it's one of the least heroic images of a human figure imaginable.

Narrator: Michael Brenson.

Michael Brenson: It's disproportioned. The interior of the body seems to be completely exposed. The spine of the body seems barely enough to support the huge head on top of it.
Then beyond that you've got this odd little bend in the neck on which the head is supported, almost as if it's supported on the point of a pin. So it looks like if you pushed against that head it would start spinning around.

Is it something that has some kind of impact or power over the people in front of it so that it looks as if you could kneel down in front of it and maybe you'd put something on the altar from which the body arises so that there's almost a sense of sacrifice in front of it? But also that it itself seems to be something that's sacrificed.

That's not untypical of Smith, not uncharacteristic, and a particular way in which he began to play, I think, with the notion of authority. So he would build these sculptures up that seemed like emblems or signs of authority. And yet, at the same time, the power seems to be, almost on some level, taken away.