David Smith, Fifteen Planes, 1958

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.