David Smith

"David Smith’s sculptures are—big or small, figurative or abstract—very complete, very attentive to your presence. They’re generous; they have no boring views. Circle them as you may, they are never napping. They present a total attention, and they are telling you that that is the way to be: on guard."

—Frank O’Hara, 1964

David Smith (1906–1965), one of the most influential and innovative artists of the 20th Century, was at his most experimental and prolific in the last five years of his life. During this period, he deployed welding to newly monumental ends, integrated open space into his arrangement of planar forms and animated sculptural surfaces with paint in color combinations that transcended logic. These innovations transgressed the norm, solidified his legacy and influenced generations of artists to come. ‘No One Thing: David Smith. Late Sculptures’ presents seven of the artist’s most important sculptures from these final years.

Smith once said, ‘My reality… is not one thing; it is a chain of interlocking visions.’ Though he often grouped objects together with series titles, he worked on multiple series simultaneously and understood each sculpture as it ‘related to my past works, the three or four works in process and the work yet to come.’ He also emphasized the importance of painting in his practice, noting that, historically, sculpture is often painted. For Smith each planar surface had its “own properties in form as well as in color, and then color adds another challenge.” Drawn from signature series such as the Zigs, Primo Pianos, and Gondolas, and including important sculptures that were not serially designated, the works on view evidence the artist’s sustained engagement with materiality, form, and surface. In their sheer variety, Smith’s late works are nevertheless united by a single shared characteristic: blazing, liberated inventiveness.

Smith was born in 1906 in Decatur, Indiana. He worked as an automobile welder and riveter before moving to New York City to become an artist in 1926. He studied painting at the Art Students League and became associated with the Abstract Expressionist movement. Cubism and Surrealism were foundational to his artistic education; he began welding sculpture around 1933 after seeing a reproduction of a sculpture by Pablo Picasso welded by Julio González. Painting and drawing remained integral to what Smith called his ‘work stream’. He embraced a holistic attitude toward art-making and dismissed the idea of separation between mediums. Acknowledging the tradition of painted sculpture in antiquity while drawing from the bold palettes of modernism and pop culture, Smith often painted his sculptures, an aspect of his work that establishes a dynamic relationship with their environments. Smith died suddenly in a car accident outside Bennington, Vermont in May 1965, leaving behind an expansive, complex and powerful body of work that has continued to exert influence upon subsequent generations of artists.

Smith began exhibiting his work as early as 1930. His first survey was organized by The Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1957. His sculpture was represented by the United States at the São Paulo Biennale in 1951 and at the Venice Biennale in 1954 and 1958. Posthumous retrospectives have been held at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (1979 and 2006, which traveled to Tate Modern, London and the Centre Pompidou, Paris) and at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2011, which traveled to the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio). Other major surveys have been organized at the Sezon Museum of Art, Tokyo (1994, traveled throughout Japan), the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (1996), and Storm King Art Center (1997–99). A three-volume, fully illustrated catalogue raisonné of Smith’s sculpture was published in 2021 by The Estate of David Smith and distributed by Yale University Press. A biography by Michael Brenson, David Smith: The Art and Life of a Transformational Sculptor, was published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux in 2022.