Art: The Belligerent Balladry of a Master Welder

DAVID SMITH rejoiced in the clatter of the Iron Age. In his workshop at Bolton Landing, on Lake George in upstate New York, he welded junk steel and polished aluminum into powerful abstractions. Before he was killed in a car crash at the age of 59 in 1965, many critics considered him the most important sculptor working in America. Smith had rarely talked about his work in public, though he often scribbled his thoughts in his notebooks.

Many of his words have now been assembled in David Smith, by David Smith, edited by Cleve Gray (Holt, Rinehart & Winston; 176 pages; $22.95). The book offers the illuminating experience of hearing a sculptor speak for himself in prose and free verse that echoes what Smith himself called the “belligerent vitality” of his work. Smith’s writings, like his sculpture, are apt to be compact and condensed, and his syntax is sometimes bewildering. Nonetheless, his thoughts become clear enough with a little patient attention. Excerpts:

Everything imagined is reality

The mind cannot conceive unreal things

The artist must work towards that which he does not know.

Whether this is called invention or finding or searching,

it must be a projection beyond the given state of art.

If the vitality is there the shape will grow form

There is something rather noble about junk—selected

junk which has in one era performed nobly in function

stayed behind is not yet relic or antique or previous

which has been seen by the eyes of all men and left for me—

to be found as the cracks in sidewalks . . .

to be used for an order to be arranged

to be new perceived

by new ownership

The Question—what are your influences

From the history of art and the myth of woman

from the half of a part chewed chicken rib cage

and out of a fried salted mackerel spine . . .

Directives too come from the way swallows dart

The way trees fall

the shape of rocks

the color of a dry doe in brown . . .

the pieces finished outside the shop

the piece underway—the piece finished conceptually . . .

the ship’s ventilators that hung from the rafters,

banks of hardies, the forging beds, the babbit ladles

the stacks of buffalo horn

from the ropes and pegs of tent tabernacles

and side shows at country fairs in Ohio . . .

from hopping freights, from putting the engines together

working on their parts in Schenectady . . .

From no one, individually, but selections

from the cube root of all in varying context.