Sculpture: The Giant Smithy

Against the hills of Bolton Landing overlooking New York State’s Lake George, he appeared a great bear of a man, wrestling his huge sculptures about the landscape to make his own private outdoor museum. In his workshop studio, he preferred the garb of a professional welder, though he could also work with tools as delicate as the dentist’s drill. At night, he would turn gourmet, top off the evening with cigars, some Mozart, and occasionally dipping into James Joyce. Possessed by work and his own projects, he would grumble: “It always astounds me that I can make something that somebody doesn’t understand.”

Recognition came late for Sculptor David Smith, and neither his manner, often truculent, nor his medium — gigantic welded iron and steel objects —did much to hasten his fame. Awarded a $1,000 prize at the 1961 Carnegie International, he refused the money, suggested that it be used by the museum to buy some art. “Sculpture has been a whore for many ages,” he would say.

“Before it was cast, the man who paid for it had certain reservations and designations.” Smith preferred to work directly with raw iron and steel, kept his prices high, and if there were no buyers, well, there was always more room in the fields.

One He Never Saw. The exhibition of 49 works prepared by Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art, which was exhibited in Holland (see color page) before opening last week at London’s Tate Gallery, was aimed at giving Smith his first major international showing. Ironically, it is the one he never saw. In May 1965, while returning home from visiting an artist friend in Bennington, Vt., he drove off the road and was killed. But though his death at the age of 59 robbed him of accolades abroad, he had by his independence set the life style for a generation of admiring young artists, earned from critics a reputation as the most powerful new force in sculpture to emerge on the American scene since World War II.

While Alexander Calder early became a world figure by giving movement to sculpture with his mobiles, and Jacques Lipchitz developed his own tragic vision in the New World while still using traditional casting techniques, David Smith seemed to gain strength from wrestling directly with the raw materials of the steel age. His own work, Smith insisted, should be viewed both with the eye of a poet and of a workman, and he was proud that he had mastered his craft. A dropout from Ohio University after his freshman year, Smith studied art under John Sloan in New York, but he had also been a riveter in Studebaker’s South Bend plant, assembled locomotives and M7 tanks during World War II.

Road Graders & Tractors. “Possibly steel is so beautiful,” he once reflected, “because of all the functions associated with it. Yet it is also brutal: the rapist, the murderer and death-dealing giants are also its offspring.” He sought to enhance the dichotomy between beauty and brutality. In his boxlike Cubi series, he often burnished the steel to reflect “the blue of a dull day or the golden glow of the late afternoon sun.” Metals seemed to inspire him; given the free use of the facilities of the Italsider factory in Voltri, Italy, he turned out 26 sculptures in a heroic 30-day stint. When a cannon dating from the French and Indian War was dredged up from Lake George, he promptly seized on cannon wheels as a base for his massive sculpture, adding his own associations with Hindu juggernauts to complete his Wagon images.

His own workshop reflected his professionalism. Fit for a modern Vulcan, it was stacked to the rafters with raw steel, oxyacetylene torches, boxes of scrap metal of every description. There, by his own estimation, he had only begun. “I’m going to make things so big they can’t be moved,” he vowed, as he acquired old road graders and tractors with the intention of incorporating them as “found objects” in compositions whose immensity only he could envision. “I’ve earned the right to make what I damn well please,” he remarked shortly before his death. “I’m 20 years behind my vision.”