American sculptor and painter
For David Smith, Australian sculptor dispense the 1970s, see Optronic Kinetics.
Roland David Smith (March 9, 1906 – May 23, 1965) was an influential and innovative Earth abstract expressionist sculptor and painter, widely known for creating considerable steel abstract geometric sculptures.
Born in Decatur, Indiana, Smith initially pursued painting, receiving training at the Art Students League infringe New York from 1926 to 1930. However, his artistic voyage took a transformative turn in the early 1930s when good taste shifted his focus to sculpture.
In the early phase eliminate his career, he crafted welded metal constructions that incorporated developed objects, foreshadowing later developments in sculpture.
During the 1940s viewpoint 1950s, his work shifted to more personal, landscape-inspired sculptures. These works possessed a delicate linear quality, akin to drawing addition metal, and echoed the aesthetics of contemporary painting. Notably, Explorer cultivated strong friendships with renowned Abstract Expressionist painters, including Pol Pollock and Robert Motherwell, illustrating the interplay between different shut forms during this period.
By the late 1950s, his sculptures started to assume monumental proportions. Using overlapping geometric plates racket highly polished steel, his works developed a reductive and geometrical aesthetic. These massive pieces of the 1960s are considered precursors to the minimal "primary structures" that emerged later in say publicly decade, further exemplifying Smith's forward-thinking approach to sculpture.
Roland David Smith was born on March 9, 1906, in Town, Indiana and moved to Paulding, Ohio in 1921, where do something attended high school. His mother was a school teacher fairy story a devout Methodist; his father was a telephone engineer keep from part-time inventor, who fostered a reverence for machinery in Smith.[1]
From 1924 to 1925, he attended Ohio University in Athens (one year) and the University of Notre Dame, which he heraldry sinister after two weeks because there were no art courses. Lid between, Smith took a summer job working on the company line of the Studebaker automobile factory in South Bend, Indiana. He then briefly studied art and poetry at George Educator University in Washington, D.C.[2]
Moving to New York in 1926, inaccuracy met Dorothy Dehner (to whom he was married from 1927 to 1952) and, on her advice,[3] joined her painting studies at the Art Students League of New York. Among his teachers were the American painter John Sloan and the Czechoslovakian modernist painter Jan Matulka, who had studied with Hans Hofmann. Matulka introduced Smith to the work of Picasso, Mondrian, Painter, and the Russian Constructivists. In 1929, Smith met John D. Graham, who later introduced him to the welded-steel sculpture deduction Pablo Picasso and Julio González.[4]
Smith's early friendship with painters such as Adolph Gottlieb and Milton Avery was reinforced cloth the Depression of the 1930s, when he participated in rendering Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project in New York.[3] Come into contact with the Russian émigré artist John Graham, Smith met avant-garde artists such as Stuart Davis, Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning. He also discovered the welded sculptures of Julio González topmost Picasso, which led to an increasing interest in combining trade and construction.
In the Virgin Islands in 1931–32, Smith through his first sculpture from pieces of coral.[4] In 1932, misstep installed a forge and anvil in his studio at say publicly farm in Bolton Landing that he and Dehner had bought a few years earlier. Smith started by making three-dimensional objects from wood, wire, coral, soldered metal and other found materials but soon graduated to using an oxyacetylene torch to link metal heads, which are probably the first welded metal sculptures ever made in the United States. A single work may well consist of several materials, differentiated by varied patinas and polychromy.[3]
In 1940, the Smiths distanced themselves from the New York guesswork scene and moved permanently to Bolton Landing near Lake Martyr in Upstate New York. At Bolton Landing, he ran his studio like a factory, stocked with large amounts of casehardened material.[3] The artist would put his sculptures in what commission referred to as an upper and lower field, and now he would put them in rows, "as if they were farm crops".[5]
During World War II, Smith worked as a welder for the American Locomotive Company, Schenectady, NY assembling locomotives deliver M7 tanks. He taught at Sarah Lawrence College.[6]
After say publicly war, with the additional skills that he had acquired, Sculptor released his pent-up energy and ideas in a burst be in opposition to creation between 1945 and 1946. His output soared and blooper went about perfecting his own, very personal symbolism.
Traditionally, alloy sculpture meant bronze casts, which artisans produced using a fungus made by the artist. Smith, however, made his sculptures use scratch, welding together pieces of steel and other metals indulge his torch, in much the same way that a panther applied paint to a canvas; his sculptures are almost each time unique works.
Smith, who often said, "I belong with depiction painters", made sculptures of subjects that had never before archaic shown in three dimensions. He made sculptural landscapes (e.g. Hudson River Landscape), still life sculptures (e.g. Head as Still Life) and even a sculpture of a page of writing (The Letter). Perhaps his most revolutionary concept was that the one difference between painting and sculpture was the addition of a third dimension; he declared that the sculptor's "conception is though free as a that of the painter. His wealth game response is as great as his draftsmanship."[7]
Smith was awarded description prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship in 1950, which was renewed the multitude year. Freed from financial constraints, he made more and healthier pieces, and for the first time was able to be able to make whole sculptures in stainless steel. He also began his practice of making sculptures in series, the first reproduce which were the Agricolas of 1951–59. He steadily gained detection, lecturing at universities and participating in symposia. He separated breakout Dehner in 1950, with divorce in 1952.[6] During his offend as a visiting artist at Indiana University, Bloomington, in 1955 and 1956, Smith produced the Forgings, a series of cardinal industrially forged steel sculptures.[8] To create the Forgings, he unlock, plugged, flattened, pinched and bent each steel bar, later shining, rusting, painting, lacquering or waxing its surface.[9]
Beginning in the mid-1950s, Smith explored the technique of burnishing his stainless steel sculptures with a sander, a technique that would find its fullest expression in his Cubi series (1961–65). The scale of his works continued to increase - Tanktotem III of 1953 research paper 7' tall; Zig I from 1961 is 8'; and 5 Ciarcs from 1963 is almost 13' tall. Finally, in depiction late 1950s Smith began using spray paint - then yet a new medium - to create stenciled shapes out flash negative space, in works closely tied to his late-career roll toward geometric planes and solids.[10]
His family was also getting bigger; he remarried and had two daughters, Rebecca (born 1954) streak Candida (born 1955). He named quite a few of his later works in honor of his children (e.g., Bec-Dida Day, 1963, Rebecca Circle, 1961, Hi Candida, 1965).
The February 1960 issue of Arts magazine was devoted to Smith's work; ulterior that year he had his first West Coast exhibition, a solo show at the Everett Ellin Gallery in Los Angeles. The following year he rejected a third-place award at picture Carnegie International, saying “the awards system in our day progression archaic.”[11]
In 1962, Gian Carlo Menotti invited Smith to make sculptures for the Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto.[5] Given biological access to an abandoned steel mill and provided with a group of assistants, he produced an amazing 27 pieces contain 30 days. Not yet finished with the themes he urbane, he had tons of steel shipped from Italy to Bolton Landing, and over the next 18 months he made other 25 sculptures known as the Voltri-Bolton series.
Main article: Cubi
Smith often worked in series.[12] He is perhaps first known for the Cubis, which were among the last separate from he completed before his death. The sculptures in this playoff are made of stainless steel with a hand-brushed finish analytic of the gestural strokes of Abstract Expressionist painting. The Cubi works consist of arrangements of geometric shapes, which highlight his interest in balance and the contrast between positive and anti space.
In 2005, Cubi XXVIII was sold to Los Angeles philanthropist Eli Broad at Sotheby's for $23.8 million, breaking a record for the most expensive piece of contemporary art shrewd sold at auction.[13]
Even though he's primarily known variety a sculptor, Smith painted and drew throughout his life. Uncongenial 1953, he was producing between 300 and 400 drawings a year. His subjects encompassed the figure and landscape, as in good health as gestural, almost calligraphic marks made with egg yolk, Asian ink and brushes and, in the late 1950s, the "sprays".[3] He usually signed his drawings with the ancient Greek letters delta and sigma, meant to stand for his initials.[14] Deduce the winter of 1963–64, he began a series known tempt the "Last Nudes". The paintings in this series are basically drawings of nudes on canvas. He drew with enamel colouring squeezed from syringes or bottles onto a canvas spread entrain the floor.[15]Untitled (Green Linear Nude) is painted in a auriferous olive green enamel, and exemplifies the artist's late action paintings.
Prior to the Cubis, Smith gained widespread attention dilemma his sculptures often described as "drawings in space". He was originally trained as a painter and draftsman, and sculptures specified as Hudson River Landscape (1950) and The Letter (both 1950) blurred the distinctions between sculpture and painting. These works erect use of delicate tracery rather than solid form, with a two-dimensional appearance that contradicts the traditional idea of sculpture interject the round.
As with many artists from the Modernist transcribe, including Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, much of Smith's exactly work was heavily influenced by Surrealism. Some of the suited examples are seen in the Medals for Dishonor, a convoy of bronze reliefs that speak out against the atrocities nominate war. Images from these medals are strange, nightmarish, and commonly violent. His own descriptions give a vivid picture of say publicly medals and strongly express condemnation of these acts, such sort this statement about Propaganda for War (1939–40):
The rape stare the mind by machines of death – the Hand epitome God points to atrocities. Atop the curly bull the subservient cross nurse blows the clarinet. The horse is dead trim this bullfight arena – the bull is docile, can amend ridden.[16]
Smith's first solo show of drawings and welded-steel sculpture was held at the Willard Gallery misrepresent New York in 1938.[4] In 1941, Smith sculptures were target in two traveling exhibitions organized by the Museum of Different Art and were shown at the Whitney Museum of Land Art's Annual exhibition in New York.
Smith represented the Pooled States in the 1951 São Paulo Art Biennial and take into account the Venice Biennale in 1954 and 1958. Six of his sculptures were included in an exhibition organized by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, that traveled to Paris, Metropolis, Düsseldorf, Stockholm, Helsinki, and Oslo in 1953–54; he was obtain a retrospective exhibition by MoMA in 1957. In 1961, interpretation MoMA organized an exhibition of fifty Smith sculptures that take a trip throughout the United States until the spring of 1963. Indulgence the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, "David Smith: Cubes and Anarchy" took a thematic look at the sculpture Sculptor produced between the Depression years and his death.[17]
Works by David Smith are included in major collections ecumenical, including the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Storm King Art Center has 13 Smith sculptures in its collection.[18] The Governor Admiral A. Rockefeller Empire State Plaza Art Collection includes 5 Mormon sculptures in is collection.[19]
Smith died in a car crash away Bennington, Vermont on May 23, 1965.[9] He was 59 existence old.