David Smith

David Smith (1906-1965) made a name for himself in many parts of the world for his large-scale abstract metal sculptures. He worked mainly with steel, which he sometimes painted. He created bronze sculptures and small scale sculptures, too. He also drew and painted on paper and panels. His works are displayed in galleries in London, New York, Athens, Rome and are outdoor installations in places as far away as the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.

Smith was born March 9, 1906 in Decatur, Indiana and grew up in Paulding, Ohio. He studied at Ohio University and the University of Notre Dame, but dropped out of college to become a welder on an automobile production line in South Bend, Indiana. [At left: Zig VII, 1963. Right: Voltri XVII,1963]

In 1927, he joined the Arts Students League of New York where he discovered the works of Picasso, Mondrian, Kandinsky, and the Russian Constructivists, and became friends with Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, Jan Matulka, and Jackson Pollock.

Profoundly influenced by the welded sculptures of Julio González and of Picasso, Smith started devoting himself entirely to metal sculptures, constructing compositions from steel and "found" scrap material. In the summer of 1929, Smith, along with his then wife Dorothy Dehner, bought a house in Bolton Landing, in upstate New York and won the Logan Medal of the arts.

In 1940, Smith moved permanently to Bolton Landing and created the Terminal Iron Works studio. In the long term, this allowed him to enlarge the size of many of his welded sculptures, moving to installations that increased in size as time passed by. World War II disrupted Smith's supply of metal and reduced the demand for abstract art, leading Smith to draw and paint more than he had previously. Smith painted prolifically throughout most of his career. He created landscapes, cubist abstractions and in the 1960s a series of sprayed pictographs that resemble visual studies for his Cubi sculptures. [At left is Untitled spray enamel on paper, 1954. To the right is Untitled pastel on paper, 1939]

In 1962, the government of Italy invited Smith to create two works for a festival, and gave him free access to an abandoned welding studio in the small town of Voltri, in Liguria. There, finding massive stockpiles of material, Smith decided to switch his plans from stainless steel to steel. The result was his Voltri series: 27 sculptures created in just 30 days.

In 1996, David Smith's daughter, Candida Smith was interviewed about her father and his work by TATE ETC, a European art magazine. She spoke of her father's sculptures being "a response to the outdoors" and calls the "smell of spray paint, grinding cold steel and the sizzle and spit of the welding torch" "cozy and comfortable." She revealed that he spoke of being "an older father" when she and her sister were born and that he would write greetings to her and Rebecca on his sculptures so that after he was gone his art could still speak to them whether in homes or museums. [The sculpture to the left is Portrait of a Young Girl, 1954.]

Smith’s last series consisted of 28 monumental abstract structures, the Cubis. These were composed from geometric cubes and cylinders of varying proportions. The cubis were all made from stainless steel. Smith burnished the steel to a highly reflective surface. He told critic Thomas Hess, “I made them and I polished them in such a way that on a dull day they take on a dull blue, or the color of the sky in the late afternoon sun, the glow, golden like the rays, the colors of nature.

Cubi XXVIII (directly below) sold for $23.8 million, Nov. 9, 2005 at Sotheby’s New York, becoming the most expensive work of contemporary art ever sold at auction.

Smith won a variety of awards and recognitions during his life time. In recognition of his influence on abstract expressionism, he was appointed to the National Council on the Arts by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965. However, at the peak of his influence and still working on Cubi, he died in a car crash near Bennington, Vermont on May 23, 1965.