David Smith: toward volume

Although the development of David Smith's sculpture is a subject that has been exhaustively researched, a recent exhibition at the National Academy of Design (the last of five American venues) examined his work from an unusual point of view. Curated by Karen Wilkin and titled "David Smith: Two into Three Dimensions," this small gem of a show focused on relief-based works from all four decades of Smith's production. As is well known, Smith started out as a painter and remained psychologically allied with painters of his generation, rather than with other sculptors. This show in particular demonstrated his ongoing interest in Pollock. Wilkin, correctly I think, asserts that relief can be seen as the "missing link" in Smith's oeuvre, a fluid and transitional ground between two dimensions and three, which was critical in allowing Smith to develop his distinctive approach to sculpture. However, relief for Smith was more than a formal tool; it was also a kind of time-out zone, a place in which he could play openly with his fantasies and obsessions, indulge in archaic forms of craft or toy with wild ideas. So, while there were none of the masterly works of the '50s and '60s here, the show was full of small surprises and anomalies, many of which have never been exhibited before.

The show opened with some of Smith's earliest forays into sculpture during the '30s, along with some related paintings and reliefs. While at this stage Smith had seen very few works of European modernism firsthand, these small colorful assemblages of wood, wire and stone demonstrate the immediate affinity he felt for the new vocabulary of construction, found objects and applied color. No other American sculptor (with the exception of Calder, who was actually in Paris at the time) absorbed the innovations of Picasso, Gonzalez, Boccioni and Arp so quickly. It was during this period of early bricolage that Smith shifted his primary commitment from painting to sculpture, explaining that "the painting developed into raised levels from the canvas. Gradually the canvas became the base and the painting was a sculpture." (1)

After the youthful exuberance of these early efforts, the show's next group of works, cast-bronze reliefs from the late '30s and early '40s, comes as a shock. Even for those who are deeply familiar with Smith's "Medals for Dishonor," the sculptures and associated works can take some getting used to. Smith and his wife, Dorothy Dehner, had spent nearly all of 1935 traveling in Europe and Russia. He had seen Renaissance portrait medallions and, in the British Museum, Dehner tells us, some satirical "medals" made to be given to the Germans for their bombings. A fervent leftist, Smith came home and started his own set of rabidly antiwar "medals" with titles like Death By Gas and Propaganda for War. This period of Smith's early production is extremely important to an understanding of his career as a whole, both from a formal and an imagistic point of view, and Wilkin did a terrific job of assembling a selection of the actual medals, as well as lots of related drawings and a few small bronze statuettes employing similar imagery.

Because Smith had already made his first openwork welded-steel constructions before leaving for Europe and was certainly the first American to do so, his subsequent turn to a fairly traditional form of cast relief can seem like a temporary retreat from the modernist ethos that was to underlie his best later work. This reading, however, fails to take into account the real driving forces in Smith's development. As Rosalind Krauss pointed out in her brilliant monograph on the artist, the period after his return from Europe was the time in which Smith settled on four images that were to remain the font of his creative life until he died--the cannon, the totem, the sacrifice and the reliquary. "The obsessiveness with which he returned to these images again and again, as though to a task he could not finish, suggests that rather than serving as the pretext for his sculpture, they were the provocation." (2)

Smith came back from Europe clearly having encountered a set of images that opened up a response in him that he could not quell. And those images did not come from the works of the European modernists but rather from a variety of specific objects he saw in the European museums--things like Roman phallic tintinnabula, the paintings and woodcuts of Bosch and Bruegel (particularly Bruegers "Seven Deadly Sins" series, recently exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art), illustrations of early medical dissection and Assyrian and Sumerian reliefs depicting ritual sacrifice and hunting. The '30s, of course, was the decade of Surrealism, and Smith was only one of a whole generation of artists who, following Freud and Jung, took it as a matter of course that the catalogue of images buried in their personal "unconscious" would find a natural congruence with an archetypal pattern of imagery recurring throughout the art and artifacts of earlier civilizations and tribal cultures. However, the psychosexual "heat" of this material seemed to demand realization in more traditional formats, ones that allowed the artist to "flesh out" his fantasies. Smith threw himself into the task with a vengeance. The resulting sculptures, both in relief and small statuary, are concatenations of some of the most bizarre and violent images imaginable, often recalling the rage and underlying sexual excitement of Goya's "Caprichos" and "Disasters of War." The most disturbing and recurrent image is a winged phallic cannon that is attempting to rape and dismember a group of naked females. War Landscape (1947) and Atrocity (1943) in this show were tiny but spectacular versions of this theme. Tellingly, when viewed as a self-portrait of Smith's fears about his own violence and sexuality, the cannon-phalli are never fully erect but always lurching somewhat saggily toward an uncertain conquest. As detailed by Krauss, this sexualized cannon image remained a staple of Smith's production until his death, resulting in spectacular late sculptures such as Zigs IV, VII and VIII; Voltri VII, XIII and XXI; and Cubi XXVI.