For aficionados of modern sculpture, it’s a stroke of good fortune that the traveling exhibition devoted to the early work of the American sculptor David Smith (1906-65) has come to New York in the final stop on its national tour at a moment when the Alberto Giacometti retrospective (at the Museum of Modern Art) and the Henry Moore retrospective (at the National Gallery of Art in Washington) are still fresh in our thoughts. Moore, Giacometti and Smith were the pre-eminent sculptural talents in the generation that came of age in the period between two world wars, and they went on to dominate modern sculpture in the post-World War II years. It is therefore of immense interest to see how differently they responded to the spirit of an age in which the disparate aesthetic impulses of Cubism and Surrealism constituted the principal artistic challenge, and the catastrophic political developments of the 1930s and ’40s inevitably played a role in shaping their response to that challenge.
The show that has now come to the National Academy of Design, “David Smith: Two into Three Dimensions” organized by Karen Wilkin, is not, alas, a retrospective. Yet it has the great merit of concentrating for the most part on the least familiar aspects of Smith’s copious oeuvre: the work of the 1930s and ’40s, which was mainly devoted to paintings, painted collage-reliefs, bronze plaques and related studies on paper. This is not the David Smith that is well-known to museumgoers, the Smith who gave us that extraordinary succession of heroic open-form welded-metal constructions that were sometimes characterized as “drawings-in-space.” Those undoubted masterworks were mainly created in the last two decades of the artist’s life. Yet, as we can now see in this survey of his earlier work, the later welded-metal constructions owed much to the artist’s early exploration of both abstraction and representation in a variety of media not usually associated with his art.
As Ms. Wilkin correctly observes in the catalog for the current exhibition, “More than 30 years and several retrospectives after Smith’s death, a considerable part of his work still remains all but unknown: a large and varied group of relief sculptures …. They range from disturbing narratives in cast bronze to expressively worked ceramic plaques to playful assemblages of unexpected materials.” The scale is intimate, the imagery often ferocious, and the materials are indeed unexpected at times-painted reliefs, for example, in which actual bones are incorporated as “real” biomorphic forms.
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Perhaps the best-known of the bronze plaques (to the extent that any of them are known to today’s art public) is the series of reliefs called Medals for Dishonor (1938-39), described by Ms. Wilkin as “an angry politically engaged series of 15 bronze reliefs encapsulating antiwar, anti-fascist sentiments.” Politically, Smith was clearly captive to the Popular Front sentiments of the day, a political allegiance that abruptly evaporated for many of its followers with the signing of the Hitler-Stalin pact in 1939. Artistically, however, the Medals remain an extraordinary achievement. Notwithstanding their miniature scale, they are the most successful effort at sculptural narrative in 20th-century art. I, for one, know of nothing in this vein that even approaches their mastery, and some of the subsequent bronze reliefs devoted to more traditional subjects- Plaque: Woman in a Room , for example, and The Studio (both 1945)-are also terrific.
The early small paintings and painted reliefs are less even in quality. Smith started out as a painter and was indeed trained as a painter, and it was through the process of building up the pictorial surfaces into three-dimensional relief that he found himself more and more drawn to sculpture itself. He continued to work at painting for the rest of his life, as this exhibition also reminds us. My own view is that he never attained the same level of quality in his paintings that distinguished his sculpture almost from the beginning. The drawings are another story, however. Both in his drawings and in his sculpture-from the meticulously detailed iconography of the Medals to the most purely abstract later welded-metal constructions-Smith showed himself to be a master draftsman. Indeed, some of the later black-and-white abstract drawings in the current exhibition strike me as better”paintings”than any of the paintings themselves. Color remained a lifelong challenge for Smith, both in painting and in sculpture. But color was never his aesthetic forte.
All the same, he was certainly the greatest American sculptor of his generation, and in my judgment, anyway, he was the only sculptor of that generation to rival-and even, at times, to surpass-the accomplishments of Moore and Giacometti. “David Smith: Two Into Three Dimensions” does much to give us a more complete understanding of his early artistic development, but what we need now is a comprehensive retrospective on the scale that has currently been lavished on Moore and Giacometti. Meanwhile, the exhibition that Ms. Wilkin has brought to the National Academy of Design under the auspices of the Pamela Auchincloss Arts Management remains on view through Jan. 6, and Karen Wilkin’s catalog is essential reading for anyone with an interest in Smith’s achievement.
