Iron Was in His Name

By ROBERT HUGHES

At the National Gallery, the eminence of Sculptor David Smith

The exhibition of the work of David Smith at the National Gallery in Washington, which opened last November and will run until late April, is the most important show by an American sculptor in years. Smith died in 1965, when his pickup truck spun off a country road near his studio in Bolton Landing, an isolated little town in the Adirondacks. He was 58 and in the prime of his sculptural career. Only Jackson Pollock's fatal car crash nine years earlier subtracted so much, so soon, from American art. No sculptor of similar talent has appeared in America since. If one measures a man's achievement by emotional range, formal vitality, material energy and historical ambition--the often derided "phallic" virtues of ambitious art--then Smith was the Melville of his chosen medium, and his shadow lies, perhaps unfairly long, across most of the steel sculpture that has been made in the U.S. since 1960.

Smith was an extremely fecund artist. One array of steel parts clanked down and pushed around on the cement floor of his studio could set off a train of associations that led with Picassoan abruptness to a whole group of pieces. For this reason, the National Gallery's show, curated by Art Historian E.A. Carmean, concentrates on the role of series in Smith's work, on how sculptural sets arose out of particular opportunities. The show also has much to say about how material determines imagery in Smith's work. But above all, it is an aesthetic delight.

The National Gallery's East Wing, with its choppy transitions of level, is a confusing place for large sculpture; the background is always getting in the way. But Smith's ponderous iron wagons, bright stainless-steel portals and gesturing arabesques of rusty or painted metal survive against it in all their magnificent variety. This is not a complete retrospective. It concentrates on the years of Smith's maturity as a sculptor, starting in 1951 with the Agricola series--"drawings in air" made, as often as not, from abandoned farm implements he collected around Bolton Landing--and finishing with the Cubis, a series incomplete at his death. In those 14 years, one may say without exaggeration, Smith explored the possibilities of welded metal sculpture more fully than any artist before or since--more, even, than Picasso or Julio Gonzalez, from whom he first got the idea of using iron.

Iron was in his name, of course, and in his family history and his social environment. He was born in Decatur, Ind., in 1906, the descendant of a 19th century blacksmith, and his sculptural language flowed with perfect naturalness out of a childhood in the part-mechanized heart of America. "We used to play on trains and around factories," he recalled. "I played there just like I played in nature, on hills and creeks." Thousands of youngsters, no doubt, could say the same; but art grows out of other art, and what opened the sluices and let Smith's childhood associations flow into a career as a sculptor was seeing photos, not the originals, of the metal sculpture of Picasso and his fellow Spaniard, Gonzalez, in an art magazine published in the early '30s. Smith had been a painting student in New York City. Working iron, he saw, might have the directness of painting. It was an intrinsically modern material, which had, as he said, "little art history. What associations it possesses are those of this century: power, structure, movement, progress, suspension, destruction, brutality." Smith was not one of those artists, common enough in America, who felt alienated from the machine age.

He was a gargantuan bricoleur, a user-up of discarded things, a collagist in three dimensions. His work touched base with the fundamental modernist movements, seizing and transforming something from each of them. From cubism and constructivism came the planar organization of form and the abstract language; from surrealism, the sense of encounter with a "personage," as basic to his work as it was to Miro's. Given enough found metal, he could launch into runs of astonishing inventiveness, like a jazz virtuoso improvising on a phrase. This happened most notably in 1962, when he was invited to make a sculpture for the Spoleto Festival in Italy. On going there he found, in the nearby town of Voltri, five deserted steel mills, littered with offcuts, sheets, bars and, best of all, a mass of abandoned tools, from calipers and wrynecked tongs to the ponderous, archaic-looking iron wagons and barrows used to run hot forgings from one part of the work floor to another. From these he made 27 sculptures in one month, and then had the leftovers shipped back to the U.S. to complete the Voltri-Bolton series.

Smith's energy made people talk about him as a "monumental" sculptor.

They still do, but today monumental is a husk of a word. In the past ten years, it has decayed to mean nothing more than "very big." American cities are now generously speckled with abstract ironmongery: sculpture that means nothing but is part of the perfunctory etiquette of urban development, most of it larger than it needs to be. Locked in a losing battle with the megacity environment, it manages to look both arrogant and depleted.

Smith, of course, never went in for such parodies of monumentality, and not one of his major works was the result of a commission. Consequently, his pieces all look as if they were made to the scale of one man. This fact bears on the alertness with which his work addresses the spectator. "Most of my sculpture is personal, needs response in close proximity and the human ratio," he said. Smith wanted to focus the image, make it speak to one pair of eyes, one mind at a time, as precisely and, there being no other word for the moral undercurrent of his work, as earnestly as possible. Hardly any Smith is more than ten feet high or wide. All the work responds willingly to nature. The stainless-steel planes of the Cubis, scribbled with stuttery, glittering lines by the rapid "drawing" of a power grinder, respond better to sunlight or starshine than to the static lighting of a museum. The high color and splashy textures with which he sometimes painted the steel were certainly meant to be seen against the colors of tree, snow or autumn grass.

But under museum conditions, the essential monumentality of Smith's vision remains. Even the biggest pieces, like the disquieting Wagon I (a "personage" consisting of a rectangular helm set on a swollen belly made of two tank ends welded together, all balancing on a huge forged chassis), suggest a sense of the figure and accordingly evoke responses from one's own body. They convey forceful impressions of posture, gesture and attitude. Smith was not in the business of making large iron dolls, and it may be, as various critics have pointed out, that the usual verticality of his sculptures encourages one to read them too readily as effigies of the figure. The same object, horizontal, would not be seen as a recumbent personage or sentinel. But in the end, the body messages of Smith's sculpture do not depend on whether the pieces have "heads" or "legs," as quite a few of them do. They flow from the internal relationships of the forms and from the metaphorical suggestions of tension, flexibility, alertness and so forth that their vivid and deliberate "drawing" evokes.

Steel, as a sculptural material, is imperfectly expressive. It has never been fully able to suggest the pathetic. But it is a marvelous substance for embodying optimistic energy, the direct flow of feeling into untormented substance. All of Smith's best sculpture is an object lesson in what scale means, in the relationship between the sculptured object and the body of the viewer. And it was in his ability to create large steel equivalents for the sensations of the body, unclouded by apparent doubt or fear, that his monumentality as a sculptor lay.

If his conception of sculpture was "heroic," it was because Smith really saw those totems and sentinels, Cubis and sacrificial altars, gateways and chariots, not just as emblems of art history but as things to be reinvented. They were a proof of the selfs limitless powers to project itself upon the world. In other words, he possessed a belief in the possibilities of sculpture that has now vanished from Western art. "Oh, David," wrote his best friend Robert Motherwell, in one of the most moving valedictions ever offered to a dead artist by a live one, "you were as delicate as Vivaldi and as strong as a Mack truck." And so he was. --By Robert Hughes This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.