David Smith
Square Clouds
Art historians always talk about the work the sculptor David Smith did in the first half of the 1960s as the most prolific and successful period of his life. Everyone agrees he was at the very peak of his career.
But to Smith, it was the lowest point of his life. His wife had left him and taken Becca and Dida, his two beloved daughters, with her. There were constant legal battles over alimony and child support. He was dead broke, spending whatever he had on art materials.
Alone in his “shop” — as he called his art studio — in northern New York in the dead of winter, he played recordings of Beethoven incessantly, as he scribbled sad poems in his notebooks, and drank cognac until he passed out on the floor.
Spring finally came, but not for Smith. On the night of May 23, 1965, he left
a party given by his friend, the artist Kenneth Noland, near Bennington in nearby Vermont. He was deeply intoxicated, and drove his Dodge pickup into an embankment. He was only 59.
How do we reconcile the public image with the private reality?
On his 75-mile journey by train from Poughkeepsie to Albany — on his way back and forth between his shop and the New York art world he had come to despise — he drew many sketches of what he saw out the window. Private maps of a public view.
And how to reconcile the delicate tracery of this drawing in space with the fact that it has been laboriously welded together out of many bits and pieces of industrial steel?
As his close friend Robert Motherwell put it, he had the touch of a Vivaldi and the body of a Mack truck.
For Smith, painting and sculpture were two sides of one art.
He’d draw every day, spontaneously, smoking a cigar with one hand and letting the pen take the other wherever it wanted to go. “Performance expectancy subdued” — a drawing was “the ground run for a takeoff.”
And to make them even more fluid, he invented his own paint, a greasy mixture of egg yolk and India ink:
“…a dare comes in — that awards despoiling — and therein… introduces error to the norm — lets the door open a crack to see the view of a new landscape.” (Sketchbook Notes for “Cube III,” 1962–3)
And like a Cubist painting, all the objects broken up into small, sharp geometric shapes, he would lay out pieces of metal from his shop — sheets, rods, wires, parts of old machinery — on the floor, on a second sheet of paper, very loosely, shifting everything around until he got something that felt right.
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Then he would spray them with a can of enamel paint, leaving behind
a ghostly impression. Or a skeleton. All of it teetering on the edge of imbalance.
Then he would use the drawings to arrange much larger pieces of metal
into an upright assembly, using a technique called tack-welding, to see if
it would all hang together. If it didn’t, he could easily undo the welds and make adjustments.
And only then would he spend the many hours needed to carefully weld everything together into a permanent piece. All the parts functioning as one being. The artist as Dr. Frankenstein.
And after that, he would often paint them in bright colors (several in this series are all white).
Finally, he would put them on wheels and move them outside into the surrounding fields, where all the other children of his imagination had
been put out to pasture, patiently awaiting the journey to a gallery.
Unlike traditional sculptures, cast in bronze, from which an infinite number of copies can be made, each child is a unique individual, born only once.
And all of them share the same sex. Girls! “I don’t make boy sculptures.”
They are all like Athena, the goddess of wisdom, warfare and craftsmanship.
In the Greek myth, Zeus swallows her mother, the goddess Metis, while she is pregnant — but soon develops a terrible headache.
Then Hephaestus — the smith god! — splits Zeus’s skull open with an axe, and Athena springs forth, fully grown.
The last of the series of 28 was sold at Sotheby’s in 2005 for $23.8 million.
Smith used an industrial sander to polish the surface so that it would reflect the light from the sky. And then he sprayed the bottom with black paint, to vandalize it with graffiti.
“Nothing is closed — everything is open” (from a lecture Smith gave at Bennington College on May 12, 11 days before his death).
