David Smith is regarded as one of the most innovative artists and important American sculptors of the 20th century. Born in 1906 in Indiana, he worked briefly as a welder in an automobile factory before moving to New York City to become an artist in 1926. Smith studied painting, drawing, and printmaking at the Art Students League and embraced tenets of Cubism and Surrealism alongside a circle of artists that included Stuart Davis, John Graham, Willem de Kooning, and Adolph Gottlieb, to become one of the leading members of the abstract expressionist generation. Smith redefined the possibilities of sculpture in...
David Smith is regarded as one of the most innovative artists and important American sculptors of the 20th century. Born in 1906 in Indiana, he worked briefly as a welder in an automobile factory before moving to New York City to become an artist in 1926. Smith studied painting, drawing, and printmaking at the Art Students League and embraced tenets of Cubism and Surrealism alongside a circle of artists that included Stuart Davis, John Graham, Willem de Kooning, and Adolph Gottlieb, to become one of the leading members of the abstract expressionist generation. Smith redefined the possibilities of sculpture in the United States by rejecting the traditional methods of carving and casting in favor of torch-cutting and welding, after seeing a reproduction of a metal sculpture conceived by Pablo Picasso and welded by Julio González. These methods allowed him to work in an improvisational manner in creating large, abstract sculptures. A dedicated draftsman, drawing and painting remained integral to his practice throughout his career. In his later years, he installed his sculptures in the fields of his home in the Adirondack Mountains, where a dialogue between art and nature emerged as a central theme in his practice.
Smith began exhibiting his work as early as 1930. His first survey was organized by the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1957. His sculpture represented the United States at the São Paulo Biennale in 1951 and at the Venice Biennale in 1954 and 1958. Posthumous retrospectives have been held at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (1979 and 2006, which traveled to Tate Modern, London and the Centre Pompidou, Paris) and at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2011, which traveled to the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio). Other major surveys have been organized at the Sezon Museum of Art, Tokyo (1994, traveled throughout Japan), the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (1996), Storm King Art Center (1997–99), and Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield, UK (2019–20). A three-volume, fully illustrated catalogue raisonné of Smith’s sculpture was published in 2021 by the Estate of David Smith and distributed by Yale University Press.
