David Smith was one of America’s foremost sculptors. His most exemplary works reduce sculpture to its essential aspects like shape and volume, fabricated in the quintessential material of the automobile age, welded steel. However, there is a more puzzling aspect to some of his work that is harder to grasp, and which is foregrounded in No One Thing, an exhibition of Smith’s late works at Hauser & Wirth in New York City. It involves the experience of moving around his works in physical space and watching them flatten into two-dimensional images, seeing sculptures contort into something more like painting. Indeed, there are some works in the exhibition that go a step further, in which flat image empties into void.
When the elevator doors opened onto the gallery’s fifth floor, I was hit by a block of acid yellow. The color is painted on the rear wall of the gallery behind the staggered rows of sculptures. I wondered what this yellow wall was trying to do? What does it help us see and what does it obscure? I am often suspicious of painted walls in galleries, as they can indicate a drive to turn exhibitions into satisfying images that look good online. Here, the yellow wall is certainly part of this image economy, but it is more than Instagram bait. Its flat expanse emphasizes many aspects of Smith’s work: its frontality, relation to painted sculpture, and the way it dissolves into image.
Smith was, after all, initially trained as a painter at the Art Students League. He eventually turned towards sculpture, applying the skills he developed while welding car parts on the assembly line at a Studebaker automobile factory. Influenced by the early surrealist work of Giacometti and the metal sculptures of Pablo Picasso and Julio González, Smith went on to pioneer a method of making constructed-sculptures. Instead of carving or modeling and casting in bronze, Smith built his forms with welded pieces of steel, often incorporating found industrial objects. Smith was also a deft photographer, documenting his works against the natural landscape, expressing both the graphic qualities of his sculpture as well as its contingent relationship to the surrounding environment.
Although Smith made the bulk of his work at his home in Bolton Landing, a small hamlet located in the Adirondack Mountains, he remained connected to the New York City art scene and enjoyed a close friendship with the Modernist critic Clement Greenberg. Famously dogmatic, Greenberg believed that Modernist art should be non-objective, making no reference to the physical world, only exploring formal qualities like line, shape, and color. He also believed that art should be true to its medium; painting should only be about the physicality of paint applied to the flat surface of the canvas, and sculpture was about its construction of raw, industrial materials. Smith initially checked many of these boxes for Greenberg, but drew skepticism once he started painting his surfaces, breaking the hard Modernist boundary between painting and sculpture.
When Smith died in a car accident in 1965, Greenberg shared the executorship of the estate. Under his management, many of Smith’s sculptures were left to rust in the elements or were forcibly stripped of their painted surfaces. We can only conjecture that Greenberg was trying to erase the colored surfaces he was opposed to. Given that allusions to the ancient world abound in Smith’s work, the removal of paint from sculptures brings to mind the history of Europeans divesting paint from the surfaces of ancient Greek statuary, because of a desire for antiquities to mirror their austere fantasies of bleach-white marble, rather than chromatic abundance.
A colored surface that Greenberg might have dismissed is demonstrated by Zig I, a steel sculpture composed of several stacked arcs, painted a deep red-brown with oily black brushstrokes. Named after the Ziggurats of Mesopotamia, the sculpture is a skillful demonstration of stacked elements, both balanced and in motion. Smith made the arcs by splitting metal pipes in half lengthwise, a challenging endeavor for even the best metalsmith. The arcs, which vary in size, are positioned on the sculpture’s horizontal or vertical axis, giving the piece a surprising grid-like structure despite being composed of bending lines which scoop and push out space. Viewed face-on, the arcs appear as flat rectangles, their curved forms revealing themselves as you circle the sculpture. I found myself trying to reconcile the sculpture’s volumetric parts with its painted surface. From every viewpoint, the frenetic brushwork obscures the arced forms, enhancing the tension between flat and open space.
Circles Intercepted exemplifies the compelling tensions between solidity, flatness and emptiness, that are so present in the exhibition as a whole. The sculpture is a series of concentric circles mounted on a four-pronged base. Like many of Smith’s late works, the sculpture is divided between a front and back view, our experience oscillating between these two positions. From the sides, the sculpture narrows into an ellipse before tapering into a thin line drawn in space. Like a painting, the visual impact of the sculpture is its frontal view. More than a flat image, though, the work is essentially a large hole. The visual pull into its void is startling, and poses questions about our attraction to, and fear of holes. Wishing to fill the unnerving emptiness, Circles Intercepted becomes a frame for the neighboring sculpture Primo Piano II. The large horizontal sculpture has two circular elements: a bronze teardrop shape and a flat white disc. With the hole filled our eyes can momentarily rest easy, but circumambulating the work again we are faced with a stark white wall staring back at us through this blind oculus, a view that is harder to accept.
Standing like a pensive child, Ninety Son is undeniably figurative. Its narrow, spear-shaped midsection has a slight contrapposto, with a large disc mounted to its tip like an inflated head, heavy with self-contained sorrow. Smith made this disc by cutting off the end of a boiler tank, an object he incorporated into many of his sculptures, giving the title for his TankTotems series. When you look closely into this disc, there is a slight glow, as if light is somehow passing through the solid steel. This unlikely radiance is an effect produced by painting metallic brushwork over a light colored base in such a way as to simulate light. As a counterpoint to the flattening of sculptural volume present throughout the exhibition, here painterly effect produces an illusory sense of depth, interiority even.
Of the many sculptures Greenberg vandalized during his executorship, two are on view: Rebecca’s Circle and Untitled (1963). The latter is an angular steel sculpture painted entirely white. It is structured by two intersecting planes of steel, one with broad notches cut out of it and the other with a row of holes down its side. The sculpture reminded me of Ancient Greek grave markers, which were also painted and flat. The white coat of paint in Untitled is actually a primer, suggesting that Smith intended to add layers of paint. Greenberg stripped this primer and applied a rust sealant to the raw material, but the sculpture on view has since been restored to its original unfinished state. Seeing it this way gives us insight into Smith’s approach, honoring the artist’s process. Standing near the yellow wall, the back of Untitled turns a milky cream color, absorbing the wall’s reflected hue. Discovering this feels like uncovering a secret, a perceptual sleight of hand made only for you. Although the sculpture we see is actually white, its proximity to the yellow wall gives it a phantom coat of chroma, ‘painting’ the sculpture without materially altering it.
No One Thing is an opportunity to reassess Smith’s relevance for us today. We live in a culture saturated by imagery in which it is hard to separate three-dimensional space from its two-dimensional representation. Smith’s late sculptures anticipate this supremacy of the image and the flattening of the world that we associate with the Postmodernism that was yet to come, by blurring the boundary between sculpture and painting that Modernism so anxiously guarded. But these works go further still. By incorporating circles and holes into his work, Smith gives us a chance to reflect upon the nothingness that haunts every image. Images appear whole, complete and impenetrable and yet they are insubstantial, almost nothing. Smith’s sculptures confront us instead with a gaping hole at the heart of the image, a void that might be a reflection of our very looking. Perhaps it is, after all, a psychological hole within us that draws us towards the apparent wholeness of images, as well as the solidity of sculptures. In knotting together these contradictory terms—solidity, flatness and void—Smith creates paradoxical objects whose inherent tension helps us to see ourselves seeing.