Sculpture: Master of the Monumentalists

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Promise & Peril. It is because artists are convinced that the great civic monuments of the future will not be pallid mitations of Greek, Gothic or Renaissance sculpture that they are now boldy taking their huge, industrially produced works to the public. It is a moment dizzying with promise and fraught with peril. For novelty quickly washes away, and bigness for its own »ake becomes merely ponderous. The reason why so much critical attention and acclaim is focused on Smith's work at the present is that, even in mock-up t has the quality of permanence. His .culptures assert their authority through heir scale as much as through their size, a unique wedding of robust geometry and personal vision.