Art: Sculpture in the Raw

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Big, ponderous, but catlike on his feet, Sculptor David Smith, 51, works the year round in a studio he calls the Terminal Iron Works outside Bolton Landing (pop. 600) on the shores of upstate New York's Lake George. There he can jaw with the natives, slouch through the Adirondacks on the prowl for old harrows, car springs or rusting buggies—almost anything in metal that might be used as a starting point for the welded sculpture he introduced to U.S. art back in 1933.

Sculptor Smith cares little for the big city, or its art gallery owners and coteries of critics; his last Manhattan show two years ago produced no sales, cost him one sculpture stolen, $500 in expenses. For Sculptor Smith, on the other hand, big-city gallery owners and critics have the highest regard; some consider him to be the best American sculptor of his time.

Chances with Fenders. To coax Smith out of the woods, Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art last week staged an impressive retrospective of 34 of his bronze, steel and iron works, plus a handful of paintings and drawings, covering some 20 years of production. After Andrew Carnduff Ritchie, Yale's new fine arts department head, looked over Smith's lacerating steel birds, ponderous tank totems and one creature of dubious charms compounded of salvaged auto fenders recast in bronze, he said: "Smith takes chances and he has the courage to fall flat on his face. He's the best—the oldest and the best."

Smith's rugged iron works are too brutal to sit comfortably close together in the whitewashed, antiseptic setting of museum walls; they look best against the rolling mountains and lakeshore on which his Lake George studio faces. His Man and Woman in Cathedral (opposite) was jigsawed out of steel plate with an acetylene torch. "The name came merely because of the male and female in a vertical structural relationship." says Smith. "I named it afterward. The structure seemed kind of gothic, so that's how come 'cathedral.' When I work I don't name things. These damned words people have been banging about for only 5,000 years! But the visual things have been around for at least 250,000 years."

Choice of Objects. Like most sculptors, Smith takes ordinary elements of transitory existence, records them in lasting material. What is different is Smith's choice of objects to preserve. The Sitting Printer, for example, is made from the back of an oak chair, a stool seat for a head and a typesetter's box, which Smith inherited when he took over another artist's studio, cast separately in bronze and then welded together. Agricola IX is one of a series Smith has done using bits of discarded farm implements, including parts from an abandoned buggy shop. For Smith, this work, which includes a pedal from a spring wagon, becomes as much a part of the landscape as trees or leaves.