Art: Dream Sculptures in Ink and Paper

In New York, the graphic intensity of David Smith

When David Smith was killed in a car accident near Bennington, Vt., in 1965, America lost the best sculptor it had ever produced. In a quarter-century of work, Smith had taken the constructivist tradition of sculpture—images built up from rigid planes—from where Pablo Picasso and Julio Gonzalez had left it in the '30s, and given it an extraordinary richness and amplitude. Indeed, his work in three dimensions was so magisterial that it blotted out the rest of his output. For Smith was not only a...