Art: Iron Was in His Name

At the National Gallery, the eminence of Sculptor David Smith

The exhibition of the work of David Smith at the National Gallery in Washington, which opened last November and will run until late April, is the most important show by an American sculptor in years. Smith died in 1965, when his pickup truck spun off a country road near his studio in Bolton Landing, an isolated little town in the Adirondacks. He was 58 and in the prime of his sculptural career. Only Jackson Pollock's fatal car crash nine years earlier subtracted so much, so soon, from American art. No sculptor of similar talent has appeared in America since. If one measures a man's achievement by emotional range, formal vitality, material energy and historical ambition—the often derided "phallic" virtues of ambitious art—then Smith was the Melville of his chosen medium, and his shadow lies, perhaps unfairly long, across most of the steel sculpture that has been made in the U.S. since 1960.

Smith was an extremely fecund artist. One array of steel parts clanked down and pushed around on the cement floor of his studio could set off a train of associations that led with Picassoan abruptness to a whole group of pieces. For this reason, the National Gallery's show, curated by Art Historian E.A. Carmean, concentrates on the role of series in Smith's work, on how sculptural sets arose out of particular opportunities. The show also has much to say about how material determines imagery in Smith's work. But above all, it is an aesthetic delight.

The National Gallery's East Wing, with its choppy transitions of level, is a confusing place for large sculpture; the background is always getting in the way. But Smith's ponderous iron wagons, bright stainless-steel portals and gesturing arabesques of rusty or painted metal survive against it in all their magnificent variety. This is not a complete retrospective. It concentrates on the years of Smith's maturity as a sculptor, starting in 1951 with the Agricola series—"drawings in air" made, as often as not, from abandoned farm implements he collected around Bolton Landing—and finishing with the Cubis, a series incomplete at his death. In those 14 years, one may say without exaggeration, Smith explored the possibilities of welded metal sculpture more fully than any artist before or since—more, even, than Picasso or Julio González, from whom he first got the idea of using iron.