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...