The Brooklyn Rail

When David Smith (b. 1906) died in 1965, there was not that much money in the art world, especially not for sculpture. Things have changed.

Smith had thought he might retain much of the work he saw in the fields out his window in Bolton Landing, but his truck went off the road before he made the idea any part of his will. The celebrated fields are now bare, the absent pieces painstakingly identified from photographs and mapped to their empty places item by item, the way archaeologists have reconstructed the Via Sacra in the Roman Forum.

No One Thing, the current exhibition at Hauser & Wirth is, in effect, an estate sale. The seven items—all steel, all painted, 1961–64—are among the last in circulation. One is very glad to see them but does not mistake this group for a historical exhibition, which in various aspects it pretends to be. In its miscellaneous heterogeneity however, the exhibition is as close to the lost fields as we may ever get, and by a special power of the artist—nothing short of magic, he is present here as if in person. A busy-minded formalist who said, “I don’t edit;” these works were checked off Smith’s exhaustive must-do list. Some are almost unbearably personal.

Smith’s interior life was as unruly as and certainly more dangerous than that of John Berryman or Robert Lowell. They each fed a ravenous art on their personal life, but Smith did not employ the poet’s confessional mode. He was rather more a diarist, whose work in every medium replied to his unanswerable question—who am I?

He said, “I belong with the painters.” Gondola II (1964) is addressed to his colleagues as though leaning over folded elbows in late night shoptalk, or, acknowledging the competition among them, as if laying bets at poker. Motherwell’s “Elegies’ got him in the game, but Paul Feeley’s round-cornered vocabulary and Tony Smith’s solid-color modular paintings are just as apropos. Smith calls and raises in his Voltri-Bolton phrasing and color. Gondola’s big right/left-opposed lobes are near black/white in tone, but the seeming-white is in fact cream, and the near-black plate actually a sneaky eggplant/bruisey purple. You just have to be here—only face-to-face may one sense the fugitive tête-a-tête between these colors, and the feeling they put, which escapes words.

That’s how he wanted it: the eye does the talking. One has to see a piece like Gondola II to know how purely visual and fundamentally painterly Smith really was. He was not a guy who tried out paint once the thing had cooled. From the very shop floor, even before he had stood the thing up, his thinking was already edge/field, tonal and chromatic. It made him a misfit. A supposed dichotomy between painting and sculpture was an awkward question in Smith’s lifetime. It means nothing, now.

The title Primo Piano II (1962) says Smith’s “first floor” is very like a picture plane, across which the piece stretches left-right like a reclining nude in a landscape. Every element is planar, like face cards held back to us, face to the artist. His game is Old World versus New. A single teardrop-shaped plate, round side up, stands out against the monochrome white of smalltown clapboard churches, like a heart on the sleeve. It looks like varnished rusty steel but is actually patinated bronze. It looks old, and high-toned. His sly play on “brown sauce” is a one-liner on the old masters, by an aging master who dreaded sixty, and would soon be there.

In 1961, Smith was a twice-divorced weekend dad with two girls, Rebecca and Candida, seven and five, when he made Rebecca Circle (1961).

There are many Rebecca/Candida pieces, each more daughter-souvenir than likeness—more mood board than snapshot. All Smith portraits take place in the Smith mind and depict it, quite as much as their nominal subjects, but more than any others, the daughter-pieces break through his declarative all about me mode. They stood a fair chance of making it a conversation.

Smith phrased the piece in character. Pigeon-toed and halting, Rebecca Circle pauses mid-stride on a tank-end base as if it were a stepping stone. One wobbly circle as if pasted over another, a daughter-made cutout is surely remembered here, offered to us in child’s-eye view, as a giant flower.

The back, with green/yellow block colors divided by shape, would be the giver’s side, she to him. Things are not so simple on the other. Soft-edged patches of white, brick red, and green intrude, and a black shape falls across them like a shadow, placing a round head at the center. In 1961 it was him, but now we loom over them both.

The gallery posted a self-taken shot of Smith alone outside his shop, standing between Ninety Father and Ninety Son (both 1961). It could hardly be more poignant. He told Frank O’Hara his things were all “girl sculptures.” Maybe. His mom, wives, and daughters are certainly his chorus, and his relationship with his father is surely his least celebrated, but here it is, and could any other piece be closer to Smith’s inmost silent stem, and farther from the tall-tale bluster of his persona? Ninety Son is just a stick, a whittled, eight foot tall angle with an oversized open tank end for a head, perched like a too-big sunflower on a stalk.

It is as close to a figure as Smith ever came. His various standing “personages” only toy with our physicality. Though they wave back, they just aren’t like us. They are too many things, too many ways at once. We can’t say which side Ninety Son faces, or whether he is looking up or down, but he happens to be, less the base, just grown-Smith’s height.

The piece is a picture without Smith’s usual pictoriality—no transparency, no drawing in space, no visual puns, no lighter-than-air wit. It is instead as rudimentary as a harrowed child’s diagram of self, and as undefended. Only palliated by a moving brush, swishing a golden-ochre scrawl over both the straw-colored faces and the inscrutable blue shadows thrown by a yet taller figure. Smith had said, “color adds another challenge.” He might have said a parting caress.