Force of Circumstance
SCULPTURE By BRYAN ROBERTSON David Smith was not, of course, a force of nature. He loved landscape, the wilder the better, but kept it firmly in its place and mostly enjoyed it as a vehicle for action : walking, shooting, sailing or driving. The solitude and silence of the country were often painful for him to bear. The rolling hills, forests and mountains of his home were a stir- ring background for his sculpture, staked out as far as the eye could see like an eccentric army resting between battles, but the sculpture was there only because it couldn't go anywhere else. Smith was pleased with the light and space but had little or no concern for any kind of nature- poetry alignment. He was too busy doing manual labour with his assistants in the big work sheds for idyllic reflections on landscape. But he under- stood it and loved it in his own unsentimental way, and hailed it with relish after his jaunts to New York where he cut a ruggedly dandified figure: a tall, thick-set, dark-haired handsome man in his good suits, with a fastidious delight in good cigars, food and drink, and the energetic, fresh, irreverent insights of a much younger man. His talk was punctuated by fairly rough langu- age which he handled with aristocratic unself- consciousness. He talked rather formally, saying 'I do not' rather than 'I don't' and his boon com- panion, Robert Motherwell was always Robert, not Bob.
To finish with the force of nature analogy, Smith was, in fact, a mid-westerner who came to grips early on with America's mechanised civilisation, working as a young man in factories, mastering the process of welding and handling the infinitely variable material of steel. His sculp- ture has the strength and authority which such a discipline engenders; part of its atmosphere and mood could only have come from the im- agination of an artist who had survived the de- pression of the late 'twenties and 'thirties and taken a radical side in the political upheavals of the period.
The Arts Council show at the Tate, selected by the Museum of Modern Art, does him proud; and the sculpture is certainly transformed by seeing it indoors, more concentrated and sharply articulated. But I must emphasise that the range is weak in coloured sculpture, which Smith had made peculiarly his own; and as a whole repre- sents only a fraction of a colossal oeuvre— worthy of Picasso in its power and scale. It is almost impossible to transport, for instance, any
of his 'covered waggon' or immense engine-like sculptures. And. although the show is well in- stalled and spaced, the lighting is inclined to make dark contours of solid masses which have greater subtlety than this harsh light allows. The effect sometimes is too like those dramatically-lit photographs to be found in glossy periodicals: exciting but a shade false and over-theatrical. I raise these minor cavils only because of the sheer genius of the work : this is one of the momentous exhibitions of the decade. I wish that London had risen to the occasion with a suitably imagina- tive gesture. like giving up Hyde Park to the show, stretching down to the Serpentine from Marble Arch. The handful of sculptures placed on the lawn outside the Tale look pinched and ill at ease among the floodlights and modern benches.
David Smith's initial inspiration was the sculp- ture of Gonzales and Picasso, using open volumes described in metal. He very quickly absorbed and overtook those sources, adding his own ex- traordinary delicacy and sonorous weight. The actual shapes are endlessly inventive and though this is 'pure' sculpture, mostly free of landscape or personage references, it is consistently moving. There are some terrible, and stunning, presences at the Tate show. Practically, the sculpture veers between wiry thinness and massive solidity. More fancifully, perhaps, a great deal of the work seems possessed by dance movement : it has a sturdy grace which goes far beyond mere gesticu- lation. There are certain exceptions, such as the 1945 Home of the Welder, which is like an obses- sive souvenir of an intimate corner of the home: static, richly modelled and wrought, and, above all;%filled with a commemorative sense, as emo- tional as Thanksgiving. This same quality informs the later and grander, less intimate, Vollri X/X of 1962, which is again a kind of demonstration- piece of the artist's—or artisan's -- working tools, deployed in such a way that a monumental souvenir-tableau is constructed. This is one of a large number of sculptures made in an incredibly short time for the Spoleto Festival of 1962, and carried out in Italy with the startled and en- thusiastic co-operation of Italian workmen. This and the earlier static 'scene' has the concentra- tion and drama that I've only found elsewhere in the 'David' biblical series of Lipchitz : there is something here akin to the Hebraic fervour of Lipchitz. as well as the surrealist undertones that undermine the contents of Joseph Cornell's boxes.
Otherwise, the dance sensation gives place frequently to a more monolithic, certainly grimmer, sculpture. A key example is Cubi XlX of 1964, made in stainless steel with a scoured- polished surface which gives great animation to this (nearly) ten-foot-high sentinel. Steel or no, it is like some part of Stonehenge. with the additional inference of the Crucifixion: a di- agonal cross, supported on a T-shaped base, lean- ing at an ominous angle. There are other elemetils; each one crucial to the structure. Smith always tnew, it seems, how to combine a mag- nanimous complexity with an equally stringent economy of means. Mexican folk art, African
tribal sculpture, Oceanic art—all flicker in and out of Smith's work. But Cubi XXIV, also of 1964, like a giant printing-press with its huge rectangle framing empty space, has also the grandeur of a Han temple arch and makes one reassess space as one hasn't since Giacometti's Palace at 4 a.m. Smith broke free of all roots and references and became an inventor.
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