"David Smith: A Centennial".(Exhibition note)(Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum)

"David Smith: A Centennial" Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. February 3, 2006-May 14, 2006

On the occasion of "David Smith: A Centennial," the marvelous exhibition that has been organized this winter at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum by Carmen Gimenez, I am obliged to declare an interest. For it would be improper for me to pretend to write about Smith with an attitude of critical impartiality. I have not only admired Smith's work since I first encountered it half a century ago, but I also have written a good deal about it. I had the good fortune of having many conversations with Smith about his life and work, and often visited his studio, which he called the Terminal Iron Works, in upstate New York.

In 1960, when I was working as the editor of Arts Magazine, I devoted a Special Issue of that journal to Smith's work--a decision that was not then universally acclaimed, to say the least. Smith had never enjoyed the kind of celebrity that came early to Jackson Pollock and certain other Abstract Expressionist painters--the artists whom Smith himself considered, rightly I think, to be his counterparts in creating a distinctive school of American modernism.

Moreover, the very methods and materials Smith employed in creating his sculpture--welded metal open-form construction--were still suspect among the many artists and critics who believed that the art of sculpture was limited to the practice of carving and modeling. As a consequence, there were highly influential critics on the international art scene--among them Sir Herbert Read, a power in his day, who flatly refused to acknowledge that welded-metal construction could even be considered sculpture at all.

This judgment, which now seems so benighted to us, was also shared by many well-known artists--among them, the English sculptor Henry Moore, whom I used to see a good deal of on my visits to London. Moore's work was then a great favorite among American collectors, but he too was very disparaging about Smith's sculpture, which (I believe) he knew only from photographs. Was there an element of national pride (or prejudice) in this refusal to acknowledge Smith's achievement? I think there was. The London cognoscenti ...