Bouquet of Concaves as photographed by David Smith at Bolton Landing, 1959. Color transparency. © Estate of David Smith/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
I was getting ready to give tours in David Smith Invents, and discovered this quote, which I love, from a 1983 Time magazine article by Smith’s friend and painter Robert Motherwell, “Oh David, you were as delicate as Vivaldi and as strong as a Mack truck.”
Smith certainly had the credentials to be the Paul Bunyan of steel. His grandfather was a blacksmith. As a young man, he worked in an automobile factory and later a locomotive factory. He drove a pick-up truck, lived in the country, and he pushed heavy pieces of metal around to make sculpture.
Incredibly (to me), this strapping figure was an artist. Not that many other artists didn’t descend from the same macho vein (Jackson Pollock leaps to mind). Smith welded farm equipment, industrial components and discarded metal objects, and he created steel poems. He was also quite eloquent, in the catalogue for the exhibition at the Phillips, he describes his artistic process: “Sometimes when I start a sculpture I begin with only a realized part; the rest is travel to be unfolded, much in the order of a dream.”
Check out the full TIME article “Art: Iron Was In His Name” by Robert Hughes here.