David Smith

Follow My Path

27 April – 30 July 2021

New York, 69th Street

‘Drawings are studies for sculpture, sometimes what sculpture is, sometimes what sculpture can never be.’—David Smith

Explore the exhibition

In a 1952 lecture at the Detroit Institute of Arts, David Smith (1906 – 1965) described the inspiration behind one of his recent sculptures, saying ‘My wish is that you travel by perception the path which I traveled in creating it. That same wish goes for the rest of my work.’ Taking its title from his remarks, ‘David Smith. Follow My Path’ will go on view at Hauser & Wirth New York beginning 27 April. The exhibition invites viewers to explore the daring artistic processes by which Smith revolutionized notions of sculpture’s form and function, embarking on new terrain in the field of abstraction.

Explore ‘Follow My Path’

We invite you to explore an in-depth examination by Jennifer Field of David Smith's exhibition, ‘Follow My Path,’ on view at Hauser & Wirth New York 69th Street through 30 July 2021.

A member of the abstract expressionist generation, Smith eschewed the conventional sculptural methods of casting and carving in favor of modern industrial techniques and materials such as torch-cutting and welding iron and steel. Working first in Brooklyn and then largely in isolation in the remote hamlet of Bolton Landing in the Adirondack Mountains, he produced art inspired by transitory connections between human experience and nature, works that are at once self-contained yet expressively expansive.

The Hero

Study for “The Hero”

1951

Δ 11/6/54

1954

‘Follow My Path’ is organized around groups of specific sculptures representing each decade of Smith’s career and enriched by drawings, paintings, sketchbook studies, and photographs by Smith related to these works. Together, these act as landmarks of his journey and manifestations of his thoughts and visions. Each sculpture and its set of corollary materials represent a ‘chapter’ in the story of Smith’s artistic evolution, and also relate to the format of entries in the forthcoming three-volume catalogue raisonné, ‘David Smith Sculpture: A Catalogue Raisonné, 1932–1965,’ to be released by Yale University Press and the Estate of David Smith in September 2021.

Untitled

1960

Ninety Father

1961

Ninety Son

1961

Featuring works of art from major museums, international private collections, and the Estate of David Smith, ‘Follow My Path’ will present never-before-seen works that shed new light on Smith’s lasting artistic legacy. This exhibition has been organized to provide an immersion in the artistic process and development of one of the 20th century’s foremost innovators. The presentation reflects our commitment to postwar art and scholarship through historical exhibitions at its 69th Street space. Digital selections from the forthcoming David Smith catalogue raisonné will be integrated into ‘Follow My Path.’

Untitled (Study for Agricola I)

1951

Untitled

Lunar Arcs on One Leg

‘David Smith. Follow My Path’ explores Smith’s world through nine distinct groups of works related by theme or form. The presentation offers a fresh perspective upon Smith’s 35-year career by allowing the visitor to travel through his cumulative aesthetic – the various styles, methods, mediums, and subjects that accrued across his practice – and formal conceits, which range from dancers, to billiards players, to letters of the alphabet, among others.

Untitled (studies for sculpture)

Blue Construction

1938

Vertical Structure

1939

Smith’s special ability to fuse the influences of Surrealism and Cubism in abstract depictions of the human body is evident throughout the exhibition. ‘The Hero’ (1951-1952) is a life-sized female figure with a head, torso, and two triangularly shaped forms suggesting breasts. This bravura sculpture achieves surprising weightlessness through its radical open structure. Similarly, ‘Blue Construction’ (1938), one of Smith’s earliest forays into sculpture, masterfully deploys geometric form to recall the arabesque movement of a dancer in space. This steel work, coated in blue enamel, was achieved via Smith’s renegade, experimental approach to three dimensions.

Untitled

1930

Untitled (Bathers)

1934

Personage from Stove City

1947

Painting, drawing, and photography were integral to Smith’s creative process; he would often work out aesthetic problems in one medium by turning to another. Smith depended upon the free-flowing nature of drawing as a complement to the slower and more physically laborious medium of sculpture. Photography played a similar role in Smith’s varied artistic practice. In 1945, he began routinely photographing his works in the studio and outdoors in the expansive fields around his home in Bolton Landing. Smith’s interest in scale is apparent in such images: the positive and negative spaces of his works take shape in relation to the landscape, illustrating his fascination with integrating art and nature.

Untitled

1938

Untitled

1939

Euterpe and Terpsichore

1946

Smith’s practice was deeply embedded in and further cultivated by the mountain setting of Bolton Landing. Here he expanded his approach to assembling found metal elements into three-dimensional works. While his techniques remained grounded in the machine age, Smith’s preference for discarded quotidian objects and emphasis on manual skill flourished in the Adirondacks into an artistic vocabulary of profound humanism. In ‘Untitled (Study for Agricola I)’ (1951), the artist combines a cast iron plowshare with old piano parts, evoking the powerful but delicate relationship between human expression and the earth.

Untitled (Euterpe & Terpsichore)

1946

Terpsichore & Euterpe

1947

Euterpe and Terpischore

1946

In this precursor to his first major series of sculpture, the Agricolas, Smith’s approach reflects his origins as an automotive riveter and welder. Also on view, the vertical steel sculpture ‘Lunar Arcs on One Leg’ (1956-62) represents a subsequent turning point in the artist’s approach to monumentality. In this beautiful work, he clusters celestial forms in apparent defiance of gravity. From the beginning of Smith’s career in the early 1930s to this late work, ‘David Smith. Follow My Path’ charts this great artist’s practice across media and through time.

On view in New York

The gallery at 32 East 69th Street is open to the public Tuesday to Saturday, 10 am to 6 pm. In order to share a safe and positive experience, we ask that you book a timed reservation and read our visitor guidelines in full before you arrive.

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About the Artist

David Smith

David Smith is regarded as one of the most innovative artists and important American sculptors of the 20th century. He transformed sculpture by rejecting the traditional methods of carving and casting in favor of torch-cutting and welding, becoming the first artist known to make welded sculpture in America. These methods allowed him to work in an improvisational manner in creating open and large-scale, abstract sculptures. In his later years, he installed his sculptures in the fields of his home in the Adirondack Mountains, where a dialogue between the art object and nature emerged as central to his practice. His sculpture-filled landscape inspired Storm King Art Center and other sculpture parks throughout the world, as well as anticipating the land and environmental art movements.

Smith was born in 1906 in Decatur, Indiana. He worked briefly as a welder in an automobile factory before moving to New York City to become an artist in 1926. He studied painting at the Art Students league, where Cubism and Surrealism were foundational to his practice. He began welding sculpture around 1933 after seeing reproductions of constructed steel sculptures by Pablo Picasso and Julio González. He later became associated with the abstract expressionist movement and paved the way for minimalism with radically simplified, geometric works. Painting and drawing remained integral to what Smith called his ’work stream’. He embraced a holistic attitude toward artmaking and dismissed the idea of a separation between mediums. Acknowledging the tradition of painted sculpture throughout art history and drawing from the bold palettes of modernism and pop culture, Smith often painted his sculptures. David Smith died in 1965, leaving behind an expansive, complex, and powerful body of work that continues to exert influence upon subsequent generations of artists.

Smith began exhibiting his work as early as 1930. His first survey was organized by the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1957. His sculpture was represented by the United States at the São Paulo Biennale in 1951 and at the Venice Biennale in 1954 and 1958. Posthumous retrospectives have been held at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (1979 and 2006, which traveled to Tate Modern, London and the Centre Pompidou, Paris) and at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2011, which traveled to the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio). Other major surveys have been organized at the Sezon Museum of Art, Tokyo (1994, traveled throughout Japan), the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (1996), Storm King Art Center (1997–99), and Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield, UK. A three-volume, fully illustrated catalogue raisonné of Smith’s sculpture was published in 2021 by the Estate of David Smith and distributed by Yale University Press. A biography by Michael Brenson, David Smith: The Art and Life of a Transformational Sculptor, was published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux in 2022.

Learn more about this artist