David Smith’s Blue Construction

‘It is a work I have loved forever. It was one of the pieces on the terrace, posed on a marble plinth. At child height, I saw the sky through it. The blue and black enamelled surface reflected the colors of the night sky over Bolton. There were small trees planted around the edge of the terrace, filled with painted golf balls to resemble plums. An abstract bird and a buoy painted black, red, and white decorated the limbs. The branches shot black against the night sky. Other midsized sculptures ringed the edge of the terrace. They upheld their monumental feeling sited against the huge sculptures in the field beyond. From the perspective of the house, all the sculptures were the same scale and size.

This was important to my father as he daily sat on a bench on the terrace to survey his work.’ —Candida Smith, April 2019 This work can be read as a major turning point in his realization of form and his appreciation for the monumental. A sense of scale in relation to the landscape played heavily on his mind. In Smith’s photography, we see the use of the upward perspective to the boundless sky, situating the sculpture in the limitless expanse of Bolton Landing on the shore of Lake George. Although many sculptures were moderate in size, this was not due to the scale of his ambition, but more to the practicality of making the work alone, with his own hands. Each sheet of steel, each rod, had to be something he could move and manipulate by himself.

The work hints at the futuristic, at notions of connectivity and the molecular. The optimistic constellation of globes and diagonal folds proffer a new spatial aesthetic language for modern America—the gas station, the Cadillac, pre-dating Sputnik 1 and the Space Race some 19 years later. He appreciated the importance of inventiveness and progress and saw industry as a sign of forward thinking. He was a modern man. The deep marine and black tones in the baked enamel paint echo a sense of the automotive, industrial polychrome hues of progress. He was very aware of industry and its processes and saw a great sense of the aesthetic in these forms and tones of functionality, even naming his Brooklyn studio ‘Terminal Iron Works.’ Smith made sculpture that was open like the midwest, where he was born, in Decatur, Indiana in 1906.

He took these influences of offcuts of iron and disused heavy tools of engineering as his inventory of materials and reconfigured then. Yet the work also captures a lyrical series of the angles that originate in the arabesque movement of dancers and the stance of billiard players at a bar. ‘Dorothy had a dance background and introduced my father to Martha Graham’s company. Graham had some of the most exciting art of the 1930s. Also Francesca Boaz, a pioneer of modern dance, had a studio in Bolton Landing, which my father visited. The same arabesque angle also morphed into the lines of a billiard player, body angled over an absent table and pool cue slanted downward. In a sculpture that was as carefully conceived as ‘Blue Construction’, many associations were manifested, as it drew from photographs, dance, the World’s Fair, the moment in history, and the artist’s unconscious synthesized together.’—C.S. Often working alone in his studio for days on end, Smith had an urge to agitate the realms of sculpture, to assemble found elements, and to communicate through sculpture; he was compelled to create.

‘During the summers at Bolton Landing, my father would supply us with materials to draw, to paint, to make ‘model airplanes’ out of big chunks of wood roughly nailed together and painted with oils. We once made a project together—he welded the metal armature for a life-size horse that the three of us then built up with plaster. Little girls love horses! We fell asleep at night to the sound of jazz records and his shaking a spray can as he worked in the drawing studio in the house. I see in these works a great sense of what I knew of my father—his love of making and constructing form. During the day, he was in the ‘shop’ cutting metal, moving pieces of steel around on a hoist and welding. We would have to wait for him to stop so we could be heard above the din when we wanted him to take a fish off a hook—fish we had caught in the pond. He often smelled of metal smoke and his handkerchiefs were stained with paint drips.’ — R.S. Smith was generous both with his ideas and his time and like many artists of the time he had a ‘day job,’ teaching a class at Sarah Lawrence College at the end of the 1940s, as well as many other colleges and universities later in his career. Teaching kept him aware of the next generation.

‘In the years I knew my father, we used the fields around our house fully and constantly… In summer, we often ate breakfast in our pajamas on the terrace, looking out on the possibilities of the day. My father encouraged my sister and me to run among the sculptures, to climb, to put our bodies into the elements of the sculptures, to bang out tuneless rhythms and hear the difference between the sound of flat and volumetric elements.

It was a playground for the unconscious.’ —C.S. 1999 Considered by many to be the most important American sculptor of his generation, Smith was the first to work in metal and was singular in his ability to fuse the influences of Surrealism and Cubism. ‘Blue Construction’ (1938) was exhibited a year later at the celebrated American Art Today exhibition at the Worlds Fair in New York. Directly referencing the Trylon and Perisphere monumental modernistic structure designed by architects Wallace Harrison and J. Andre Fouilhoux as a symbol of the fair, Smith’s sculpture adopted the strong linear forces of Russian Constructivist into a new, distinctively American style of modern abstract sculpture. ‘Blue Construction’ has been on loan to the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. for the past fifteen years, and we are very proud to be able to show this masterpiece.

David Smith’s ‘Blue Construction’ is part of Hauser & Wirth’s presentation at Art Basel, 13 – 16 June 2019.