David Smith The art and life of a transformational sculptor

Art critic Brenson's exactingly researched, richly analytical, and steadfastly eloquent biography is the first comprehensive study of the radical sculptor David Smith. Born in Indiana in 1906, Smith loved to draw. A rebellious teen in Ohio, he was an ardent reader, yet ended up dropping out of college. He met artist Dorothy Dehner (who deserves her own biography) in New York and she steered him to the Art Students League. They married in 1927 and acquired 77 acres and a very old house in Bolton Landing in the Adirondacks, where Smith, who also had a studio in an ironworks on a Brooklyn pier, became a master welder and the driving force in the new realm of abstract sculpture. Erudite, well-traveled, multitalented, and steeped in global artistic traditions, Smith stated, "I wanted a sculptural medium with the fluency and subtlety of drawing," and achieved just that in metal constructions of extraordinary expressiveness, balance, and mystery. Volatile and usually broke, Smith, though championed by Clement Greenberg, was often at vociferous odds with the art world. Brenson precisely documents the making of Smith's art and its reception; he also takes full measure of Smith's unnerving anger, misogyny, and violence. But as troubling as Smith's behavior is, his art, forged on the anvil of his pain, soars.

Smith (1906--1965), an American artist known primarily for his large, welded-steel, abstract sculptures, comes to life in this comprehensive biography by art critic Brenson (Visionaries and Outcasts). Despite being "part of an Abstract Expressionist generation that was convinced of the destructiveness of words," Smith left behind a wealth of writing, letters, and prose poems. Drawing from those documents, Brenson crafts a vivid mosaic of Smith's life, from his childhood in the Midwest to the controversy over the alteration of his work years after his death in a car accident. Along the way, Brenson nimbly traces Smith's evolution as an artist and a thinker, following his move in the 1920s to New York, his experimentation with found materials, his exposure to the international art community, and his studio life at New York's Bolton Landing starting in the 1940s. By the 1950s and 1960s, Smith was widely recognized as a master of abstract and geometric sculptures, gaining admirers near and far for such works as 1951's Hudson River Landscape, whose "every line," Brenson writes, "is unpredictable, movement projects in all directions." Extraordinary as he conveys his subject to be, Brenson also sheds light on Smith's more complicated dimensions, including his problematic relationships with women, and struggle with alcoholism. Engrossing and erudite, this is sure to fascinate the artist's many admirers. (Oct.)