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Lot Essay
David Smith’s Landscape with Strata is a striking example of the artist’s groundbreaking, signature style of sculptural abstraction, produced during a burst of concentrated creative output during his exceptionally active 1945-1946 period. “The enormous variety, high quality, and sheer numbers of sculptures (Smith) made in 1945 and ’46 make them landmarks of Smith’s early production….As a group, they are surprisingly inventive, as though Smith were deliberately testing the limits of what sculpture could be. Instead of the relatively traditional heads and figures of his prewar years, he tackled such unprecedented themes as hermetic containers, totemic displays, and landscapes” (K. Wilkin, David Smith, New York, 1984, pp. 34-35). In Landscape with Strata, two dynamically poised vertical elements face each other (in literal appearance, the sculpture suggests an upward-reaching stair structure), projecting upward from a heavy block of steel, the entire edifice mounted on a marble base, the light color of the marble dramatically contrasting with the dark steel of the sculpture itself. Multilevel, staggered platforms contain abstracted shapes, while other areas of the work include forms reminiscent of painted canvases or medallions. The sculpture depicts an abstracted vision of water cascading down a hill, but the materials are pushed past the literal point of representation to become a fully abstract work.
Exploring the ways that the elements interrelate is one of the pleasures of Landscape with Strata. The individual parts of the sculpture exist in a complex, layered, multidimensional form. Themes of concealment (both literal and symbolic) were recurrent motifs in Smith’s work: “Landscape with Strata retreats from the viewer, turning in on itself. As one moves around the sculpture, elements are obscured, or turn away, rather than revealing themselves more fully. The complex, layered ‘medallions’ of landscape forms that make up the work could be seen fully only if the viewer were within the sculpture” (K. Wilkin, David Smith, New York, 1984, p. 95). The work incorporates relief-like elements with shapes that suggest gestural markings, as does the artist’s use of welding marks, the lighter color of the welds offset against the darker steel material. Elements of the current work express traces of some of Smith’s early influences: the abstract metal sculptures that Pablo Picasso and Julio Gonzalez were making in the late 1920s, and the Surrealist sculptures of Giacometti. But the sculpture also looks forward, toward newer ideas as well. The works that Smith created during the immediate post-war period emphasized introspection, explored existential themes, and pursued formal experimentations consistent with strategies being investigated by Abstract Expressionist painters of this period.
Landscape with Strata is also an excellent example of Smith’s innovative use of the industrial process of welding as fine art practice, an example of Smith’s use of welding to produce sculptures that would bring together unusual, idiosyncratic (but for Smith, highly personal and meaningful) materials, at a time when sculpting traditionally and invariably meant carving from marble or wood or casting in bronze. The work attests to Smith’s ability to develop evocative sculptural forms via the selection and combination of diverse and distinct individual elements. The choice of the word “landscape” in the work’s title hints at Smith’s concern with nature, modernity, civilization and with humanity’s place within the natural world.
David Smith’s career as a sculptor was associated with one material—Steel—perhaps as few other artists are so closely associated with one specific material. His preferred material evokes a 1930s and 1940s era of American industry, factory assembly lines, mass production, and the heavy machine technology of the early to mid-20th Century. As an artist, Smith was highly conscious of the era that he lived in and felt that it was the role of the artist to express his own times through his artwork. Steel reflected both his work experience as a welder and steel worker, and his desire to make an art that would express the era in which he lived and worked. Of his choice of steel as material, Smith said, “steel possesses little art history. Its associations are primarily of this [the 20th] century. It is structure, movement, progress, suspension, cantilever, and at times destruction and brutality” (D. Smith and C. Gray, David Smith, New York, 1968, p. 54). The machine age industrial metal materials Smith used for this piece—and indeed throughout his career—project an unmistakable aura of strength, stability, and solidity. Smith remarked, “my reverence for iron is in function before technique. It is the cheapest metal. It conceptually is within the scale of my life. And most important before I knew what art was I was an iron monger. The iron element I hold in high respect. I consider it eidetic in property. The metal particularly possesses no art craft. What it can do in arriving at form economically—no other element can do” (D. Smith and C. Gray, David Smith, New York, 1968, p. 50).
Smith’s achievement was to invent a sculptural language entirely his own, although influenced by European sources, a specifically American language that was improvisatory, practical and vigorous, but also capable of an eloquent abstraction of forms. He had an extraordinary ability to choose and combine scrap materials in his sculptures, building sculptural forms through the selection and combination of highly varied and initially completely unrelated individual material pieces. In this his work anticipates both the Assemblage art movement and an entire generation of artists (sculptors and those working in other media) who repurposed and recombined existing materials into new forms.
Writing in 1947, one year after Landscape with Strata was created, the great critic of the mid-20th century avant-garde Clement Greenberg remarked that “(David) Smith is already one of the great sculptors of the twentieth century…deserving to stand next to Brancusi, Lipchitz, Giacometti, Gonzalez, not to mention Laurens and Moore. That is, he is making an absolute contribution to the development of world as well as to American art” (C. Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume 2: Arrogant Purpose, 1945-1949, Chicago, 1995, p. 140).
Exploring the ways that the elements interrelate is one of the pleasures of Landscape with Strata. The individual parts of the sculpture exist in a complex, layered, multidimensional form. Themes of concealment (both literal and symbolic) were recurrent motifs in Smith’s work: “Landscape with Strata retreats from the viewer, turning in on itself. As one moves around the sculpture, elements are obscured, or turn away, rather than revealing themselves more fully. The complex, layered ‘medallions’ of landscape forms that make up the work could be seen fully only if the viewer were within the sculpture” (K. Wilkin, David Smith, New York, 1984, p. 95). The work incorporates relief-like elements with shapes that suggest gestural markings, as does the artist’s use of welding marks, the lighter color of the welds offset against the darker steel material. Elements of the current work express traces of some of Smith’s early influences: the abstract metal sculptures that Pablo Picasso and Julio Gonzalez were making in the late 1920s, and the Surrealist sculptures of Giacometti. But the sculpture also looks forward, toward newer ideas as well. The works that Smith created during the immediate post-war period emphasized introspection, explored existential themes, and pursued formal experimentations consistent with strategies being investigated by Abstract Expressionist painters of this period.
Landscape with Strata is also an excellent example of Smith’s innovative use of the industrial process of welding as fine art practice, an example of Smith’s use of welding to produce sculptures that would bring together unusual, idiosyncratic (but for Smith, highly personal and meaningful) materials, at a time when sculpting traditionally and invariably meant carving from marble or wood or casting in bronze. The work attests to Smith’s ability to develop evocative sculptural forms via the selection and combination of diverse and distinct individual elements. The choice of the word “landscape” in the work’s title hints at Smith’s concern with nature, modernity, civilization and with humanity’s place within the natural world.
David Smith’s career as a sculptor was associated with one material—Steel—perhaps as few other artists are so closely associated with one specific material. His preferred material evokes a 1930s and 1940s era of American industry, factory assembly lines, mass production, and the heavy machine technology of the early to mid-20th Century. As an artist, Smith was highly conscious of the era that he lived in and felt that it was the role of the artist to express his own times through his artwork. Steel reflected both his work experience as a welder and steel worker, and his desire to make an art that would express the era in which he lived and worked. Of his choice of steel as material, Smith said, “steel possesses little art history. Its associations are primarily of this [the 20th] century. It is structure, movement, progress, suspension, cantilever, and at times destruction and brutality” (D. Smith and C. Gray, David Smith, New York, 1968, p. 54). The machine age industrial metal materials Smith used for this piece—and indeed throughout his career—project an unmistakable aura of strength, stability, and solidity. Smith remarked, “my reverence for iron is in function before technique. It is the cheapest metal. It conceptually is within the scale of my life. And most important before I knew what art was I was an iron monger. The iron element I hold in high respect. I consider it eidetic in property. The metal particularly possesses no art craft. What it can do in arriving at form economically—no other element can do” (D. Smith and C. Gray, David Smith, New York, 1968, p. 50).
Smith’s achievement was to invent a sculptural language entirely his own, although influenced by European sources, a specifically American language that was improvisatory, practical and vigorous, but also capable of an eloquent abstraction of forms. He had an extraordinary ability to choose and combine scrap materials in his sculptures, building sculptural forms through the selection and combination of highly varied and initially completely unrelated individual material pieces. In this his work anticipates both the Assemblage art movement and an entire generation of artists (sculptors and those working in other media) who repurposed and recombined existing materials into new forms.
Writing in 1947, one year after Landscape with Strata was created, the great critic of the mid-20th century avant-garde Clement Greenberg remarked that “(David) Smith is already one of the great sculptors of the twentieth century…deserving to stand next to Brancusi, Lipchitz, Giacometti, Gonzalez, not to mention Laurens and Moore. That is, he is making an absolute contribution to the development of world as well as to American art” (C. Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume 2: Arrogant Purpose, 1945-1949, Chicago, 1995, p. 140).