It reveals the mix of rage, vulnerability, buoyancy, and desperation packed within him at this moment. Fry once wrote.īut another of those aspects might account for the fact that, as Brenson writes, Smith had a tendency to “speak of women like meat.” “His coarseness,” according to Bresnon, “contributed to an aura of defiance and authenticity. Improbably balanced against a smallish disc at the bottom, the sculpture is awe-inducing-“a soaring gesture of human longing for transcendence,” as Guggenheim curator Edward F. Take the example of Cubi I (1963), a “monster” of a sculpture, as Smith himself described it, in which a pile of squares rises 10 feet into the air. He made this heavy material appear to defy gravity. One of the aspects that Brenson is referencing is almost certainly Smith’s prodigious ability to form abstractions from steel. Who gets to be “the greatest sculptor the country has ever produced,” and why? It’s a question Brenson asks implicitly when, in the biography’s introduction, he writes, “In this book’s search for a true picture of David Smith, the multiple aspects of the man and his art must be in play.” To put it another way, you probably ought to square David Smith, the womanizer, with David Smith, the talented sculptor, if you’re really going to consider him at all. As early as 1947, when Smith had not even yet come to the abstract style that made him famous, the critic Clement Greenberg, who went on to boost many Abstract Expressionists, called Smith “the greatest sculptor the country has ever produced.” He made monumental sculptures of steel at a time when painting was still considered the pinnacle of art-making, and critics fell hard for them. “Genius” is typically the word applied to someone like Smith, who was-and remains-one of the most beloved American artists of the postwar era. It lays bare the fact that Smith’s game-changing artistic practice existed side-by-side with his misogyny, which, in Brenson’s telling, nearly ground down many women in his orbit.
But what is contained within its pages is something much more nuanced. Another epic work of nonfiction touting a straight white male artist? Well, not quite.īrenson’s biography, David Smith: The Art and Life of a Transformational Sculptor, has a title that suggests grandness, admiration, and ego stroking. No one would blame you, then, for eliciting a groan when you notice that critic Michael Brenson’s new doorstopper of a biography of the sculptor David Smith comes in at 834 pages. Sword Fights on Canvas: Georges Mathieu at Perrotin and Nahmad Contemporary The ARTnews Guide to Abstract Expressionism
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