Word: smithing
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...metal that Smith was to find his calling and his towering achievement. He was a born craftsman. As a boy growing up in Decatur, III., he remembered, "I played on trains and around factories just like I played in hills and creeks. Machinery has never been an alien element; it's been in my nature." During his college years, he worked for a summer as a riveter and spot welder at Studebaker's South Bend plant. Looking through French art periodicals in his art-student days, he saw how Pablo Picasso, working with the Spanish metalworker Julio Gonz...
Form Giver. More than any man, Smith gave the obdurate metal of the Industrial Revolution its own sculptural form. He liked the fact that steel had little real history in art. What associations the metal possesses, he argued, "are primarily of this century: structure, movement, progress, suspension, destruction and brutality...
...first efforts looked like so many small Picassos. Later, they also began to resemble the small, stage-like Surrealist compositions of Alberto Giacometti, whose work Smith admired because it also incorporated the Freudian dream imagery so dear to Joyce. In 1940 Smith moved to Bolton Landing, and during the war years, he spent most of his time at his welder's trade, working on locomotives and tanks at a nearby plant. But by 1945, he had accumulated an exquisite series of small, neo-Surrealistic bronze-and-steel tabletop tableaux. Both Home of the Welder and Reliquary House are rich...
Seeking to translate this symbolic imagery into clearer, simpler compositions, Smith developed his "line drawing" sculptures, made from strips of steel welded together into flat, picture-like compositions. His masterpiece in this genre is Australia (1951), a 9-ft.-wide, predatory sort of flying queen ant that stands on a pedestal, as much signpost as symbol. Australia occupies a niche of its own at the Guggenheim, for it marks the end of Smith's apprenticeship to foreign styles and his emergence as an innovator with followers of his own. Thereafter, his works became increasingly abstract, although to the last...
Beginning in 1957, larger, heavier and subtly more ominous forms intrude. The 7-ft.-high "Sentinels" are towers of chunky I-beams or weather-vane slabs. Smith set some on little wheels, explaining that he had gotten .the idea from Hindu temple chariots. He always prided himself on his sheer physical energy, as if he were clinging to his image of himself as some machine-age peasant with industrial muscles. Invited to contribute to Italy's Spoleto festival in 1962, Smith stunned nearly everyone by producing 26 works in less than a month and studded the Spoleto amphitheater with...