Word: smiths
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Orleans; San Francisco's Butterfield & Butterfield; West Palm Beach's Trosby Auction Galleries. The so-called country auction where the city slicker might once snap up for a song a Revere salver or a federal highboy is as distant a memory as the nickel newspaper. Says Scudder Smith, editor of Antiques and Arts Weekly, "You look around some of these little country auctions and there are 25 well-known dealers there...
...York, the graphic intensity of David Smith...
When David Smith was killed in a car accident near Bennington, Vt., in 1965, America lost the best sculptor it had ever produced. In a quarter-century of work, Smith had taken the constructivist tradition of sculpture-images built up from rigid planes-from where Pablo Picasso and Julio Gonzalez had left it in the '30s, and given it an extraordinary richness and amplitude. Indeed, his work in three dimensions was so magisterial that it blotted out the rest of his output. For Smith was not only a sculptor, but a draftsman, and his drawings, thousands in number, were...
...draftsman, Smith was fecund, prolific to the point of garrulity, and very uneven. In front of many drawings in this show one is made to feel that, had they not been created by one of the leading modernist sculptors, they would not command much attention on their plain aesthetic merits. Most of the work from the late '30s and early '40s is pastiche of one sort or another: a heavy line, now dogmatic, now uncertain, grinding across the paper, paying its digestive homages to Picasso, Gonzalez, constructivism generally and, rather surprisingly, to the bonelike figures of Moore...
...artist of stronger social engagement than most of the abstract expressionists, Smith tried his hand at political propaganda with a set of Medals for Dishonor inspired by the Spanish Civil War, later with a number of drawings that tried, in effect, to do a Bruegel on fascism. These desolate landscapes, populated by knotty women copulating with cannon, are postsurrealist cliches-although they make clear Smith's erotic feelings about steel. Even so, they are full of the harsh, graphic intensity that would soon burst forth in his sculpture...