DAVID SMITH
Neumann/Willard Gallery
David Smith: DAVID SMITH. New York: Neumann/Willard Gallery, [1940]. Original edition. Untrimmed thick craft paper sheet with two color screenprint and letterpressed typography. Two-color design with facsimile signature to front panel. Letterpressed type to remaining three panels. Folded into quarters as issued. Tiny pinhole to two corners. Light handling wear, otherwise a fine copy. Rare.
9.25 x 12.5 folded exhibition announcement for the exhibition from March 25-April 15, 1940. The Neumann/Willard Gallery show was Smith’s fourth one-man exhibition of his sculptures. Andreas Feininger is credited with Photography for this show. In January 1938, Smith presents his first solo show (welded iron sculptures and drawings dating from 1935 to 1938) at Marian Willard’s East River Gallery, in New York City. Smith makes his first arc-welded sculptures. He exhibits his sculpture in a group show, American Art Today, at the 1939-40 New York World’s Fair. In February 1940, Smith affirms the value of abstract art, in contrast to the then fashionable Social Realism, in his lecture, “On Abstract Art in America,” presented at a forum of the United American Artists group. In March, he presents a solo show at Neumann-Willard Gallery, New York.
The show consisted of twelve works:
- 1. Vertical Structure [steel with copper]
- 2. Structure of Arches [steel with zinc and copper]
- 3. Bathers [steel, polished]
- 4. Ad Mare [steel, natural]
- 5. Unity of Three Forms [steel, polished]
- 6. Head [cast iron]
- 7. Interior [steel and bronze]
- 8. Bi-Polar Structure [steel, encoustic]
- 9. Leda [steel natural]
- 10. Headscrew [steel, oxide]
- 11. Growing Form [cast aluminum]
- 12. Head as Still Life [cast iron and bronze]
“David Smith’s constructions come logically out of the technology of modern America.” — Elizabeth McCausland
From 244davidsmith.wordpress.com: “David Smith’s solo exhibition at the Neumann-Willard Gallery in 1940 included twelve sculptures and spanned several mediums. His extensive use of steel, found in nine of the twelve pieces, was highly valued because many sculptors of this time had not yet explored the medium of steel. Copper, zinc, bronze, and iron were among other metals incorporated into his work.
“Although this was not his first show at the gallery, this 1940 exhibition was significant in his development as an artist working in the sculpture. In the early 1930s, Smith’s artistic career transformed and became defined by sculpture rather than watercolor painting. The organic, abstract forms seen in Smith’s 1940 exhibition helped to shape his future sculptural work, although he was continuously experimenting with innovative ideas.
“The reason for the 1940 Neumann-Willard Gallery exhibition is not entirely known, but it undoubtedly functioned to publicize Smith’s work and help him gain recognition in the art world. As evidenced by art reviews in the New York Times and the journal Parnassus, Smith’s sculptures were received in a positive manner. The fact that critics chose to comment on the work in Smith’s exhibition suggests that he was an artist growing in recognition and influence. Today, the exhibition remains important to the history of Smith’s career, as it provides current viewers with an insight into how his early sculptural work shaped the entirety of his artistic career.
Howard Devree similarly reviewed David Smith’s Neuman-Willard Gallery exhibition in 1940 for the New York Times. In his short blurb, he clearly recognizes the improvement Smith has made in his creation of art. He writes, “Smith’s first show was of primarily abstract work without, it seemed to me at the time, much point.” Although harsh, Devree was most likely talking about Smith’s abstraction in the form of his watercolors, a medium that while he used throughout his lifetime, never was his prominent medium of interest. In this show, however, Devree begins to suggest the “possibility of use for some of the figures in architectural manner[s],” raising the possibility of Smith’s sculpture not only being artwork, but also utilitarian artwork. He goes on to say, “Now he has hit upon a line of develop with a number of the pieces clearly possessing architectural potentialities.” It is interesting that Devree makes little to no reference to the aesthetic qualities of Smith’s sculpture but rather to its “so-called” potential as architectural inspiration. He concludes by saying, “In several of the structures Smith has sensed something more largely purposive toward which to work.” This is to say that he recognizes that Smith has a goal in mind as he progresses with his architecture. From this statement, we can also make the inference that Devree believes that Smith also had several works at the show that were not of “architectural potentiality.” Yet, with that being said, I believe that his last statement about Smith is one of optimism and hope, for Smith, at the time, was still in the prime of his career, ready to innovate and take on the world.
From Wikipedia: Roland David Smith (1906 – 1965) was an American Abstract Expressionist sculptor and painter, best known for creating large steel abstract geometric sculptures.
Smith was born on March 9, 1906 in Decatur, Indiana and moved to Paulding, Ohio in 1921, where he attended high school. From 1924-25, he attended Ohio University in Athens (one year) and the University of Notre Dame, which he left after two weeks because there were no art courses. In between, Smith took a summer job working on the assembly line of an automobile factory. He then briefly studied art and poetry at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.
Moving to New York in 1926, he met Dorothy Dehner (to whom he was married from 1927 to 1952) and, on her advice, joined her painting studies at the Art Students League of New York. Among his teachers were the American painter John Sloan and the Czech modernist painter Jan Matulka, who had studied with Hans Hofmann. Matulka introduced Smith to the work of Picasso, Mondrian, Kandinsky, and the Russian Constructivists. In 1929, Smith met John D. Graham, who later introduced him to the welded-steel sculpture of Pablo Picasso and Julio González.
Smith’s early friendship with painters such as Adolph Gottlieb and Milton Avery was reinforced during the Depression of the 1930s, when he participated in the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project in New York.Through the Russian émigré artist John Graham, Smith met avant-garde artists such as Stuart Davis, Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning. He also discovered the welded sculptures of Julio González and Picasso, which led to an increasing interest in combining painting and construction.
In the Virgin Islands in 1931–32, Smith made his first sculpture from pieces of coral. In 1932, he installed a forge and anvil in his studio at the farm in Bolton Landing that he and Dehner had bought a few years earlier. Smith started by making three-dimensional objects from wood, wire, coral, soldered metal and other found materials but soon graduated to using an oxyacetylene torch to weld metal heads, which are probably the first welded metal sculptures ever made in the United States. A single work may consist of several materials, differentiated by varied patinas and polychromy.
In 1940, the Smiths distanced themselves from the New York art scene and moved permanently to Bolton Landing, NY near Lake George. At Bolton Landing, he ran his studio like a factory, stocked with large amounts of raw material. The artist would put his sculptures in what is referred to as an upper and lower field, and sometimes he would put them in rows, "as if they were farm crops."
During World War II, Smith worked as a welder for the American Locomotive Company, Schenectady, NY assembling locomotives and M7 tanks. He taught at Sarah Lawrence College. After the war, with the additional skills that he had acquired, Smith released his pent-up energy and ideas in a burst of creation between 1945 and 1946. His output soared and he went about perfecting his own, very personal symbolism. Traditionally, metal sculpture meant bronze casts, which artisans produced using a mold made by the artist. Smith, however, made his sculptures from scratch, welding together pieces of steel and other metals with his torch, in much the same way that a painter applied paint to a canvas; his sculptures are almost always unique works.
Smith, who often said, "I belong with the painters," made sculptures of subjects that had never before been shown in three dimensions. He made sculptural landscapes (e. g. Hudson River Landscape), still life sculptures (e. g. Head as Still Life) and even a sculpture of a page of writing (The Letter). Perhaps his most revolutionary concept was that the only difference between painting and sculpture was the addition of a third dimension; he declared that the sculptor's "conception is as free as a that of the painter. His wealth of response is as great as his draftsmanship."
Smith was awarded the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship in 1950, which was renewed the following year. Freed from financial constraints, he made more and larger pieces, and for the first time was able to afford to make whole sculptures in stainless steel. He also began his practice of making sculptures in series, the first of which were the Agricolas of 1951-59. He steadily gained recognition, lecturing at universities and participating in symposia. He separated from Dehner in 1950, with divorce in 1952. During his time as a visiting artist at the University of Indiana, Bloomington, in 1955 and 1956, Smith produced the Forgings, a series of eleven industrially forged steel sculptures. To create the Forgings, he cut, plugged, flattened, pinched and bent each steel bar, later polishing, rusting, painting, lacquering or waxing its surface.
Smith continued to paint and especially to draw throughout his life. By 1953 he was producing between 300 and 400 drawings a year. His subjects encompassed the figure and landscape, as well as gestural, almost calligraphic marks made with egg yolk, Chinese ink and brushes and, in the late 1950s, the ‘sprays’.He usually signed his drawings with the ancient Greek letters delta and sigma, meant to stand for his initials.
He died in a car crash near Bennington, Vermont on May 23, 1965. He was 59 years old.
The Neumann-Willard Gallery opened in 1936 by Marian Willard and originally was called the East River Gallery. Its name was changed to the Neumann-Willard Gallery in 1938 when JB Neumann partnered with Willard for a couple of years. In 1945 the gallery was again renamed to the Willard Gallery.
This was not David Smith’s first solo exhibition as this gallery. In 1938, when the gallery was still named East River Gallery, David Smith had his first solo exhibition ever. Smith was a part of a group of artists Mariam Willard brought to the gallery because they expressed the idea of “the creative spirit,” which she strongly believed in. Smith continues to have solo exhibitions at the gallery almost every year until 1956.
Although the name of the gallery has changed many times, the type of art exhibited as remained the same. Marian Willard was the woman behind selecting all of the artists to exhibit in her gallery. She was innovator of her time. Willard wanted to show new American and European art. Most of all, Willard was known for her very talented eye and her resistance to prevailing artistic inclinations. During the times of artistic criticism and disposition for conservatism in art in America, she fought for the acceptance of many new modern artists. In starting her own gallery, she wanted to not only provide a locale for the repressed minority of artists to display their work, but also give those artists a safe place for nurture and growth, ideas that she truly subscribed to.