Tony Smith: True to Form

By James Panero | Monday, August 31, 1998

The galleries of Tony Smith's recent retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art were quiet and empty through their summer run—somehow appropriate for Smith's black, enigmatic sculptures. For the few who did attend this exhibition, 'Tony Smith: Architect, Painter, Sculptor' presented a distilled artistic language, the language of form.

Smith's abstract sculpture can appear foreign today. While the 1960s were proving to be Smith's most productive years, abstract art was writing its final chapter—at least for this century. In the decades since, abstraction has entered a diaspora. Pop, race-specific, and gender-specific art have taken center stage. Abstraction's use of color, shape, and form have been abandoned. For an exhibition on Smith to succeed it must, essentially, awaken a dead language: the Modern used Smith's accessible architecture and painting to decode the abstraction of his sculpture.

Smith became a successful sculptor only late in life; he was 51 years-old when he first exhibited in 1963. Two and a half decades before, in the late 1930s, Smith was a struggling architect studying the organic-structure theories of Frank Lloyd Wright. In the late 40s Smith began teaching and designing in New York, befriending the Abstract Expressionists Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, and Clyfford Still. Ten years later, while dividing his time between architecture and painting, he began to engage Le Corbusier—the French architect who theorized a replacement for the Golden Section. Le Corbusier's proportional system, termed modular, was based on the scale of the human body; its basic unit was 1.3 meters. Size and form were becoming Smith's first concern.

As an architect Smith designed beehive-like buildings of modular cells, and as a developing sculptor in the 1950s he continued this modular approach. He first constructed small paper cubes and tetrahedrals (triangular dice). He taped these shapes together into abstract forms, enlarged his designs and plated them in steel. Animistic and hard-edged, visceral and mathematical, the resulting objects became his abstracted sculpture.

Standing beside Die (1962), a 6' x 6' x 6' metal cube and the artist's most fundamental structure, one begins to appreciate Smith's command of form. At six feet, the top of Die lies just above eye level. Up close Die's black, matte face leers above. Its mass and weight are palpable—form conveys emotion. Different forms carry different emotions, and Smith examined their resonance in his sculpture: Smog's (1969-70) low-hanging lattice-work suggests claustrophobia and asphyxiation; Stinger's (1967-78) horseshoe-shaped design, entrapment and death; Moses's (1968) sky-bound beams, enlightenment and transcendence.

Smith hoped to communicate with the unconscious. 'I see my pieces as aggressors in hostile territory,' he wrote. 'I think of them as seeds or germs that could spread growth or disease... All my sculptures are on the edge of dreams.' His sculptures are considered to be indebted to the Abstract Expressionists, though this assessment is recent. As the Modern documented, Smith's early critics considered him a minimalist, not an expressionist.

When he became known in the 1960s for Die, his work was called conceptual, a dispassionate examination of 'objecthood' that tested the medium of sculpture. In a well-known Artforum essay, 'Art and Objecthood,' the critic Michael Fried even accused Smith of corrupting sculpture with 'hidden theater': 'Whereas in previous art 'what is to be had from a work is located strictly within it,' the experience of [object] art is on an object in a situation—one which, virtually by definition, includes the beholder. (italics his own)'

In calling him a minimalist, Smith's critics neglected Die's place in his body of work. Die was the modular cell, the basic unit of expression—like the first drip from Pollock's brush. Fried was hasty to call Smith an object-art minimalist. Smith's sculpture was charged with a humanism and anthropomorphism the other 'minimalist' artists lacked. But Fried was right about one thing—size mattered: 'Why didn't you make [Die] larger, so that it would loom over the observer?' Robert Morris once asked Smith.

'I was not making a monument.'

'Then why didn't you make it smaller, so that the observer could see over the top?'

'I was not making an object.'

Smith cast his designs in different scales, but his best work is, like Die, those sculptures just beyond human size. Most of these larger pieces would not fit inside the exhibition, and the Modern has converted its Philip Johnson sculpture garden to accommodate several of them (Smith's popular Moondog (1964) is there).

The New York Public Art Fund has also placed some of Smith's best sculptures around the streets of Manhattan. Smith often lamented America's lack of public art. 'There is nothing to look at between the Bennington Monument and the George Washington Bridge,' said the New Jersey native.

His geometric abstractions seem tailor-made for the New York landscape, which alternates between order and chaos. Smith often spoke about the beauty of Manhattan's street grid. Cigarette (1961) can now be found at the corner of 5th Avenue and Central Park South; Light Up (1971), his only sculpture in yellow, can be found in Seagram Plaza, at Park Avenue and 52rd street. Once we know to listen, Smith is there speaking to us today.

'Tony Smith: Architect, Painter, Sculptor' will continue at the Museum of Modern Art through September 22, 1998. 11 W 53rd St between Fifth and Sixth Aves. Subway: E, F to Fith ave. Sat—Tue, Thu 10:30am—6pm; Fri 10:30am—8:30pm.

Tony Smith: True to Form

Article Tools

Related Articles