David Smith in Two Dimensions: Photography and the Matter of Sculpture 0520280342, 9780520280342

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DAVID SMITH IN TWO DIMENSIONS

the publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the art endowment fund of the university of california press foundation.

the publisher also gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the judy and bill timken endowment fund in contemporary arts of the university of california press foundation.

DAVID SMITH IN TWO DIMENSIONS Photography and the Matter of Sculpture Sarah Hamill

university of california press

illustrations in this book were funded in part or in whole by a grant from the meiss/mellon author’s book award of the college arts association.

publication of this book has also been supported by a grant from the wyeth foundation for american art publication fund of the college art association and by the henry moore foundation.

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Oakland, California © 2015 by The Regents of the University of California All works of art by David Smith are © Estate of David Smith/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hamill, Sarah, author. David Smith in two dimensions : photography and the matter of sculpture / Sarah Hamill. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-520-28034-2 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Smith, David, 1906–1965. 2. Photography of sculpture. 3. Art and photography. I. Title. II. Title: David Smith in 2 dimensions. tr658.3.h36 2015 770—dc23 2014014667 Manufactured in Hong Kong 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48-1992 (r 2002) (Permanence of Paper).

For Chris

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

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Introduction: The Problem of Photography and Sculpture 1.

Toward Mass Reproduction as a Public Display

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Aerial Vision, Photographic Abstraction, and the Surface of Sculpture 59

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Images of Nonbelonging: Dramatizing Autonomy in the Sculptural Group 88 •

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Picturing Color in Space

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The Terrain of the Vulgar: Smith’s 1963– 64 Nudes

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119

Conclusion: Framed and Unframed Space Notes 181 Bibliography 221 List of Illustrations Index 243 •

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142

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book began as a paper in Anne M. Wagner’s seminar on modern sculpture, which she taught at the University of California, Berkeley, in fall 2001— a course that opened the way to thinking about the matter of sculpture: its space and materiality, public display, and suspension in provisional media. Through her discerning guidance and tremendous support, that paper grew into a dissertation. I am extraordinarily grateful to her, as I am to Tim Clark, whose thoughtful and generous responses deepened the project at every step. Whitney Davis and Kaja Silverman also provided valuable feedback, and I thank them and other members of the History of Art Department, especially Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby and Christopher Hallett, for their encouragement and advice. My gratitude also goes to the many graduate students who formed a lively intellectual community at Berkeley in the early 2000s. The Estate of David Smith has been wonderfully supportive of my research, and one could not ask for a more generous and engaging group with which to work. I am especially indebted to Rebecca Smith and Candida Smith; Peter Stevens, whose knowledge of David Smith’s materials has been singularly valuable; Susan Cooke, whose deep insight into his work and general all-around expertise and wit were indispensable to this book, at many levels; and Allyn Shepard for her bibliographic assistance. (Any mistakes are of course my own.) The Estate of David Smith assisted with this book’s production by greatly reducing copyright fees, sharing the cost of color correction, and undertaking the arduous task of scanning many previously unpublished photographs, negatives, slides, and copy prints with skill and efficiency. They have my enormous thanks.

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The publication of this book would not have been feasible without a Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publication Grant and a Meiss/Mellon Author’s Book Award, both of which were awarded by the College Art Association; a Henry Moore Foundation Publication Grant; and a subvention from the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, Oberlin College. I also wish to acknowledge the funding sources that supported my research and writing: at the doctoral level, a Mellon Dissertation Fellowship, Council on Library and Information Resources; a Library Research Grant, Getty Research Institute; a Dean’s Normative Time Fellowship, Graduate Division, UC Berkeley; and a Chancellor’s Dissertation Fellowship, UC Berkeley. At the postdoctoral level, a Residential Fellowship at the Getty Research Institute allowed me to recast the dissertation among a vibrant group of scholars, and I thank in particular Peter Bonfitto, Lucy Bradnock, Gail Feigenbaum, Thomas Gaehtgens, Matthew Hunter, Stephanie Klamm, Andrew Perchuk, Emma Richardson, John Tain, and Katja Zelljadt. More recently, a Franklin Research Grant from the American Philosophical Society, and a Powers Travel Grant from Oberlin College, supported crucial research trips abroad. Archivists, curators, and librarians at the Getty Research Institute; the Archivio Ugo Mulas; the Museo Medardo Rosso; the Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti; the Henry Moore Foundation; the Musée National d’art Moderne; the Archives of American Art; and the University of California, Berkeley, have shown the way to many of this book’s images and archives, for which I am most appreciative. Joan Pachner was kind enough to share her interviews with Dorothy Dehner and Ralph and Ethel Paiewonsky at an early stage. Walter Gordon, Brenna Larson, and John Michael Morein provided valuable research assistance. Joseph Romano helped with several of the book’s images. Rusty Sena masterfully color-corrected many of the book’s faded slides. Oberlin College has been an intellectually stimulating and energizing environment in which to complete the manuscript, and I am indebted to my supportive and kind colleagues in art history for making these years so fruitful—Bonnie Cheng, John Harwood, Erik Inglis, Susan Kane, and Christina Neilson, as well as many others across campus, especially Denise Birkhofer, Julia Christensen, Jan Cooper, Sean Decatur, Heather Hogan, Chris Trinacty, and Drew Wilburn. This book has benefited mightily from rich exchanges with Oberlin students— too many to name here, but whose presence in the book is nonetheless deeply felt. I am also grateful to the History of Art Department at Johns Hopkins University, and the Department of Art at the University of Toronto, for providing research support and community. Many of the arguments presented herein were sharpened through dialogues with audience members, including those at the 2008 Association of Art Historians Conference, the 2012 College Art Association Conference, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Phillips Collection, the High Museum of Art, Emory University, the Wexner Center for the Arts, the University of Southern California, and the University of Chicago. I am particularly indebted to Kris Paulsen for initiating my

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invitation to Columbus; the group of scholars who commented on a chapter in an Emory workshop organized by Todd Cronan; and graduate students and faculty at USC. At key moments, conversations with Zeynep Çelik Alexander, Jo Applin, Elise Archias, Michael Brenson, Anne Byrd, Sue Frank, Michael Fried, Aden Kumler, Alma Mikulinsky, and Alex Potts also emboldened the book’s writing. I also thank my first teachers of art history: Allen Fitzpatrick and Peter Parshall, whose pedagogical models of intellectual rigor and lively debate continue to shape my writing and teaching. This book has benefited from having two editors at University of California Press, and I am grateful to them both. Stephanie Fay’s steadfast encouragement and incisive editorial direction is the reason this book is a book at all, and the care she put into the manuscript has been astonishing. Kari Dahlgren’s tenacity brought the project to fruition. I thank Chalon Emmons, Jack Young, and the UC Press designers for their patience and diligence as they shepherded the book through the production process. UC Press’s readers— Sally Stein and an anonymous reviewer— generously offered perceptive comments and recommendations for revision, as well as enthusiastic support. Alex Potts and an anonymous Art History reader provided valuable reviews on an excerpt of chapter 3, which is reprinted here thanks to Sam Bibby and the editorial board of Art History. A number of others also poured their time into reading portions of the manuscript, for which I am abundantly thankful: Lisa Florman, Megan Luke, Jeremy Melius, Jamie Nisbet, Irene Small, and, lastly, Jenny Wapner, whose editorial comments on the initial proposal were vital. I am especially indebted to Louise Hornby for the many walks, meals, and phone calls during which the ideas in this book were mulled over and discussed. Friends—many of those mentioned above, as well as Ginny Adams, Sylvan Brackett, Barrie Brouse, Jessica Buskirk, Chris Dodd, Ariel Evnine, Elissa Fontenot, Jessica Green, Daphne Kouretas, Michael Kunichika, Andrew Moisey, Jodi Pink, Denise Ramzy, Tom Roberts, Sanford Sanchez, Lizbet Simmons, and Joni Spigler— have provided lively respite from writing, as have my family and extended family, especially Claudia Lakey and the late Bob Lakey, Patrick Lakey and Jane McFadden, Maren Lakey, Everett Lakey, Sam Hamill, Natalie Hamill and Josh Perlsweig, Rebecca Harlan, and Jason Bereswill. The loss of Sam Hamill (1976–2005) marks these pages, which were written in his memory. My parents, Bill and Leita Hamill, have my resounding gratitude and more for their unfailing love, wisdom, and steadfast encouragement—they taught me at an early age how to write and think critically about the world, lessons that reverberate here. The humor and friendship of my sister, Jane Hamill, and my brother, Will Hamill, matter more than they know. This book owes everything to Chris Lakey, to whom it is dedicated, for the life that we have built together.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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INTRODUCTION The Problem of Photography and Sculpture

Every day the urge grows stronger to get hold of an object at close range in an image, or better, in a facsimile, a reproduction. And the reproduction, as offered by illustrated magazines and newsreels, differs unmistakably from the image. Uniqueness and permanence are as closely entwined in the latter as are transitoriness and repeatability in the former. The stripping of the veil from the object, the destruction of the aura, is the signature of a perception whose “sense for sameness in the world” has so increased that, by means of reproduction, it extracts sameness even from what is unique. WALTER BENJAMIN, “THE WORK OF ART IN THE AGE OF ITS TECHNOLOGICAL REPRODUCIBILITY,” 1939

To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge—​ and, therefore, like power. SUSAN SONTAG, “IN PLATO’S CAVE,” 1977

In October 1957, Arts magazine featured on its cover a commanding yellow photograph spanning the page at a full bleed (plate 1). The image is dramatic—​triumphant, even. David Smith’s sculpture Portrait of a Lady Painter is silhouetted against a resonant landscape setting, appearing as a free-floating thing. The photograph was meant to publicize Hilton Kramer’s review of Smith’s recent Museum of Modern Art exhibition, but the magazine’s pages did not reveal that Smith himself had taken the shot, using his camera to present a dramatizing image of his work. The artist used a low vantage point, which had the effect of flattening his sculpture to a two-dimensional plane, and cropped the image where the sculpture meets its pedestal, disconnecting it from the ground. The resulting image monumentalizes—​perhaps even ironizes—​the sculpture’s acute violence: the palette, which stands in for the painter’s head, falls back in pain, an instance of aggression toward a perceived type of female artist.1 Seen in Smith’s photograph, his three-dimensional object is translated into an abstract surface that levitates above its surroundings. Portrait of a Lady Painter is magnified, its brutal imagery projected on a heroic scale.

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Figure 1. Dan Budnik, Portrait of David Smith (Holding Dan Budnik’s Pentax Camera with 180-mm Lens), Bolton Landing, NY, c. 1962–​63. Digital scan from 35-mm black-and-white negative, 35 × 24 mm. © Dan Budnik.

As early as 1947, Smith registered the power of photographic reproduction as a display for his objects. “Reproduction seems to act as first acquaintance—​and eliminate some of the barriers,” he wrote to his dealer, persuading her to include additional illustrations in an upcoming catalog.2 From the mid-1940s on, Smith took thousands of photographs of his sculptures and used them to promote his work.3 Over the course of his career, he used several different cameras, including a Rolleiflex and a four-by-fiveinch Busch Pressman. In a portrait by Dan Budnik taken in 1962 or 1963, he holds Budnik’s thirty-five-millimeter Pentax (fig. 1).4 Taking the reins of the documentary process from professional photographers hired by his gallery, Smith photographed his objects in the fields outside his studio in upstate New York.5 He sent his pictures to critics, curators, dealers, editors, and patrons, and his photographs were published in countless magazines, newspapers, journals, and exhibition catalogs, albeit as anonymous illustrations of his sculptures. Far from neutral or transparent documents, however, the sculptor’s photographs are independent images in their own right. They animate and pictorialize his welded steel sculptures using the camera’s controls of vantage point and frame. In one group of photographs, Smith construed his modernist abstractions as large-scale and monumental forms that are disconnected from the ground. In another, he introduced them as loose collectives of antediluvian figures. In

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yet another, the sculptor situated painted sculptures within the landscape to organize the surface effects of color. What did it mean for an artist committed to sculptural elusiveness to document his work in this way? Smith began to make sculptures in 1933, when he purchased a welding outfit after seeing photographs of constructions by Pablo Picasso and Julio González reproduced in the pages of Cahiers d’Art.6 He set to work developing a new sculptural idiom that departed radically from the legacy of sculptural idealism: space would be outlined in the negative rather than defined as bulk and volume. The figure—​if there was one—​would be fragmentary and disconnected, empty and unstable. Looking back in 1953, Smith described his innovation of the 1930s as one of overlapping shapes and complex associations: My first steel sculptures were made in 1933. . . . I have always considered line contour as being a comment on mass space and more acute than bulk, and that the association of steel retained steel function of shapes, moving, circumscribing upon axii [sic], moving and gearing against each other and with each other at different speeds, as the association of this material suggests. The overlay of line shapes, being a cubist invention, permits each form its own identity, and when seen through each other, highly multiplies the complex of associations into new unities.7

Smith’s new sculptural vocabulary excluded the traditional monolith and processes of carving and modeling, to instead shape space in the negative. It entailed open yet conflicting parts, an overlay of lines and contours “moving and gearing against each other.”8 Rosalind Krauss, in her 1971 study of Smith’s work, described this visual fragmentation as the artist’s “primary insight,” because it carried a rejection of the idealist notion that a sculpture has an internal core or spine, differentiating it from other objects.9 Raven IV, for example, a sculpture completed in 1957, enacts this experience of spatial fragmentation in its competing surfaces (figs. 2 and 3). A viewer who walks around the work encounters images of the sculpture that are difficult to resolve. From a frontal vantage point, Raven IV appears as a pictorial plane: a collaged image of a figure or an abstract pictogram of a bird in flight. From other vantages, the sculpture registers as dense and bulky, and its viscous materiality—​an agglomeration of small cubes of steel and found pieces of shorn metal that are held together by an unnecessarily thick welded bead, the line of the weld that Smith used to join the parts—​comes into view. From still other vantages, the sculpture seems to be a thing that undulates fluidly between concave and convex pockets of space. Taken together, these conflicting accounts of the same object seek yet never actually attain a totalizing view, since Raven IV’s broken surfaces do not imply a central core. Broadly speaking, Smith’s sculptures are composed of incongruous images that destabilize perception. They unsettle idealist expectations that an object is something made up of an inside and an outside. As a medium that fixes time and space, photography posed a unique set of repre-

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Figure 2. David Smith, Raven IV, March 14, 1957. Steel, 28⅛ × 32⅜ in. (71.4 × 82.2 cm). Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. Figure 3. David Smith, Raven IV, March 14, 1957. Steel, 28⅛ × 32⅜ in. (71.4 × 82.2 cm). Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. (Photograph: Sarah Hamill.)

sentational problems for Smith’s sculpture, risks that the sculptor himself identified in 1952. “The eye of man is not a camera eye,” he wrote in “The Language Is Image”; “it is a cerebral eye. It is not a two-dimensional photograph, nor any one view.”10 With these words, Smith defined sculptural perception—​t hat is, “the eye of man,” which inhabits three dimensions—​as antithetical to photography, which deals in a limited dimensionality and perspective. Viewing a sculpture, he argued, takes place in time and space, yielding an abundance of mental images and visual associations that “[would take] two years . . . to tabulate.”11 Photography, by contrast, stops the unrestricted process of viewing in its tracks, compressing three dimensions into two in the time articulated by an instant. A photograph flattens sculptural space to a single planar surface, limiting the spatially complex experience of sculpture to only one view. The risks that the camera posed for sculpture were real: photography endangered his works’ open-endedness by risking a totalizing and misleadingly whole view of the object. The questions that his photographs raise, then, are urgent: why would a sculptor invested in spatial instability use his camera to direct an encounter with sculpture? Why risk losing his objects’ spatial complexities by translating them into a fixed and twodimensional image? What did Smith expect to achieve by photographing his sculpture? This book explores answers to these key questions by comprehensively mapping Smith’s photography and identifying it as vital to an understanding of his sculpture. I introduce a broad corpus of photographs that demonstrate the sculptor’s sustained engagement with photography, a medium that until now has not been considered integral to his artistic practice or thoroughly examined. Smith is widely known as a sculptor who radically shifted the terms of a medium traditionally defined by casting, modeling, and carving. He was the first to make industrial welding a sustained technique for large-scale sculpture, elaborating on the constructions of González and Picasso. In 1946, Clement Greenberg took note of Smith’s achievement, calling him “the best young sculptor in the country.”12 In reviews and essays through the 1950s, the critic praised Smith’s virtual use of welded line, which shaped “empty space” to direct a pictorial illusion of matter.13 In his use of industrial materials, the sculptor sought a renewed connection between art and modern industry, craft and steel—​or, as Anne M. Wagner writes, “Smith’s body of sculpture, we might say, offers a long meditation on everything concealed and revealed by the synecdoche ‘manual labor.’ That ‘everything’ includes both class and gender, as well as the fabricating systems that Smith mobilized and to which his work was intended to refer.”14 The relationship between craft and industry was also one Smith pursued through his artistic identity as a sculptor-laborer, an artist skilled in factory welding. Indeed, one of Smith’s most enduring contributions to the history of modernism was his modeling of how sculpture could actively account for (Wagner’s word is embody) industrial manufacturing.15 As stock narratives have it, in the second half of the twentieth century, sculpture’s relationship to industry changed. Minimalists—​including Richard Serra, Robert Morris, and Donald Judd—​took up and critiqued Smith’s

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Figure 4. David Smith, Untitled (Model for Sculpture), c. 1938. Gelatin silver print and ink, 3 × 4 in. (7.6 × 10.2 cm). The Estate of David Smith, New York.

emphasis on welding by relying on industrial production. Their objects—​which were newly situational, rejecting the pictorialism of Smith’s sculpture—​were professionally fabricated, not handmade by the artist’s torch.16 The path describing Smith’s contributions to the history of twentieth-century sculpture is well trod.17 What is less known about the sculptor is his work across media and his simultaneous use of painting, drawing, and photography to experiment with the perception of objects and space. Smith learned to take and develop photographs in the 1930s, and although he stopped developing his own images in the 1940s, he would continue to use his camera as a representational medium until his untimely death in 1965. Along the way, Smith took a range of photographs, pointing his camera not only at his sculptures but also at other objects, spaces, and bodies. He staged rocks, shells, and other found objects as fantastical assemblages; pictured the earth seen from an airplane in flight; and framed female nudes in an open encounter. These images underscore photography as a central component of Smith’s aesthetic of sculptural perception, tied to how the artist envisioned the role of two-dimensional vision in his work. In a handful of instances, the artist also used his camera as an aid to his sculptural

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Figure 5. David Smith, Workshop Floor, Sculptures in Process (Left to Right): Albany II (1959), Land Coaster (1960), Untitled (1960), and Doorway on Wheels (1960), Bolton Landing, NY, c. 1959. Gelatin silver print, 9⅝ × 713⁄16 in. (24.4 × 19.8 cm). The Estate of David Smith, New York.

process. Smith, for example, drew over photographs of clay models for sculptures. Figure 4 shows that he edited a photograph with notations of size and dimension and indicated additions for the casting process.18 In the late 1950s he also photographed the floor of his studio dotted with rectangles of white paint (fig. 5). Using the camera as a compositional tool, Smith pictured the aggregates of steel that would form sculptures from his Albany and Raven series. These diverse photographs take their place alongside the vast body of drawings and paintings the artist made throughout his career. But unlike in the cases of those other two-dimensional media, Smith deployed the mechanically reproducible medium of photography to display his sculpture publicly, to direct the public life of his objects. With his camera, he could both record a sculpture’s likeness and transform and amplify it by using the medium’s magnification of scale, frame, and isolation of a point of view. As in casting, another technology of reproduction that Smith relied on in his practice, he used his camera to produce original, independent images, not unmediated copies. In a photograph by Ugo Mulas taken of Smith’s sculpture workshop after his death in

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Figure 6. Ugo Mulas, David Smith’s Studio (illustrating David Smith’s Untitled [1959] and Untitled [1959]), Bolton Landing, NY, 1965. Gelatin silver print, dimensions unknown. Archivio Ugo Mulas, Milan. © Ugo Mulas Heirs.

1965, for instance, we can see this contradiction at work. Two untitled bronze sculptures from 1959 stand in the foreground, one an echo of the other (fig. 6). Smith made them by sand-casting a third welded-steel, painted sculpture, their prototype. Rather than duplicating the original, however, he made subtle changes in the two casts by orienting the foot piece—​a cast found object that is not in the earlier work—​parallel to the head in one and perpendicular in the other.19 Pairing the two works together amid the individualized clutter of the studio, Mulas presents Smith’s investigations with reproduction: for the sculptor, replication would yield innovation and difference, not an exact copy.20 Smith’s photographs operate in an analogous way by materializing and making vivid

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the workings of mechanical reproduction. They suggest new ways to see his sculpture even as they use the duplicating powers of the negative. In connecting the artist’s photographs to his broader explorations across media, this book offers a reorientation of Smith’s sculptural project by underscoring photography as integral to his work. The sculptor used photography to envisage dialogues between objects, bodies, and spaces; to suggest disorienting vantage points for his sculptures and dramatize their pictorial qualities; and to dislocate the scales and settings of his forms. With the camera, Smith directed a public display of his work that destabilized the matter of sculpture. .

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By using his camera to document his work, Smith entered into a debate at the core of modernism about mass reproduction’s role in the perception of art objects. The debate arose in response to a late-nineteenth-century surge of photographic reproductions, many of them produced by photographic firms such as Fratelli Alinari and Bruckmann Verlag. In a two-part essay published in German in 1896 and 1897, the art historian Heinrich Wölfflin confronted this groundswell of reproductive images. The title of his essay, “How One Should Photograph Sculpture” (Wie Man Skulpturen Aufnehmen Soll), already hints at its author’s polemic, which argued that there is a right way and a wrong way to photograph a sculpture.21 Wölfflin based his arguments on the sculptural idealism of Adolf von Hildebrand. In The Problem of Form in the Fine Arts (1893), Hildebrand asserted that real space should be “secured” and “stabilized” in sculpture as a pictorial and frontal image, a requirement that he found well suited to relief sculpture.22 Building on this text, Wölfflin claimed that it was not enough to secure the contingencies of embodied viewing by making sculptures that contained a single vantage point. The object’s photographic mediation also had to be stabilized to orient the beholder to the sculpture’s assigned point of view. A properly educated photographer would grasp this perspicuous view, thus mirroring the sculptural plane in the photographic surface.23 Used correctly—​which is to say, from a vantage point that organized sculpture into a harmonious image—​t he camera could be an effective tool for reproduction. Writing roughly thirty years later, theorists Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin were more skeptical about photography’s ability to copy art objects. In his 1927 article “Photography,” Kracauer argued that “artworks suffer . . . through their reproductions,” noting that a photographic reproduction was a poor substitute for the original thing.24 “The spatial continuum from the camera’s perspective predominates the spatial appearance of the perceived object,” the critic warned, adding, “the likeness that the image bears to it effaces the contours of the object’s history.”25 For Kracauer the issue was how photography hardened an object’s spatial and temporal resonance into a two-dimensional, static frame; he situated his critique in a condemnation of the social function of photographs as mediating—​and impoverishing—​experience, memory, and history.26 Benjamin shared these doubts, even though he celebrated photography’s ability to “bring things closer” to the masses, making possible a socially engaged mode of view-

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ing.27 “In even the most perfect reproduction,” he wrote, “one thing is lacking: the here and now of the work of art—​its unique existence in a particular place. It is this unique existence—​and nothing else—​t hat bears the mark of the history to which the work has been subject. This history includes changes to the physical structure of the work over time, together with any changes in ownership.”28 Lost in a mechanical reproduction was the object’s authorial presence in a particular time and place, or what Benjamin termed its “aura.” Although he would later lament the loss of the aura more overtly in essays such as “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” his essays of the 1930s already convey some doubt about mass reproduction, which risked obliterating the object’s spatial and temporal histories, or its connection to the “here and now.”29 These historians and theorists were responding to a world in which the experience of things was increasingly mediated by the camera. Even as they recognized the uses of mass reproduction for the study of art objects, they identified its dangers. Sculptors, too, reacted to this uniquely modern problem by controlling the public image of their sculptures, governing the process of reproduction. Some—​including Auguste Rodin and Alberto Giacometti—​worked with professional photographers. Rodin, for instance, closely directed a coterie of photographers whom he contracted to document his work.30 Others—​among them Medardo Rosso, Constantin Brancusi, Pablo Picasso, and Henry Moore—​photographed their sculptures themselves, taking over from the professional photographers who had been hired by their galleries or dealers. Brancusi went so far as to manage nearly every aspect of his works’ presentation. In addition to refusing to allow others to photograph his work, he reprimanded editors who attempted to alter his photographs in reproduction.31 In seizing control of the documentary process, these sculptors made images that refused to adhere to standards of documentation. Nineteenth-century firms like Alinari or Bruckmann developed visual norms for photographing sculpture, borrowing them in turn from early modern reproductive prints.32 As Joel Snyder has argued, in the nineteenth century a shared style of transparency and believability was established through a uniform and deindividualized set of traits.33 Those conventions included distant views; frontal or three-quarter vantage points; neutral, plain backgrounds; narrow framing; and soft, even lighting. Pictured through these controls, objects were detached from their original social, historical, and spatial contexts and envisioned as pure form—​as things unmoored from their settings. In fact, as Frederick Bohrer has argued, it is no accident that these standards of documentation were systematized alongside art historical approaches of connoisseurship and formalism. Bohrer observes a direct correspondence between discourses of photographic objectivity in the late nineteenth century and the emergence of “the study of art as a rationalized, objectifiable matter.”34 Objects, presented in a clear and legible pictorial field and miniaturized in a transportable format, could be classified, cataloged, and compared on the basis of their formal features.35 André Malraux envisioned as much with his concept of the Musée Imaginaire, which described a world of art objects

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from differing historical periods and geographies brought together on the printed page. Reproduced as a microcosm, an assortment of objects could be studied and compared on the basis of style.36 Resisting the drive to rationalize and systematize, modern sculptors often turned away from established models of documentation. Rather than contain their objects in a neutral, decontextualized visual field, they mobilized unsettling vantage points, dramatic settings, irregular frames, and theatrical lighting techniques to picture an imaginative encounter with sculpture. In their hands, photographic documentation was a highly individualized, nonstandard practice. Beginning in the 1880s, for instance, Rosso animated his cast wax sculptures by assuming intimate and close-up points of view and by cropping his images tightly.37 Framed in a narrow view (see figs. 26 and 27), his photographs grip the viewer by suggesting that his sculpture is brought to life. Rosso also materialized his photographs’ surfaces by tearing and altering the photographic paper (see fig. 44). In a very different mode, Edward Steichen famously monumentalized Rodin’s failed monument to Balzac in collaboration with the sculptor in 1908. Steichen’s photographs transform what he perceived as the work’s “harsh, chalky effect” into a romanticized, imposing form by silhouetting the figure in the moonlight.38 Brancusi, for his part, in a set of photographs he took around 1923 (see figs. 60 and 61), depicted his sculptures grouped amid blocks of stone and wood in the studio, exposing them in a bright flash of light. His images fuse the industrial with the primordial by presenting his objects in a space of ruin and disorder.39 Picasso, too, used photography to stage correspondences between his Guitar and works in two dimensions.40 In images taken of his studio wall, the artist made and remade his work, deploying his camera to chart and record its different spatial incarnations. Finally, Moore used photography to display his sculptures in a pastoral setting, England’s green fields, frequently amplifying the sculptures’ size in a trick of scale.41 A photograph of Reclining Figure taken in 1938 (see fig. 28), for instance, magnifies the small form so that it appears on a par with the landscape. The camera suggests the massive scale that Moore, in his early sculptures, had not yet achieved.42 These photographs are diverse, but appropriately so. Each grapples with sculptural documentation as something that is varied, nonuniform. In each the camera is used not to present the sculpture in a legible plane or in a visually clear framework but to creatively distort or amplify sculpture—​by exaggerating the camera’s dislocation of scale, by materializing the photographic surface through bright exposures or scratches, or by using the photograph’s edge to imagine new placements and vantages for objects. For these modern sculptors, the camera was an extension of a sculptural project. It was a flexible tool that could keep pace with changing and experimental definitions of sculpture, or with modernists’ attempts to offer, as Alex Potts writes in The Sculptural Imagination, “a radical alternative to the classicizing and monumentalizing tendencies of traditional sculpture.” 43 In their shift away from the imperatives of monumentality and classical figuration, modern sculptors made objects that were fragmentary and

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itinerant, provisional, and open. In their photography, they used the camera as a tool of contingency, by upending and dematerializing, remonumentalizing and memorializing, their sculptures, imagining new and changeable connections and placements. Rather than relying on the camera to clearly locate their objects in a stable pictorial field, these artists often employed it to further shift their conception of what a modernist object was and how it would be encountered. Smith, for his part, similarly used photography to unsettle and reinvent his objects. Like Brancusi, Picasso, and Moore, many of whose images the artist would have seen in reproduction, he used photography to enact a pictorial encounter with sculpture. He staged his objects in dialogue with one another as well as with their surroundings, photographed them from unexpected vantage points, and used jarring framing techniques. He rejected the notion that a photograph should clearly present a sculpture in a neutral or stabilizing image and instead pictorialized his objects in a range of ways. Smith’s pictorial encounter with sculpture is thus different from the pictorialist photographic movement, which took place in Europe and the United States in the late 1890s and early 1900s. Although Smith registered the materiality of the photographic surface, he did not share pictorialism’s nostalgic subject matter; nor was he interested in fetishizing the developing process, since he did not develop his own photographs after the 1930s. By evoking the term pictorial, I aim to communicate how Smith and other modern sculptors used the camera to picture, envision, suspend, animate, isolate, or otherwise construe a visual encounter, recalling Michael Baxandall’s use of the term: “By pictorialization,” Baxandall wrote, “I mean the deployment of the resources of the medium—​t he ordering of color, tone, edge, and figure—​not just the bare registration of a subject matter. From this, it seemed to me, one might be able to get a better foundation for one’s view of mediated social meaning in early Renaissance painting generally.” 4 4 Baxandall was describing his approach to the social and artistic facts of painting in Trecento Siena. But his definition can also apply to photographs by modern sculptors and how Smith “deploy[ed] . . . the resources of the medium,” which for him included vantage point, setting, lighting, and frame. Smith resisted a photographic model of transparency that would have entailed the “bare registration of a subject matter.” 45 He made vivid the camera’s reinvention of objects, spaces, and bodies, and it is through studying these qualities that we discover a sculptor coming to terms with reproduction as a social fact and a public display. For Smith, a photograph was a document or record—​furnishing what Roland Barthes has called a “certificate of presence” 4 6 —​but it was also a coded framework of representation. Smith worked against a definition of photography as transparent even as he used the medium to document his sculpture. We can glean as much in a series of drawings he made around 1935 in an unlikely place: his 1932 English edition of Hildebrand’s Problem of Form in the Fine Arts. The young artist drew a scaffolding of diagonals, circles, and arcs over the book’s photographic illustrations. Many of the reproductions—​which were stock photographs taken by firms like Bruckmann and added to the first English

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Figure 7. David Smith, Untitled (Drawing on Illustration in Adolf von Hildebrand, The Problem of Form, 1913, Page 73), c. 1935. Graphite on printed paper. The Estate of David Smith, New York.

edition of the publication47—​presented sculptures against black backgrounds and from three-quarter vantages, which secured the object for view. Taking aim at figure 19, for instance, captioned “Ancient Sculpture. Illustrates Clearness of Total Space,” Smith’s pencil cuts into the stable imagery, remaking classical form and photographic surface alike as a fractured network of lines (fig. 7).48 His drawing dismantles the photograph’s presentation of a frontal and predictable object, instead proposing an image of sculpture as a vital, fragmentary surface. The visual clarity of both sculpture and photograph is broken by Smith’s use of line. A few years earlier, in 1931, Smith himself had experimented with photography as an ordering framework for objects. In October that year, Smith and his wife, artist Dorothy

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Figure 8. David Smith, Virgin Islands, St. Thomas, Looking across the Bay at the City of St. Thomas from the West Indian Company (LTD), c. 1931. Gelatin silver print, 3⅞ × 4⅞ in. (9.8 × 12.4 cm). The Estate of David Smith, New York.

Dehner, traveled to Saint Thomas, Virgin Islands, where they lived for eight months. There Smith painted in the cubist style he had practiced with Jan Matulka at the Art Students League, where he studied from 1927 to 1929. But he also experimented with other media: with sculpture, which he carved from coral and constructed from wire, wood, and found objects, and with photography. Armed with a press camera and knowledge of apertures, lenses, and developing processes he learned from Ralph Paiewonsky, a local pharmacist, chemist, and amateur photographer, Smith took a wide range of photographs in the Virgin Islands.49 His notebooks reveal the intensity of his study: he recorded the camera’s aperture, distance, and focus, as well as the weather conditions, for each shot he took. In one mode, he adopted a formalist approach to document the living and working conditions of island inhabitants. His photo-essay, never published, demonstrated that conditions of local populations on the British and French colonies were superior to those on the American-colonized island of Saint Thomas (fig. 8).50 Some photographs present spaces by framing them in a planar composition or use vantage points that abstract the latticework of steel structures, for instance, into a horizontal plane. These photographs echo those Smith would have seen by László Moholy-Nagy in Cahiers d’Art in 1929, and

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they approach the disorienting vantage points and clear contrasts of the European avantgarde.51 At each click of the shutter, the artist adopted a formalist aesthetic to record his subject, relying on angles, black-and-white contrasts, and diagonal compositions to telegraph his political message.52 Smith also made images in a very different mode, experimenting with the photograph’s ability to confound perception. He created double exposures of coral and shells, layering registers of space to create a disorienting pictorial field (fig. 9). In one photograph, a string of luminescent beads, repeated twice, overlays the textured shapes, double exposed, of shell and coral. The montage creates a serenely dissonant tableau of divergent shapes, as if the photograph were taken underwater. Smith also cut and manipulated his negatives to fabricate photo-collages (fig. 10). The collage in figure 10, for instance, asks viewers to move between the flat cutout shapes of the upper right, reminiscent of Picasso’s canvases, and illusionistic space glimpsed in snippets: from left to right, the image contains a scene of a train track telescoping into deep space, an enlarged and magnified view of a nautical chain, and a faded shot of a boat at an unsettling angle. Smith has painted dots on the surface of the negative, using drawing to merge these discordant views—​each constituting a different scale—​into a single plane. The collage creates a disjunctive tableau that moves between illusionistic depth and flattened surface, asking viewers to shuttle between disjunctive scales and registers. In the Virgin Islands, the artist also arranged shells, rocks, and pieces of coral and photographed them to create surrealist tableaux that influenced his first constructed sculptures; the camera’s shutter is the glue that holds the constructions in place.53 These photographs offer a unique view of how the young artist used the camera to shape and frame objects by changing distance, vantage point, and focus. In several shots taken of the same fabricated scene, for instance, Smith has used shadow and light to describe a desolate, timeless, and fragmentary landscape. In one view, the setup is evident and the photograph constructs an assemblage of incongruous objects (fig. 11). In another, Smith has shifted the vantage point and focus to anthropomorphize the scene (fig. 12). Eroded pieces of coral are reconceived as bodily fragments, lost in a ruin of branches and towering shells and encircled by a wire draped across the scene. Smith conjures an animate, primordial space in which objects are imagined to be part of a posthuman landscape. Another shot of a different installation uses point of view and focus to magnify upright pieces of coral, inventing an anthropomorphic scene (fig. 13). By changing the vantage point, proximity, focus, and frame, the artist demonstrates that objects can appear as many different things; shells and rocks are animated into diverse and lively scenes by the camera’s controls. In these photographs, Smith structures a photographic equivalent to the incongruous and dreamlike spaces imagined in paint by Matulka, Picasso, Giorgio de Chirico, Yves Tanguy, and Jean Lurçat, artists whose paintings Smith aimed to emulate. Yet the differences between painting and photography are crucial: using photography, the artist has built a pictorial world from

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Figure 9. David Smith, Untitled (Virgin Islands Photomontage), c. 1931. Gelatin silver print, 6 × 3⅝ in. (15.2 × 9.2 cm). The Estate of David Smith, New York.

Figure 10. David Smith, Untitled (Photo-Collage), c. 1932–​35. Gelatin silver print, 4¾ × 3½ in. (12.1 × 8.9 cm). Private collection, New York.

Figure 11. David Smith, Untitled (Virgin Islands Tableau), c. 1931–​32. Gelatin silver print with applied varnish, 6⁷⁄16 × 9¼ in. (16.4 × 23.5 cm). Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, North Carolina (Museum purchase with funds from the Lynn Richardson Prickett and Laura Weill Cone Endowments [1998.9]). Figure 12. David Smith, Untitled (Virgin Islands Tableau), c. 1931–​32. Gelatin silver print with applied varnish, 9⅞ × 73⁄16 in. (25.1 × 18.3 cm). The Estate of David Smith, New York.

Figure 13. David Smith, Untitled (Virgin Islands Tableau), c. 1931–​32. Gelatin silver print, 3½ × 4⅝ in. (8.9 × 11.7 cm). The Estate of David Smith, New York.

physical things. Rocks, shells, and coral fragments, as well as the camera itself, stand in for the brush and canvas. In his Virgin Islands photographs, the artist used his camera to destabilize things, reinventing them by manipulating the camera’s focus, vantage point, and frame. Although the sculptor would not make photographs in this experimental vein after the 1930s, what he learned in making these images would affect his later investigations. He laid the foundation for the photography of sculpture at the very moment that he was beginning to make sculptures: with the camera he would reproduce and transform the objects of his focus, both capturing a sculpture’s likeness and animating it pictorially. Look again at the photograph of Portrait of a Lady Painter chosen for the cover of Arts magazine (see plate 1). Smith’s image tells little about the object as a three-dimensional form that unfolds in space. Missing are the residues of the sand-casting process on its densely scratched and patinated surface, which Smith left behind when he welded separate casts of found objects that he had coated in clay and chose not to polish or grind the weld. None of this information—​which would be gleaned seeing the sculpture firsthand or in an up-close view—​is visible. Rather, the photograph organizes Smith’s sculpture’s pictorial content from a distant view. Seen from a low vantage point and

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cropped at its base, the figure of the female painter is magnified and projected against a pale sky, a monotone backdrop. Her body thrusts away from a stake that punctures her torso, and her palette head hangs back. The violence of the scene—​a gendered portrait of aggression pictured against the blurry contours of a mountain range—​comes into full view. The sculpture is dramatized in a pictorial framework. What is more, by disconnecting the sculpture from the ground, Smith’s photograph activates an image of the work as placeless and siteless, setting in motion what Rosalind Krauss termed modern sculpture’s “nomadic” condition, or the homelessness of modern sculpture.54 Sculpture is disconnected, untethered from place and space. Its violence is magnified as a free-floating projection. It was through photographs like this one that Smith’s public came to know his work. The sculptor’s own images were published in magazines, sent to dealers and critics, and used as illustrations in books and catalogs. Until recently, however, these photographs have been read as transparent images of his sculpture, a designation that the sculptor in part promoted. When asked to supply a credit line for his photographs, he frequently responded, “Copyright TIW,” shorthand for the name of his studio, Terminal Iron Works.55 Writing to the curator and art historian Sam Hunter, Smith went even further to reject his authorship: “All negatives I’ve sent are mine—​I do not want any credit for photos. If such is necessary, in very fine print just say all photos not [otherwise] credited copyright TIW.”56 These phrases suggest that Smith viewed photography as instrumental to his practice; his camera was no different from his oxyacetylene torch or steel-toed boots. It was one piece of equipment among many in the sculpture workshop. Yet to take Smith at his word—​to read his camera as an unmediated machine—​is to miss his expansive and varied use of photography as an art form in its own right. What are we to make, for instance, of commanding views in the idiom of Portrait of a Lady Painter, which dramatize the sculpture’s autonomy by separating the work from the ground on which it stands? The low vantage point of these photographs suggests sculpture’s dislocation, exaggerating—​even celebrating—​t he work’s sitelessness. How do these photographs direct a specifically pictorial encounter with sculpture? Or, to take a different set of images, what of the many group photographs the sculptor took, such as the unsettling and peculiar image of sculptures from his Tanktotem series on a dock on Lake George (see fig. 49)? In photographs like this one, the lake serves as an unexpected setting for welded steel objects. The image raises questions about sculpture’s belonging in a postwar world; staging a collective of figural sculptures, Smith suggests that each one be read as individual and self-sufficient, in tension with its surroundings. Or, to take another series, Smith photographed his painted sculptures outside his Adirondack studio using color film. In these 1960s photographs, such as shots he took of Tanktotem X (see plates 30–​35), the artist maps a spatial encounter with polychrome sculpture. Approaching the work through many different vantages, Smith structures correspondences between the colors of applied paint and the natural hues of the landscape. How

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do these photographs call for a new reading of Smith’s painted surfaces, as seen by the sculptor’s camera? None of these questions—​which are raised by Smith’s photography and ultimately influence readings of his sculpture—​are explored in the historical accounts of his work. From the 1940s on, critics, curators, and art historians used the sculptor’s own photographs to illustrate their publications. As photographs that were consulted by authors to write their studies, they influenced some of the most enduring and significant accounts of his sculpture, by Greenberg, Frank O’Hara, Hilton Kramer, Rosalind Krauss, and others. Smith regularly gave his critics photographs of his sculptures with notes about the objects’ sizes, surface colors, and dates of completion, who used them to write their appraisals and to elucidate their arguments in publications. Krauss relied on Smith’s photographs in writing her 1969 Harvard dissertation, which she expanded into a monograph, Terminal Iron Works: The Sculpture of David Smith, published in 1971; her catalogue raisonné of Smith’s work, which she compiled as part of her dissertation and published in 1977; and her chapter on his sculpture in Passages in Modern Sculpture, also published in 1977.57 She recounted in 2006 that she had depended on Smith’s photographic archive, which the Marlborough-Gerson Gallery made available to her, to assemble the catalogue raisonné and develop her analysis.58 Nonetheless, Krauss, in her rigorous and illuminating studies, did not address how Smith’s photographs directed her readings of his sculpture. Even when she returned to the very topic of the photographs in 1998, by then recognizing them as part of Smith’s sculptural project, she did not discuss the connections between his photographs and her analyses except to observe their similarities.59 This representational oversight on the part of Krauss, Greenberg, O’Hara, and others has far-reaching consequences for the study of Smith’s sculpture and raises broad questions about the role of photographic reproductions in writing the history of modern sculpture. Too often, photographs of sculpture have been read as transparent images, and their mediation of the objects they picture has been overlooked. How, for a start, do we begin to decouple critics’ accounts of his works from Smith’s photographic mediations, when the sculptor’s own images influenced their writing? When critics appraised his works in phrases such as this one—​“Silhouetted against the sky, as they should be seen, these hieroglyphs in space have a clarity and finality that only a powerful imagination can achieve”—​do their terms apply to Smith’s sculptures or his photographs, or both?60 What role did the sculptor’s photographs play in Greenberg’s and Krauss’s foundational assessments of his work—​accounts that also shaped their readings of the category of modern sculpture as a whole? In 1998, Joan Pachner began to answer these weighty questions. She reintroduced Smith’s photographs as his own in two articles, one of which accompanied the first exhibition of the artist’s photography. Pachner’s research coincided with a spate of exhibition catalogs and scholarly essays published on photography by modern sculptors, among them Rosso, Brancusi, and Moore.61 David Smith in Two Dimensions builds on

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these earlier conversations. It offers the first comprehensive study of a sculptor’s pho­ tography by focusing on Smith and by situating his photographs alongside those by other modernists. In so doing, it suggests a reappraisal of his sculptural practice that includes multiple media. Taking my methodology of close reading from recent studies of photography that attend to the material and pictorial qualities of the photograph, I demonstrate how Smith’s photographs are documents of sculpture that stage and frame an aesthetic and rhetorical encounter with objects.62 Broader discourses of modern sculpture are key to my story, and one chief aim of this book is to challenge formalist narratives of the purity of medium and of sculpture as an autonomous object. I show how an artist moved fluidly between media to forge a boldly expansive definition of the sculptural object. A study of Smith’s photographs unsettles foundational concepts for modernism, such as medium specificity and autonomy, shed­ ding new light on the intersections between media in the postwar period. David Smith in Two Dimensions participates in a recent discursive turn in the dis­ cipline of art history that asks us to locate meaning in an object’s mediating condi­ tions—​the contingent factors surrounding its display—​in addition to its formal and material properties.63 In The Sculptural Imagination (2000), for instance, Alex Potts attends to the many modes by which modern sculpture solicits and activates a viewer’s embodied response. In his comprehensive account, photography is one of several con­ tingent factors, along with setting and surface lighting, that direct a viewer’s spatial encounter. Yet Potts’s expansive study does not linger on the question of how sculptors themselves structured the display of their objects by incorporating photography into their sculptural practices. That question is the focus of this book, which shows how Smith’s photographs ask us to return to his objects with new insight. In chapters that unfold chronologically, this study explores how the artist staged his sculptures in connection to one another, the landscape setting, and the human body. The book’s first three chapters introduce Smith’s turn to photography and exa­ mine some of the most important images that came to dominate the reception of his sculpture in the 1940s and 1950s. Chapter 1 focuses on an exhibition of Smith’s sculpture that was organized by the American Association of University Women, which traveled across the midwestern United States from 1946 to 1950. Because of the expense of shipping steel sculpture, the exhibition presented only a few sculptures—​from two to nine sculptures at each venue—​a longside thirty photographs, which were enlarged and mounted on Masonite. Twenty-one of these photographs were Smith’s own. This exhibition reflected back to Smith the importance of mass reproduction and cemented his commitment to photography as a public presentation of his sculpture. During the 1940s, Smith tested out a number of different photographic models for documenting his objects. This chapter tells the story of how he settled on a single approach, placing his camera at or below the sculpture’s pedestal and presenting his objects against a resonant setting. This became his signature style; it reenvisioned objects as silhouettes and disconnected

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them from their surroundings, qualities that I compare with those found in Rosso’s, Brancusi’s, and Moore’s photographs. In chapter 2, I focus on Smith’s use of vantage point by looking at a body of photographs he made of everyday objects and landscapes—​slide transparencies that the sculptor used to illustrate his lectures in the 1950s. I show how he used an avantgardist strategy of defamiliarization to unsettle vision and call attention to the surface of the photographic image, borrowing on formalist conventions. Pointing his camera at the ground from an airplane in flight, for instance, Smith reoriented vision to a horizontal plane, translating the landscape below into a language of abstraction. I connect these images to the artist’s presentations of his sculpture, which also used unsettling vantage points to defamiliarize his objects, and I show how these images mediated art historical accounts of his objects, by Krauss, Greenberg, and others. From here, a new understanding of sculptural surface begins to take shape, one that is tied to the photographic plane. Turning to Smith’s use of setting, chapter 3 analyzes the sculptor’s use of the landscape to animate an encounter with sculptures as distinctive things. In the photographs Smith made of a single object, sculpture is both situated in its environment and radically separate from it: free-floating, open, and unenclosed. In photographs of sculptural groups, he positioned objects in loose collectives to animate them as independent, autonomous forms. These resonant photographs are part of the broader staging in modernism of the sculptural group—​by Brancusi, Moore, Giacometti, and Louise Bourgeois. Returning to formulations of modern sculptural autonomy, this chapter shows how sculpture’s homelessness or sitelessness was imagined photographically. Autonomy is shown here to be part of the rhetorical staging of sculpture in a photograph. In chapters 4 and 5, I explore a shift in Smith’s photographic practice that took place in the 1960s. Chapter 4 examines the artist’s 1961 color slide transparencies of his painted objects—​images that raise the contentious issue of his polychrome sculpture. Since Krauss revealed in 1974 that Greenberg had stripped the paint from seven of Smith’s sculptures and left the paint on three others to deteriorate, the issue of color in Smith’s sculpture has been at a standstill. No scholar has fully explored Smith’s use of color as structuring an elusive encounter with sculptural space. This chapter initiates the discussion by focusing on the artist’s color photographs of his objects, many of which are reproduced in color here for the first time. These photographs provide a new account of the role of color in his project for sculpture—​and give evidence of his use of space and color in his photographic strategies, a style different from what we have seen before. His strategies also underscore the sculptor’s commitment to working across media. Chapter 5 continues to map this shift by focusing on a group of nude photographs from 1963 and 1964. Scholars have read these photographs as working aids to Smith’s nude paintings. I offer an alternative reading that correlates the naked female body in these photographs with the artist’s sculptural explorations in 1963 and 1964 of volume,

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mass, and space in his Cubi and Menand series. These photographs also stage a return to the role of gender in Smith’s sculpture, raising questions about desire and possession by putting a body on display. I connect these evocative images to the artist’s formulation of the vulgar, a term that stood in for Smith’s project of open-endedness. Addressing a broad range of images, these chapters show Smith to be expansively and diversely engaged with the medium of photography. With the camera, he kept pace with his sculptural experiments, using it to define what an object was and how it would be projected publicly. Not an ancillary medium, photography was intimately tied to his project for sculpture—​t hrough it Smith could structure a uniquely modernist fantasy of viewing.

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1 TOWARD MASS REPRODUCTION AS A PUBLIC DISPLAY Yet the frantic abolition of all distances brings no nearness; for nearness does not consist in shortness of distance. What is least remote from us in point of distance, by virtue of its picture on film or its sound on the radio, can remain far from us. MARTIN HEIDEGGER, “THE THING,” 1950

The year is 1946. David Smith has received two of his largest exhibitions to date, a pair of shows that earned him wide praise and helped to secure his reputation as “the best young sculptor in the country,” as Clement Greenberg then lionized him in The Nation.1 Each exhibition included what the New Yorker critic Robert Coates called in a review Smith’s “frenzied” postwar production, and each assumed a different audience using two distinct modes of display.2 The exhibitions reflected back to Smith two models of what sculpture’s public address could be: one was spatial and material, inciting an experience of steel sculpture in the round, while the other was photographic, in which his works’ pictorial qualities were amplified and dramatized in two dimensions. In New York, the exhibition encompassed two Fifty-Seventh Street galleries—​Smith’s own, the Willard, and the neighboring Buchholz—​to present fifty-four sculptures, along with drawings, in a way that invited critics to track Smith’s career. Coates noted a “slump” during the war and a frenetic pace afterward, as the artist produced twenty sculptures in a frenzy he attributed to a “wartime obsession . . . still working its way to the surface.”3 Greenberg observed a similar explosion of subject matter in Smith’s postwar productions, although he was less impressed, noting that Smith’s “phase of extravagance, disorder, and agitation is something he seems compelled to work his way through,” linking the artist’s “baroque vein” to “late history.” 4 In an essay he wrote for the exhibition catalog, W. R. Valentiner hoped to couch those “wartime obsession[s]” in formal analysis. He explained how Smith manipulated two-dimensional images to achieve a three-dimensional encounter: “By walking around

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these sculptures, which are intended to be seen from all sides, the masses appear to be constantly shifting, revealing new views of exploding energy, of which parts seem to break through the frame unexpectedly, as if darting into space.”5 Valentiner presented Smith’s imagery of violence and war by evoking spatial instability and broken, bursting frames—​a language aimed at a public looking for narratives of postwar reconstruction.6 The critic Harold Clurman took a similar tack: This young American sculptor has put the nervousness, conflict, horror of our day into forms that seem to fly. They have so much movement that one almost expects to see them burst through the walls and take refuge in some more appropriate place than the rooms in which they are imprisoned. When I first saw these pieces I had the impulse to protect myself by an indulgence in the usual cant: that they might be more successful as drawings, that they seemed to derive from post cubist paintings with the now ubiquitous use of bird forms and special animal life as motifs to convey painful ideas. But Smith uses steel; and this is an inspiration, a novelty that in the final count convinces us of its inevitability. Steel strikes us not only as a modern, but as an American medium. . . . In Smith, the violence is a high-voltage shock.7

Deciding that Smith’s imagery would not be better rooted in two dimensions, Clurman noted how Smith’s sculpture nonetheless ruthlessly underscored conflict: the “highvoltage shock” suited sculptures, especially those made from steel. Meanwhile the second Smith exhibition, sponsored by the American Association of University Women, was beginning to circulate to thirteen small cities in the American South and Midwest. It too had a retrospective pitch, and in the course of four years it traveled to such venues as the East Central State College and Public Library in Ada, Oklahoma, and the Indiana State Teachers College in Terre Haute, Indiana, where the “median city [population was] 12,000.”8 The works that traveled to these midwestern towns, packed in crates “with hinged, padlocked lids,” were mostly Smith’s photographs; only two to nine of Smith’s sculptures were exhibited at any given stop.9 The photographs, thirty in all, twenty-one of them taken by Smith himself, had been professionally enlarged to poster size and mounted on heavy Masonite. The emphasis on photographs was due to the prohibitive costs of shipping steel sculpture.10 Although the exhibition’s organizer, Lura Beam, had reservations about photography because it was too easily “accepted . . . [as] the real thing,” she defended her decision to use the photographs, stating, “It was photographs or nothing.”11 The exhibition served to introduce Smith’s sculpture to a public vastly different from his New York audience—​a public well equipped, according to Beam, with a knowledge of steel production and machine shops.12 If the New York exhibition solidified the spatial innovations of Smith’s sculptures, the traveling show displayed a different model of his objects in their photographic reproductions. The exhibition made a significant impact on the sculptor. What began in

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practicality—​photographs were cheaper to exhibit than sculptures—​ended in an illuminating definition of what photography could achieve: it could structure a transportable display for sculpture that rerouted its spatial imagery in a pictorial plane. Smith was impressed by the audience the American Association of University Women show had produced. Although none of the works had sold, the exhibition’s travels meant that Smith’s work had reached a broad public, numbers that inspired confidence.13 On his copy of the flyer for the exhibition, Smith scrawled some notes after the show’s figures had come in: “Traveling Show / To Library [sic] and Small Towns /  During 2 Years—​20,000 attendance / american association of university women / Exhibition still being booked.”14 In the AAUW exhibition, Smith found a way to invent and project his sculptures photographically, thus settling on a corollary to the photographs that Constantin Brancusi disseminated of his sculptures, images Smith knew well.15 Beginning in the 1920s, Brancusi had crafted a public image for his work, publishing his photographs in journals such as Little Review, This Quarter, Cahiers d’Art, and Minotaure. Like the elder sculptor, Smith seized on reproduction as a public address, thanks to the AAUW display. One measure of the AAUW exhibition’s success can be found in a letter the sculptor wrote to his dealer, Marian Willard, in January 1947. Smith pleaded for additional illustrations in an upcoming catalog, citing the uses of photographic reproduction in the reception of his work: “As many or all, if possible in way of reproduction—​because reproduction seems to work well and introduce it to out of town people who don’t see the show. Reproductions stick in files, libraries and make contact in peoples [sic] minds so when they do get to New York they already know the work in part. Reproduction seems to act as first acquaintance—​and eliminate some of the barriers. In our case, I just think reproduction helps the acquaintance and acquisition. I think at least 1 piece was sold in last show from reproduction.”16 When Willard did not include what the sculptor thought were enough images, Smith expressed his disappointment, arguing to Willard that “the catalogue cost is an investment that pays off, if not during the show, during the year.”17 Illustrations could reach a wide audience, making an impact long after his objects were returned to the studio. As a result of the AAUW exhibition—​which showed him the uses of reproduction—​ Smith devoted most of his funds from a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 1950 to the purchase of photographic equipment, no small commitment for an artist who had recently complained of a “bad financial year.”18 Smith acquired two cameras and lenses, a tripod, and an exposure meter, justifying these expenses in his renewal application: “Due to my isolation it seemed necessary to purchase the camera, for shop record and for publicity.”19 In the ensuing months, he reshot the sculptures he had made to date, using a consistent style that pictured sculptures individually. He also developed an archival system to catalog the resulting images: each negative was stored in a labeled envelope, with a contact print, marked with crop lines or other instructions for his printer, pasted to its exterior.

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Figure 14. David Smith, Sketchbook Page (Drawing of Cubi III [1963]), c. 1963. Crayon and ink on paper, 83⁄16 × 5⅜ in. (20.8 × 13.7 cm). The Estate of David Smith, New York.

Photography was one of two media Smith used to record his output: he also made drawings of his sculptures in his notebooks, which he supplemented with notations on the objects’ sizes, dimensions, and colors. In a sketchbook drawing of Cubi III (1961), for instance, Smith created a schematic line drawing to note the basic contours of the sculpture, situating it in a spatial setting designated by a horizon line (fig. 14). He noted the height and width, title, and date and made other simple notations on the work. But Smith regularly sent his photographs—​not his drawings—​to critics, curators, dealers, and patrons for publication in journals, newspapers, and exhibition catalogs. Unlike drawing, photography could act as a transcription of his production and make his objects visible to a wide audience. Indeed, it seemed as though by the early 1950s,

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Smith had registered the need to embrace publicity owing to a changed system of artistic patronage. As he told an audience in Norman, Oklahoma, in 1953, “[The artist] has no patron to cajole, but as Herbert Read has pointed out, his great embarrassment is publicity, which seems a necessity in order to become known, but which is so broad and undefined that he couldn’t aim his concept to it if he tried.”20 Managing publicity—​however ambiguous and difficult the task—​was the only option, given the lack of government or individual patronage. Statements like these testify to the artist’s commitment to photography as a necessary display for sculpture—​a commitment he made between 1946 and 1950, during the years the AAUW exhibition circulated. In the early 1950s, however, Smith also expressed reservations about the camera’s ability to adequately document his sculpture. In 1952 he levied a harsh judgment on “the camera eye”—​a photographic mode of perception that risked compressing the object’s spatial history. Analogizing sculpture to an apple, he wrote in “The Language Is Image”: “The true reality of an apple is not any one naturalistic image. The eye of man is not a camera eye, it is a cerebral eye. It is not a two-dimensional photograph, nor any one view. The reality is actually all apples in all actions. Apples are red, yellow, green, round, halved, quartered, sweet, sour, rotten, sensuously felt, hanging, crushed to juice, and all the associations two years would take to tabulate, yet when stimulated the mind can select and experience the desired action in a flash: ‘apple’ is meaningless without memory.”21 Smith describes the process of viewing an object as open-ended and indeterminate, resulting in an abundant list of descriptors. Photography, by contrast, involved a limited and fixed mode of perception; it stopped the unrestricted process of embodied viewing in its tracks, compressing the spatial openness of an apple—​a sculpture—​into a single, concrete image. The problem with the photographic image went beyond its fixity in time and space, however. It was reproducible, a trait Smith vehemently rejected in his sculptural practice. In 1940, he told Maude Riley of Cue magazine: “I don’t cast things I make in the shop. In the first place, it wouldn’t be possible to duplicate them. If you like them at all, it’s not just the shape you like, it’s also the marks left by my hammer, my chisel, the file, or the sand blaster.”22 The artist was more emphatic in 1961. “I don’t even make copies,” he stressed to David Sylvester. “If I make a cast sculpture, I make one and all the marks are mine.”23 Although the sculptor used reproducible processes in his works, his resulting sculptures were original, handmade things. To make Portrait of a Lady Painter (see plate 1), for instance, Smith reused the molds he fabricated for Portrait of a Painter, completed two years before. To make the molds, he cast found objects, which he coated in clay, and sections of cardboard, which he pieced together using tape. Each mold was cast separately by a commercial foundry.24 Back in the studio, Smith welded the pieces together—​now configuring the parts differently than he did for Portrait of a Painter—​and added hatch marks and scratches to their surfaces. The resulting object is not a seamless cast but a reproduction that emphasizes the marks of its own making, echoing Rodin’s bronze-casting process: the joints between

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different pieces and the textured surfaces were pointed up and highlighted rather than obscured. Casting, for Smith, would produce a single, original object. Individual and handmade, Smith’s casts opposed the mass-produced object or the serial flow of the assembly line, both of which he saw evidence of in the posthumous casts of works by Rodin and Edgar Degas. As a reproducible copy—​and a spatially delimited one at that—​photography raised questions about the role of reproduction in Smith’s work, testing his commitment to handmade sculpture. What would it mean to reproduce his sculpture in a photograph? What would his sculpture look like, if it were not an exact copy or replica? In the period during and after the AAUW exhibition, Smith grappled with these questions by testing out a range of pictorial strategies for documenting his work. Like his use of casting to produce handmade objects, Smith employed his camera to create independent images in their own right. Not straightforward or mechanical copies, his photographic reproductions unsettle expectations of what a document is. They materialize and make visible the photograph’s mediating process.

D O C U M E N TA R Y M O D E L S

In a 1937 drawing, Smith detailed the workings of a professional photographer’s studio (fig. 15). It depicts the photographer Leo Lances, whom Smith knew from the Art Students League, crouching in front of his tripod. Lances’s hand reaches around the camera’s bellows to adjust the lens. The object of his attention is Smith’s Reclining Figure, completed the preceding year. Positioned on a table, the open, constructed figure is set against a rectangular swath of paper, a backdrop that curves down from the tacks used to fasten it to the wall. The lamp, suspended on an adjustable stand, illuminates the setup. In a small inset, Smith presents the scene from a different point of view. Smith describes the props and accessories of the photographer’s studio, alerting us to the conventions of sculptural documentation. He would have seen such tropes used in countless illustrations in magazines and books, from the Bruckmann photographs included in the 1932 edition of Adolf von Hildebrand’s The Problem of Form to the images used in W. R. Valentiner’s 1946 Origins of Modern Sculpture25 —​photographs that rely on the same conventions to present sculpture in neutral visual field. Smith himself mastered these conventions in 1938, the year John Graham hired him to document selected objects from Frank Crowninshield’s collection of African sculpture.26 Then the sculptor worked alongside Lances, and his resulting images evidenced the studied traits of sculptural documentation. In one photograph, Smith shot the object head-on using a vantage point above the pedestal, which imparts a sense of the sculpture’s depth and volume if not its scale (fig. 16). The plain drop cloth and paper covering the table—​and the uniform pedestal, which Smith likely built himself—​present the object in an empty space. The sculpture is enlarged to fill the frame, a specimen on view. In the photograph, an African sculpture is dissociated from its historical,

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Figure 15. David Smith, Photographer Leo Lances Taking a Picture of Reclining Figure, 1937. Ink and wash on paper, 7½ × 10⅛ in. (19.1 × 25.7 cm). The Estate of David Smith, New York.

religious, social, and spatial contexts.27 It is quarantined by its framing. But this space of order, of aesthetic indifference, is disrupted by Smith’s use of lighting. The abstract composition of shadows falling on the cloth detracts from the rhetoric of neutrality that the photograph otherwise declares. Not only does it reference something beyond the picture—​a window, perhaps—​but it also disrupts a formalist reading of the object, through the shadow, a pictorial abstraction. The image calls to mind Charles Sheeler’s use of shadows in his 1916 photographs of African sculptures, which dramatize cubic angularity and volume through the effects of light and dark. Smith was well versed in conventions of documentation, even as he disrupted them as early as the 1930s. These norms were reproduced in professional photographers’ presentations of his work, in images that presented sculpture in a decontextualized nonspace. After Smith’s first solo show, at the East River Gallery in 1938, his dealer, Marian Willard, hired a number of professional photographers to document his work, including Lances, Eliot Elisofon, Pinchos Horn, and Soichi Sunami.28 Their photographs followed the same documentary standards Smith had learned, organizing his sculpture in a neutral pictorial field.

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Figure 16. David Smith, Photograph of African Sculpture in Collection of Frank Crowninshield, c. 1935. Black-andwhite negative, 4¾ × 4⅜ in. (12.1 × 11.1 cm). The Estate of David Smith, New York.

When Smith himself first tried his hand at documenting his own sculptures in the 1930s, he had these documentary controls in mind but adapted them to include natural lighting. In 1936, at what was then his summer studio in Bolton Landing, New York, he pictured several of his first welded constructions. Taking his sculptures outside, he used a stump and a canvas as a pedestal and backdrop. Picturing Reclining Construction (1936), he made a number of shots of the sculpture’s different sides, turning the object for viewing, even propping it with a stick to make visible its top (fig. 17).29 Smith was not pleased with the results, and he wrote to his friend the artist Edgar Levy in November 1936: “I photographed most of my sculpture but it doesn’t appear any too well in the rustic setting.”30 It’s hard to know exactly what the sculptor found disappointing, but his high vantage point and distance from the sculpture may have been the problem. The landscape swallows his sculpture, making it look diminutive and unimpressive. What was needed was a gripping image of his work that conveyed his sculptures’ pictorial qualities. Nine years later Smith again turned to photography, while he was living in Bolton Landing year-round, a location that made it difficult for him to rely on his dealer’s New York–​based photographers. Now Smith again experimented with different lighting effects and backdrops, photographing his sculpture indoors as well as outdoors. In these photographs, many of which were included in the AAUW show, Smith took a comprehensive approach, using a range of experimental techniques. In some shots, he adopted the studied controls of the photographer’s studio. Photographing Head as Still Life II (1943), for instance, Smith positioned the head and its double pedestals against a plain backdrop, so that the object seems suspended in an empty space (fig. 18). An even light falls across its surface, emphasizing its folds and curves. A head-on vantage point permits easy visual access to the object, highlighting its spatial dimensions. Smith demonstrates his ability to capture a learned mode of photographic illusionism. Head as Still Life II is offered up without restraint as a threedimensional form. In other photographs, however, Smith dramatized his sculptures and, with his photographs, sought to lay bare the device of the camera, using it as an instrument capable of magnifying and abstracting sculptural form in a composition of contrast. Take, for instance, a photograph that Smith shot indoors of Aftermath Figure (1945; fig. 19). The artist has staged his sculpture against a cloth backdrop, but the crests and folds of the sheet make the background less a neutral prop and more an active part of the scene. Stark contrasts of light and dark introduce a quasi-melodramatic tone and dramatize the sculpture’s subject matter. Skewed lighting and irregular shadows animate the sculpture, which appears to lunge forward, straddling the light. Its phallic protrusion is echoed on the wall as a shadow, a spectral form. Power and corruption—​the qualities the title invokes—​are cast here as jarring light and dramatic angles, calling up the antiwar narrative behind the sculpture’s making. The photograph summons the skewed war-torn imagery of Picasso’s Guernica (1937) by referencing its schismatic black-andwhite shapes. In the image, the specters and figures of power come to life.

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Figure 17. David Smith, Photograph of Reclining Construction (1936), 1936. Gelatin silver print, 4⁷⁄16 × 3⅛ in. (11.3 × 7.9 cm). The Estate of David Smith, New York.

Figure 18. David Smith, Photograph of Head as Still Life II (1942), Bolton Landing, NY, c. 1943. Black-andwhite negative, 411⁄16 × 3½ in. (11.9 × 8.9 cm). The Estate of David Smith, New York.

Figure 19. David Smith, Photograph of Aftermath Figure (1945), c. 1945. Gelatin silver print, 915⁄16 × 8⅛ in. (25.2 × 20.6 cm). The Estate of David Smith, New York.

While Smith staged this interior shot as a gripping theater of light by calling attention to the backdrop—​otherwise invisible in professional photographer’s shots—​he also experimented with the control of focus. Picturing Classic Figure III (1944; fig. 20), the artist took his sculpture outside and made the figure part of an even, allover composition by blurring the landscape backdrop. The unfocused dappled shapes mime the sculpture’s bodily curves. Just as before, Smith underscores the photographic process by creating jarring effects with focus. The resulting image naturalizes the bodily forms of his female figure in a canvas of mottled dabs. In these two photographs as well as others he made in the mid-1940s, Smith sought a pictorial idiom for his sculpture that implicated the working mechanisms of documentation. He emphasized the effects of artificial lighting, the possibilities for distortion caused by the camera’s focus, and the materiality of the studio backdrop. In both interior and exterior shots, Smith followed a guiding structure: he aimed to visualize the procedures of documentation—​t he lighting and props that might otherwise go unnoticed in a standard documentary image of sculpture. The “optimal” views, head-on vantage points, and neutral backdrops present in his 1930s photographs of African objects: Smith abandoned these conventions when he picked up his camera in the mid-1940s. His photographs stress the camera as an independent and individualized framework in its own right, something capable of magnifying, dramatizing, and altering the objects of its focus. In two photographs, Smith pushed such experiments to an extreme. The sculptor now depicted his work using stark contrasts and irregular vantage points to present sculpture as part of an abstract composition. To document Spectre of War (1944; fig. 21), for instance, Smith placed it in the foreground, with a snow-covered field behind it—​a background that highlights the sculpture’s crisp, dark lines and pictorial content. He stationed his camera above the work, looking down. A horizon line is visible in the upper right corner of the image, a clue that this is some kind of inhabitable space. Yet the landscape appears at a remove, distanced from the sculpture by a blurred focus. Spectre of War hovers above its environment like a collaged shape cut from its surroundings, a figure against a planar ground. Once again, Smith structured a composition that uses pictorial contrast to thematize the pitch-black brutality of war. In these photographs, Smith rejects normative strategies of documentation in favor of jarring and nonuniform pictorial compositions. Although the sculptor’s photographs refused established models inherited from the nineteenth century, they borrowed conventions of photographic abstraction. Their use of pictorial contrast draws on avantgardist photographs by Man Ray and László Moholy-Nagy, whose work had influenced the sculptor’s 1930s photo-collages and photomontages. Smith’s 1945 photographs also build on the abstract compositions of Andreas Feininger, the one professional photographer hired by Willard whose photographs constitute an exception to the conventional images of Lances, Horn, Elisofon, and Sunami. Feininger’s pictorial style was rooted in the European avant-garde; a former student

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Figure 20. David Smith, Photograph of Classic Figure III (1944), Bolton Landing, NY, c. 1945. Black-and-white negative, 4⅜ × 3⅛ in. (11.1 × 7.9 cm). The Estate of David Smith, New York.

Figure 21. David Smith, Photograph of Spectre of War (1944), Bolton Landing, NY, c. 1944–​45. Gelatin-silver contact print, 3⁷⁄16 × 413⁄16 in. (8.7 × 12.2 cm). The Estate of David Smith, New York.

at the Bauhaus, he was influenced by the New Vision photography of Albert RengerPatzsch and Moholy-Nagy.31 His 1930s photographs isolated and abstracted their subject matter through bold contrasts, pictorial compositions, and extreme close-ups—​calling attention to the planar surface of the image. As Stuart Alexander has written, “Space [appears] shallow if not virtually flat and emphasizing the patterning of the arrangement.”32 In Passion Flower (1935), for instance, a botanical study that resembles those Karl Blossfeldt published in Urformen der Kunst (1929), Feininger positioned his camera close to his subject, magnifying it so that it appears as a flattened plane.33 Seen against a dark ground, the stems and leaves of the vine look like otherworldly forms. Feininger stresses the camera as a device capable of extreme magnification, here using focus to create a drama of forms. Feininger adopted a similarly destabilizing tactic when he photographed Smith’s sculptures around 1939. Placing Headscrew and Growing Forms (both 1939) on pedestals, which were inspired by Brancusi’s, against the landscape of Willard’s Long Island house, Feininger stressed their linear shapes by using a low vantage point (fig. 22).34 A shallow depth of field blurs the backdrop, heightening the angularity of sculpture against a softened sea. The image points up these planar contrasts to demarcate the

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Figure 22. Andreas Feininger, Photograph of David Smith, Headscrew (1939) and Growing Forms (1939), c. 1939. Gelatin silver print, 913⁄16 × 7⅜ in. (24.9 × 18.7 cm). The Estate of David Smith, New York. © Estate of Andreas Feininger.

edges and contours of sculptural forms, a strategy Feininger detailed in his book on photographic methods of 1952.35 Sculptural dimensionality is reconfigured here as linear shapes presented alongside the blurry autumn brush. Smith was drawn to what he termed Feininger’s “dramatic” compositions, and the sculptor appropriated several of Feininger’s strategies.36 Echoing the photograph of Headscrew and Growing Forms, Smith’s depiction of Spectre of War uses a low vantage point to reimagine sculpture as an abstract composition of planar contrasts. Photographing Cockfight (1945), Smith similarly silhouetted the object against its surroundings—​here a cloudy sky (fig. 23). Now the sculptor positioned his camera beneath the sculpture’s base. He cropped the photograph where the sculpture and pedestal meet, an effect that delimits its spatial setting. Using a shallow depth of field, he heightened the contrast between the sharp edges of steel—​amplified through light and shadow—​and the blurred landscape and clouds behind it. The sculpture’s parts are animated as a dramatic flurry. One bird lunges upward while the other falls toward the earth; both fight vigorously, a battle of beaks, feathers, and wings. Yet this tense movement is frozen in midair and the foes are suspended over the landscape, since the photograph is cropped at the object’s base. No ground is supplied on which the sculpture can stand. The photograph presents an enthralling image of tension, a scene of grabbing, thrusting, reaching forms. Smith’s photograph magnifies his sculpture’s subject matter, setting in motion a commotion of wings. In these experimental images of 1945, Smith found a way to translate the spatial complexity of his sculptures into a gripping pictorial image, jettisoning the conventions of the professional photographer’s studio. His photographs dramatized his sculpture’s pictorial content, pointing up the qualities of his sculpture that his critics most admired. Writing in 1947, Greenberg praised Smith’s work as “linear, open, pictorial, rather than monolithic,” defining the sculpture as optical and weightless.37 In his landmark 1958 essay “Sculpture in Our Time,” a revision of his 1949 “The New Sculpture,” Greenberg went further, to argue that space “is to be shaped, divided, enclosed, but not to be filled or sealed in.”38 The experience of the new constructed sculpture was one of opticality, as opposed to physical tactility.39 “Sculpture can confine itself to virtually two dimensions (as some of David Smith’s pieces do),” he emphasized, “without being felt to violate the limitations of its medium, because the eye recognizes that what offers itself in two dimensions is actually (not palpably) fashioned in three.” 4 0 Line and shape were used not to indicate matter but to conjure the illusion of matter, which registered “optically like a mirage.” 41 While Greenberg was attuned to the material qualities of Smith’s works—​how they could appear as raw forms, for instance—​he emphasized aspects of weightlessness and pictoriality, or how matter appeared to be immaterial, like an apparition.42 In shots of Spectre of War and Cockfight, Smith points up—​even dramatizes—​ these pictorial facets through low vantage points, unexpected cropping, shallow focus, and stark black-and-white contrasts, routing their “explosion” of imagery into

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Figure 23. David Smith, Photograph of Cockfight (1945), Bolton Landing, NY, c. 1945. Black-and-white negative with masking tape, 4⅞ × 3⅛ in. (12.4 × 7.9 cm). The Estate of David Smith, New York.

two ­dimensions. In photographs like Cockfight, a heavy, industrial steel sculpture is envisioned as an ungrounded form, a soaring projection of avian combat.

“HEROIC ABS TR AC TION”

The image of his sculpture that Smith developed in 1945 was disseminated widely by the AAUW exhibition—​t he enlarged photographs dramatized the pictorial qualities of his sculptures on a grand scale. Lura Beam, the exhibition’s organizer, selected the photographs to include in the show. She included several taken by the photographers that Willard hired; Smith had specifically requested that she display Feininger’s photograph of Headscrew and Growing Forms (see fig. 22).43 But the majority of images Beam chose were taken by the artist himself—​his shots of Head as Still Life II, Aftermath Figure, and Classic Figure III (see figs. 18, 19, and 20) were exhibited, as were Spectre of War and Cockfight (see figs. 21 and 23), and the latter two were also used in press materials for the show. Smith’s photograph of Spectre of War was frequently used to illustrate reviews. A narrowly cropped version of Cockfight was featured as the sole photograph in the exhibition’s flyer. Its triumphant and contrasting image of birds engaged in struggle became the exhibition’s guiding sign. Smith’s photographs made it easier for Beam to manage a difficult subject matter: abstraction. She relied heavily on his images to introduce welded steel constructions to a rural audience accustomed to realism, or “the older landscape style,” as Beam put it.44 Difficult to understand, and not so “loveable” as the carved “folk” sculpture by John Rood being circulated by the AAUW at the same moment, Smith’s abstraction risked alienating the local communities, Beam repeatedly claimed.45 She seems to have used photographs to soothe a public unfamiliar with the “constantly shifting” masses or “new views of exploding energy” that Valentiner so admired.46 Smith’s photographs made his sculpture more accessible, containing welded steel in a pictorial image.47 In a letter to Marian Willard, Beam revealed as much, recounting how she began a talk to a Dallas audience, using the photographs to ease into the material: “So, though it hurt me to do it, I gave two talks in which I ‘explained’ the sculpture. I just walked around picking up one picture after another and then getting to the originals. . . . This was easily understood and brought some lively response.” 4 8 Beam hesitates to say that photography might explain or resolve Smith’s sculpture, putting the term in quotation marks. Yet she kept her focus on Smith’s images—​not the seven sculptures included in the Dallas version of the show—​implying that photography could convey more to an audience than sculptures themselves. Beam leaned heavily on photographs like Cockfight, which presented a dramatizing image of sculptural form. Yet her emphasis differed from the sculptor’s own. Her agenda was to market steel sculpture to a public unaccustomed to abstraction, and she relied on a mythologizing version of his work. Beam sold Smith’s sculpture to the AAUW regional centers by focusing on its industrial materials, and she connected

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welded sculpture to “native labor,” as she put it.49 In letters to organizers, and in her “Memorandum to the Branches,” she cited steel’s roots in manufacturing and tried, above all, to enlist a public of women who believed that metals were men’s business.50 “This is going to be a very masculine event and the help of men is necessary. You must get a man who knows something about metals,” Beam urged.51 And the community organizers complied. One wrote to Beam in 1947 that the superintendent of a Gary, Indiana, steel mill had spoken at the opening of the exhibition.52 Beam also exhorted local organizers to give the exhibition spaces an industrial look. Her memo directed them to “take away from your exhibition room anything which has cozy domestic associations, for example chintz curtains and geraniums. After the exhibition is hung, try to arrange tall bouquets of bare brown tree or shrub branches, keeping to long lines.”53 If Smith’s sculpture was transformed by his dramatizing image, its physical, linear industrial look was replicated in the convention halls and community centers that became the exhibit’s temporary homes. Beam promoted Smith’s abstraction by petitioning an audience that privileged welding as men’s work, and she leaned heavily on the heroic images of sculpture that Smith himself produced. Where publicity was concerned, she constructed an image of Smith’s sculpture that narrowed it to a single dramatizing shot. In her instructions to her printer, she described how the photograph of Cockfight chosen for the exhibition catalog’s cover should mirror the experience of viewing Smith’s sculpture: “The effect of a roomful of these works is tall, angular. . . . I have therefore come to think that cropping the illustration (being sure to leave all the base) to the shape that will go onto the attached dummy by bleeding . . . would express the spirit of the thing.”54 Simplified, angular, compressed against a whitened page: the image of Cockfight summoned Smith’s sculpture by tight framing. Steel would be referenced in concept only, in an isolated image of pictorial form.55 Smith viewed the AAUW exhibition as a success. The show reached an audience of some twenty thousand in its first two years of circulation, according to the sculptor’s notes.56 What is more, it reflected back to him the camera’s instrumentality for displaying his sculpture, spurring Smith to lobby his dealer for more illustrations in catalogs and to purchase additional equipment, all in the name of publicity. But the AAUW exhibition also modeled what that display would look like, and what idiom it would take, by showing how sculpture could be represented as a commanding, heroic form. If Smith was encouraged by the photographs he produced, others were less so. During the years the AAUW exhibition was circulating, at the very moment that his photographic style began to take off, the sculptor received a number of complaints about his photographs. The problem was that they refuted conventions of documentation by not presenting sculpture in a stabilizing, neutral field. His developer in Glens Falls, New York, weighed in. Responding to the artist’s request for dodging a negative, he offered unsolicited advice about exposures and backgrounds:

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Overexposure makes a flat negative. This “flatness” increases along with the density and the grain becomes increasingly pronounced. A good contrast is impossible to produce with this type negative and the background takes on a gray or muddy appearance. For uniform results I would suggest that you make all exposures with artificial light and[,] since the bulk of your work is uniform in tone[,] make a note of your diaphragm setting and exposure time on all shots. . . . You should also make a flat white background with the smoothest possible finish. Then when you place objects close to it for [the] purpose of obtaining clean cut shadows there would be no rough areas to show dark in the print. You see[,] to produce shadows to appear at an angle you have to light more from the side[,] and if [the] background is not smooth every little pimple or brush mark also casts a shadow[,] making [the] background look dirty. If no shadows are desired[,] push [the] background a little farther back and flood it with light until shadows disappear.57

In his criticism of the sculptor’s photographs, the developer highlighted the very qualities that Smith aimed to point up: how a composition of flatness produced a series of pictorial contrasts. Not markers of the artist’s lack of skill, these were tested facets of the sculptor’s formalism or his use of photography as a representational medium. Smith’s dealer, Marian Willard, also complained about the photographs, which she claimed were not suitable for reproduction: Glad to have the photos of new things and I like them very much. Have only one reaction and take it for what it is worth. The Oculus placed on the pedestal seems too disconnected from the base. It adds a formal note which doesn’t seem to me to relate to the free forms of the piece. The aggressive character is fine and I would hate to have to cope with such. One suggestion in taking the photos[,] which I am sure you know and perhaps cannot avoid—​t hat is if they are to be used for reproduction it is bad to have any landscape forms appearing in the background. Many times pieces have been turned down when being considered because of that. True that sculpture in landscape is where it belongs, but the magazine boys and girls can’t see it that way.58

Several of the “magazine boys and girls” in question had told Willard that Smith’s photographs were unacceptable for reproduction, requesting that his sculptures be rephotographed using a more neutral approach. Willard did not relay these complaints to the artist.59 Without going so far as to term them “bad” photographs, she called into question Smith’s low vantage points and landscape backdrops, the two photographic tactics that he had worked to develop. The sculptor ignored such pleas. He continued to take one-on-one photographs of his sculptures against the landscape, using natural lighting, but he left behind the dappled or skewed lighting. In what became his signature style, he often positioned works on a pedestal, milk crate, or other rudimentary support. He placed his camera underneath

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the sculpture’s pedestal, presenting the object as a dark shape that was backlit and projected against a white sky. Using a piece of tape, or marking the photograph with his pencil, he indicated crop marks for his developer. Copy prints from Smith’s photographic archives are laden with lines drawn by hand or with the assistance of a ruler, as in his copy print of Pillar of Sunday (1945; fig. 24), or with a piece of tape, as in two copy prints of Bouquet of Concaves (1959; see figs. 34 and 35). In the shots of Bouquet of Concaves, Smith’s masking tape blocks our view of the wire crate and the pile of materials scattered behind the base—​a tactic that allows the sculpture no ground but suspends it above its surroundings, framing it as a set of dark shapes. Broadly speaking, Smith’s crop lines have the effect of compressing space into the foreground, so that the sculpture seems weightless or groundless, disconnected from its spatial setting. A viewer is not invited to project herself into the picture plane, to imagine how the work carries an innate physical scale or a tactile surface, or how it spreads out in space. Isolated from its setting, the sculpture appears to hover unmoored. In photographing Cockfight in 1945, Smith found a pictorial idiom for presenting his sculpture to a broad and diverse audience, one he repeated in one-on-one photographs of his sculptures in the 1950s and 1960s (see figs. 38, 39, and 91 and plates 36, 41, and 44). In these images, Smith presents his sculptures as upright, dominating structures—​ they are images that isolate and animate his work’s pictorial content at the expense of spatial volume. In Smith’s photograph of The Hero (1951–​52), for instance, which he took shortly after the conclusion of the AAUW exhibition, the sculpture appears as a figure of contrast with its human-scaled landscape (plate 2). The Hero towers above its out-of-focus setting, an effect that results from the camera’s low vantage point and the alignment of the sculpture’s base with the lower edge of the image: owing to the narrow framing, the object is not given a spatial ground. Nor does the photograph relay information about its densely textured and colored surface, bronze and steel material, or figural scale—​information that is apparent in a museum photographer’s shot of the work (plate 3). The museum photograph uses soft shadows to convey something about the sculpture’s size and textured surface even as it also situates it within the nonspace of the photographer’s studio. Smith’s photograph, by contrast, distances the sculpture, eliminating tactile and spatial information. The Hero rises up from its pedestal, a powerful figural form distinct from its out-of-focus surroundings. Like Smith’s photograph of Cockfight, his rendering of The Hero destabilizes our experience of the sculptural object as a three-dimensional thing; in the photograph, the sculptural vocabularies of space and volume are translated into a crisp silhouette, conjuring a picture of sculpture. Compare Smith’s photographic style to one used by the Italian photographer Ugo Mulas, who sought to relay the volumetric qualities of Smith’s sculpture. Mulas photographed Smith’s installation in Spoleto, Italy, in 1962 and was commissioned to document sculptures in Smith’s Bolton Landing studio shortly after the artist’s death in May

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Figure 24. David Smith, Photograph of Pillar of Sunday (1945) with Smith’s Directions to His Printer, Bolton Landing, NY, c. 1945. Gelatin-silver contact print, with pencil and colored ink, 413⁄16 × 3½ in. (12.2 × 8.9 cm). The Estate of David Smith, New York.

1965. Mulas’s style resembles the sculptor’s own in its adoption of a low vantage point and presentation of sculpture in an outdoor setting. But Mulas presented Smith’s sculptures from up close and used a shallow depth of field. These tactics heighten attention to the fabricated surface of sculpture, calling attention to the rough-cut edge of steel or the painted brushstroke. In a photograph of Suspended Cube (1938), Mulas displays the object in a three-quarter view with a crisp focus. Irregularities in the cut edge of the steel are visible; the painted surface of the suspended part looks broken and uneven (fig. 25). In Mulas’s photograph, the object appears imposing, a quality relayed by the details of the image. Such closeness was not part of the photographic idiom Smith developed in the late 1940s, which presented his objects as distanced, flattened planes; they convey a pictorial image of detachment that is separate from the experience of encountering Smith’s sculptures in the round.

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Figure 25. Ugo Mulas, Photograph of David Smith, Suspended Cube (1938), 1965. Gelatin silver print, dimensions unknown. Archivio Ugo Mulas, Milan. © Ugo Mulas Heirs.

Reviewing the New York exhibition in 1946, Edward Alden Jewell zeroed in on Smith’s photograph of Cockfight, made available by the gallery for publicity. “The photograph of a heroic abstraction set up out of doors,” he wrote, “suggests achievement more significant than any that the exhibition proper embraces.”60 Jewell praised the photograph—​not the work itself—​calling attention to the image’s qualities of heroism, of welded steel birds lifting off in a fight. Once again, Smith’s photographs are praised for expressing something a spatial encounter with his three-dimensional objects might not: in the artist’s photograph, Cockfight becomes a figure of weightlessness, of heroic victory.

PIC TORIAL PHOTOGR APHY

Smith’s photographs of Cockfight, Hero, and many others frame a pictorial encounter with sculpture by flattening the sculptural object to a plane or by designating a low vantage point to magnify its scale—​tactics the sculptor developed in the 1940s. His photographs elide a sculpture’s material surfaces—​which might be dense with puddles of welding material, contain shorn edges of steel, or exhibit irregularities in how their chemical finishes were applied. The photographs also compress spatial dimensionality into a single plane. Viewers are encouraged to envision sculpture as a dramatic image, a weightless specter, or a monumentalized form come to life.

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In using his camera to direct a pictorial encounter with objects, Smith joined other modern sculptors who similarly deployed photography to activate a site of beholding, as Harry Cooper has described Medardo Rosso’s photography. Cooper observes how Rosso’s photographs elicit an absorptive state analogous to the one Michael Fried located in Courbet’s canvases: the photographs situate beholders in the artist’s stance and embody them. “Only photographs of sculpture could impose a specific viewpoint,” Cooper writes, and “construct a site at which the sculptor-beholder could coalesce before the work and from which he or she could then be absorbed into it.”61 In Rosso’s narrowly framed photographs, which assign a close point of view, the viewer is drawn into the sculptural object, and its subject is animated pictorially. Rosso was among the earliest sculptors to employ technologies of photographic reproduction to publicize his sculpture. Beginning in the 1880s, he published his own photographs as postcards announcing his exhibitions, and his photographs appeared as illustrations in exhibition catalogs, newspapers, and journals.62 Rosso also exhibited his photographs alongside his sculptures, testament to the value he placed on them as works of art.63 The sculptor was adamant that his own photographs—​neither altered nor retouched—​be used in publications. In a series of letters he wrote to the painter and art critic Carlo Carrà in 1926, Rosso insisted on complete control over the illustrations that were to be used in an upcoming article, commanding, “In short, I cannot allow other photographs to be taken. I want those of mine and no others. I also believe these are the best. I don’t want any others. Thank the director (I don’t know his name) thank him. I don’t want, desire any others. Also thank the photographer. But I don’t want his, I want only my own.”64 Rosso’s statements anticipate the famous control Brancusi maintained over photographic representations of his work. Visitors to Brancusi’s studio on the Impasse Ronsin were required to observe an injunction that the artist never tired of repeating: no one but the sculptor himself was to photograph his work. As Brassaï complained, requests to document his objects were refused, and those who tried to photograph them anyway were thrown out.65 Even those who attempted to edit Brancusi’s own photographs in reproduction—​by silhouetting his objects, for example—​were reprimanded.66 Such mandates served a purpose. In maintaining aesthetic control over publicity, both Rosso and Brancusi were acknowledging the photograph’s specific power to structure a mode of viewing. As was the case for Smith, the camera was an extension of their studio practices, a tool no less important to the sculptural process than the hammer, torch, or chisel. For Rosso, the camera could carefully construct a visual encounter by framing and reframing objects. He often rephotographed his photographs by pinning the source image to a wall, leaving the pinhole visible in the second print. In one series he rephotographed a photograph of Aetas Aurea (1887) numerous times—​these photographs are the starting point for Cooper’s argument (figs. 26 and 27). Each secondary photograph uses exposure and framing to alter the original image. In some, the child’s

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Figure 26. Medardo Rosso, Photograph of Aetas Aurea (1887), Photographed from a Photograph, Enlarged and Hand Cut, c. 1887. Gelatin silver print, 8.2 × 8.4 cm. Private collection.

face is illuminated while the mother’s is darkened; in others the secondary print is magnified and cropped, the original’s surrounding details eliminated. When cropping his photographs, Rosso often used unexpected angles and jarring lines, testing out different compositional configurations. These strategies yielded new pictorial images as the sculptural object was reconfigured through a diverse array of framing and lighting techniques. As Sharon Hecker and Paola Mola have separately observed, Rosso’s use of photographic reproduction follows his employment of casting in his sculptural practice: both mechanisms of copying ultimately produced wholly new works, shifting expectations for stability and permanence.67 Vantage point also played a central role in Rosso’s photography. In one of the photographs of Aetas Aurea, he assumes an up-close and intimate point of view by cropping and magnifying the original print (see fig. 27). When viewed alongside others in the series, the photographs progressively zoom in on the sculpture, drawing the beholder into a lively visual encounter. This tightly framed image—​which also contains dark marks from the developing process on the left edge—​leaves out extraneous detail. By cutting the background of the upper right, for instance, Rosso excluded a view of the object’s upper flange, which he left visible in several other prints. The photograph eliminates the sculpture’s boundaries and edges, deceiving viewers into thinking they are seeing an animated scene of a mother and child, rather than a sculpture. What is more, the picture places the viewer in the vantage point of the mother, who is herself cropped

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Figure 27. Medardo Rosso, Photograph of Aetas Aurea (1887), Photographed from an Enlarged Detail of a Stock Photograph Cut at the Corner, after 1910. Gelatin silver print, 12 × 8 cm. Private collection.

from view, looking down on the child. As Rosso increasingly restricts the frame, the beholder is incorporated into the work; drawn into the scene, he or she is invited to inhabit and embody the sculpture’s space.68 Rosso’s photographs pictorialize the sculptures they present, transforming a material object into an enlivened scene. His images share much in common with Smith’s—​ low vantage points and unexpected cropping techniques are two of the strategies behind the dramatizing photographs of Cockfight and The Hero, for instance. Both artists also used photography to activate a beholder’s encounter, shifting the material dimensions of sculpture by construing it as intimate or monumental. Henry Moore, too, exploited the camera’s vantage point to reenvision his sculptures. In the late 1930s he began to photograph his sculptures outside his studio in Burcroft, Kent, and his photographs were published widely in the ensuing years.69 As Elizabeth

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Figure 28. Henry Moore, Photograph of Reclining Figure (1938) against a Kent Landscape, c. 1938. Gelatin silver print, dimensions unknown. Henry Moore Foundation, Perry Green, England (LH192). Reproduced by permission of the Henry Moore Foundation.

Brown has written, Moore experimented with vantage point to arrange a “wholly new and different composition” with every shot.70 Scale, too, was something that could be altered through vantage point, Moore learned. A photograph of Reclining Figure (1938) presents the sculpture on a flat, even plane, behind it a sloping field and woods (fig. 28). The sculpted body—​its head impaled and empty—​coheres around a curved, crescentshaped torso, which casts a series of ground shadows. Envisioned from a low point of view, the work is structured in direct relation to its landscape surroundings with no base or intermediary plinth. Reclining Figure’s sprawling, massive body merges with the English landscape, appearing innate to it. A second photograph, however, shows Moore’s magnification at work (fig. 29). Reclining Figure’s massiveness dwindles to the scale of a table’s wood grain: to thirteen inches in length, to be precise. While the second shot substantiates the sculpture’s size, the first photograph dramatizes the object’s magnitude, summoning notions of sculptural presence in the process. With the illusion of scale provided by the photograph, Reclining Figure seems monumental, an integral part of its surrounding pastoral setting.71 In 1964 Moore reflected on the camera’s distortion of objects, observing how “a small sculpture only three or four inches big can have about it a monumental scale, so that if you photographed it against a blank wall in which you had nothing to refer it to but only itself—​or you photographed it against the sky against infinite distance—​a small thing only a few inches big might seem, if it has a monumental scale, to be any size.”72 Moore notes that a dramatization of a sculpture’s scale depends on the landscape setting. Seen against a contextual setting, a small object could be enlivened to seem massive, human-sized. In anticipation of his works’ installation in the Forte di Belvedere, Florence, in 1972, Moore again used his camera to strategically resize his work. Photographing small

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Figure 29. Henry Moore, Photograph of Reclining Figure (1938) against a Kent Landscape, c. 1938. Gelatin silver print, dimensions unknown. Henry Moore Foundation, Perry Green, England (LH192). Reproduced by permission of the Henry Moore Foundation.

sculptures and maquettes of his final sculptures, Moore used color slide transparencies, a photographic medium that is itself capable of enlargement in the projector, to measure his sculpture against the architectural monuments of Florence. Moore created an elaborate setup to map out the installation, positioning the maquettes in front of a reproduction of the city, seen from the rooftop of the Forte di Belvedere, the site of his show (plates 4 and 5). He illuminated the scene artificially and rotated the objects to capture a range of views. Pictured from a low angle, Maquette for Large Torso: Arch is imagined as towering over Brunelleschi’s dome; it is naturalized in its Florentine setting (see plate 5). Moore took these photographs as aids to the process of staging large-scale sculpture; yet they carry a fantasy of sculpture’s permanence and solidity that is based on the camera’s ability to magnify a sculpture’s size. In Moore’s imaginings, maquettes are transformed into monumental sculptures—​stable, enduring forms that are to be measured against a storied European civic setting. Using his camera, which is capable of bridging the gap between size and scale, Moore summons notions of monumentality without actually engaging a monumental sculpture.73 In using the camera to animate and transform their sculptures, Rosso, Smith, and Moore were participating in a dialogue central to modernism about the role of vantage point in the perception of sculpture, an issue Adolf von Hildebrand took up in The Problem of Form (1893). His text offered a solution to what he and others held was the awkward and contingent visual encounter of objects in three dimensions—​in his words, the “unfinished and uncomfortable frame of mind” that arises in spatial perception.74 Looking for a way to alleviate the contingencies of bodily viewing, Hildebrand turned to the Kantian theories of Hermann von Helmholtz, for whom perceiving meant comparing new optical data with old to identify or synthesize an object—​t hus, as one critic has put it, “subsuming the phenomenal singularity of its aspects under a general intellec-

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tual concept.”75 The Problem of Form aimed to shorten this synthetic process; the viewer would be presented with an object that already cohered as an epistemological model when seen from a frontal point of view. In its planar, two-dimensional organization, relief sculpture represented for Hildebrand a totalized and synthesized image of what would otherwise be mere kinesthetic irregularity. Real space would be “secured” and “stabilized” as a pictorial image oriented to the viewer, who would encounter the work from the idealized and fixed point of view.76 In a two-part essay published in German in 1896 and 1897, Hildebrand’s friend and colleague Heinrich Wölfflin built on this model of sculptural idealism to analyze how photography could further stabilize sculpture. In his essay “How One Should Photograph Sculpture,” he took issue with the late nineteenth century’s surge of art reproductions and came to grips with photography as a layer of mediation. Wölfflin argued that the contingencies of real space required stabilizing not only in an idealized sculptural form but also in its photographic reproduction, which would orient a beholder to the sculpture’s harmonious point of view. He critiqued what he saw as an overabundance of photographs taken from an oblique point of view—​a vantage point that misread sculpture: The public buys these photographs in good faith, [believing] that with a mechanicallymade illustration nothing of the original could be lost; it does not know that an old [historic] figure has a particular main view, that one destroys its effectiveness when one takes away its main silhouette; without batting an eye, present-day people allow their uncultivated eyes to put up with the most disagreeable overlaps and lack of clarity. . . . However, [a work made in] the good [old] tradition provides one main view, and the educated eye feels it is a virtue that here the figure explains itself all at once and becomes completely understandable, so that one is not driven around it in order to grasp its content, but rather that it informs the beholder about its viewpoint right from the start. Whosoever wants to instruct himself about such matters should read the relevant section in Adolf Hilde­ brand’s Problem der Form.77

Wölfflin’s essay argues for a definition of the photography of sculpture that hinges on vantage point. Because a sculpture could appear as many different things when seen from disparate points of view, the photographer would need to match the perspicuous alignment of the object. From this principal, frontal orientation, he claimed, the object would cohere effortlessly as a harmonious image, a pictorial contour, or “silhouette.” In his essays Wölfflin compared photographs taken of the same sculpture, juxtaposing those lacking the ideal point of view with those skilled images that achieved it. He contrasts two reproductions of Verrocchio’s David—​one depicting a plaster cast, and the other, the bronze original. An Alinari photograph presents an incoherent image of the bronze because it was taken from an oblique vantage point located slightly above the sculpture’s base.78 The relationship between the feet is illegible; the arms appear in different spatial planes. A photograph by an unidentified photographer of the plaster

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cast, by contrast, resolved this spatial awkwardness. In it the vantage point is lower and the work is presented frontally, yielding an image Wölfflin described as heroic and victorious. “What liveliness is gained by the contour!” he exclaimed; David’s limbs now appear ordered, their relationships to one another visible.79 Describing two reproductions of the Apollo Belvedere—​an engraving by Marcantonio Raimondi and a photograph by the Bruckmann firm—​Wölfflin preferred the engraving for its ability to direct viewers to the sculpture’s principal point of view. Whereas the photograph, taken from well above the base, made the figure appear “insecure, brittle, [and] disturbing,” Raimondi’s engraving synthesizes the sculpture at the level of the sculpture’s feet, relaying its secure and tranquil stance.80 “All at once,” Wölfflin observed of the print, “the torso gains an undreamt of power, vertically and horizontally, chest and arm are set in sharp contrast against one another, and the flaccid contours of the first view [the Bruckmann photograph] are suddenly full of life and energy in every particle.”81 Wölfflin’s essays recognize the ways in which photographs isolate a single view of a three-dimensional sculpture. In his account, the camera either summons an idealizing encounter with sculpture by matching the “correct” vantage point or presents the object as a spatially awkward form. When it grasps the frontal plane of the sculpture, Wölfflin argues, the object coheres as an animated picture—​it is a victorious and heroic body, an idealized picture that matches an idealized form. Like Wölfflin, Smith knew that a photograph could marshal the contingencies of three-dimensional viewing in a planar image, a silhouette. Look again at how a welded steel sculpture such as Cockfight hovers above its surroundings when pictured from a vantage point below the pedestal (see fig. 23). The contrast between sculpture and backdrop is heightened by a narrow focus, which dramatizes the differences between the sculpture’s angular cut parts and the soft, blurry forms of the landscape. Flattened to two dimensions and cropped from the ground, the sculpture is suspended in midair—​in a flattened projection. But Smith was also keenly attuned to how photography skewed or remade his sculpture. The sculptor repudiated the model of sculptural idealism espoused by Wölfflin and Hildebrand by creating objects that entailed many different, incompatible “fronts.” His objects embrace the contingencies of three-dimensional viewing by rejecting frontality, or the idea that a sculpture has a principal alignment. And his photographs followed suit: even as they summon sculptural form in an image, they also destabilize or distort his objects by presenting independent images. What was for Wölfflin ultimately a stabilizing framework—​used correctly, the photograph would fix and frame an ideal form—​was for Smith and other modern sculptors a way to further upend and transform objects that rethought sculptural idealism. The photographs taken by Rosso, Moore, and Smith are not surfaces that match up seamlessly with a sculptural plane or front. They are images that capitalize on the arbitrariness of vantage point. These artists’ photographs unsettle sculpture, suggesting different

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Figure 30. David Smith, Photograph of Oculus (1947), Bolton Landing Dock, Lake George, NY, c. 1947. Black-andwhite negative, cropped to the artist’s specifications. The Estate of David Smith, New York.

definitions of objects made contingent and fragmentary through light and movement, animated by the camera’s frame as a pictorial form, or monumentalized through a trick of scale. As Rosso’s increasingly closer frames of Aetas Aurea acknowledge, or as Moore’s two shots of Reclining Figure underscore, a photograph can activate several different encounters with sculpture, altering the object at each click of the shutter. These photographs do not stabilize sculptural dimensionality by capturing it from a particular vantage point, as Wölfflin would have it; instead, they fluster expectations about totality by presenting a range of different and destabilizing views. In Smith’s photographs, the physical materiality of his work is reshaped, something the sculptor himself was keenly aware of. The acknowledgment came in a discussion of his photograph of Oculus (1947), a sculpture whose title references the eye. The work is composed of four steel vignettes suspended from a horizontal piece of cut metal that is balanced on a vertical pedestal, which stands atop a wooden base. Smith completed the sculpture in December 1947 and photographed it that month (fig. 30). Oculus seems superimposed on its out-of-focus backdrop. Its horizontal bar meets the top of a mountain range, yet the two forms are separated by a gulf of frozen water, above which Oculus is perched. Smith used a vantage point oriented to the base of the pillar, along with a

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Figure 31. Unknown photographer, David Smith Photographing Oculus (1947), Bolton Landing Dock, Lake George, NY, c. 1947. Single frame from an uncut roll of black-and-white negatives; each frame: 7/16 × 1⅜ in. (1.1 × 3.5 cm). The Estate of David Smith, New York.

shallow depth of field. In a copy print, he drew his crop mark between the pillar and the wooden base, so that the sculpture seems dislodged from its surroundings—​t he sliver of base the barest indicator of a ground.82 To make this photograph, Smith brought the sculpture down the hill from his studio, propping it on a group of pilings at the edge of a snow-covered dock overlooking Lake George. This much we can tell from a negative found on an undeveloped roll of film, whose photographer is unknown (fig. 31). Knees bent, feet lodged in the snow, Smith leans down behind the tripod, his hulking body crouching so that his eye can meet the viewfinder. He fits himself into the apparatus of the camera. A jacket covering his head serves as an improvised hood, blocking the light. Smith took five other photographs of Oculus, in his sculpture workshop, in the fields outside his studio, and on the dock. But it was this photograph—​w ith its meticulous composition in which the abstract steel sculpture touched the top of a mountain landscape—​that he sent to his dealer, Marion Willard, in New York (see fig. 30). Her response came in a letter, and it was not approving. She quipped that the sculpture seemed “disconnected from its base.”83 Smith responded hastily, explaining his depiction: “Oculus base was meant to be disconnected from the base [sic], hence the unusual elevation.

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The sculpture part takes place at eye level. The photo takes place under eye level.”84 With these sentences, Smith describes how his photographs elicit an encounter with his sculpture that differs from the encounter experienced when viewing the sculpture from an embodied vantage point, or the “eye level” view through which sculpture would be seen as a “free form” in its spatial setting. The photograph, by contrast, structured an encounter that takes place beneath standing height—​a view that Smith had to crouch down to obtain and which was structured by the mobile device of the camera. Seen photographically, the sculpture would look different than it did in the round—​it would be disconnected from its surroundings, a dematerialized projection. Smith’s language underscores the importance of vantage point for the process of pictorialization. Unlike Wölfflin, who argued that the camera’s vantage point should remediate the contingencies of viewing in the round by matching the frontal view, Smith and other modern sculptors seized on the arbitrariness of vantage point to further destabilize sculpture. If, for Rosso, vantage point could activate a provisional and intimate glimpse of a scene, and for Moore it could magnify and amplify his sculpted bodies, for Smith it could further distance and detach the object, construing it as a flattened plane. Seeing sculpture in a photograph and in the round were two separate things. These artists used the camera not as a neutral technology of vision—​t heir aim was not to “bring things closer” in a reproducible copy, the possibility of mechanical reproduction Walter Benjamin outlined in 1931, describing the camera’s ability to “get hold of” the objects of its gaze. Rather they unsettled those objects by refusing to fix them in a single, reproducible image. For Smith, the photograph would be a way to dissociate his objects in a pictorial projection.85 In the AAUW exhibition, Smith developed a model for photographing his objects one-on-one that he would continue to pursue until his death. Although the artist would supplement this approach with other photographic modes—​by presenting his sculptures in groups or using a higher vantage point to depict his painted objects—​this model would become synonymous with his sculpture, and it influenced his public’s reception of his sculpture. For Smith, photography was a public display of his objects—​ capable of circulating them widely—​but it was also much more than this: it was a way to transform and reinvent his objects. Seen photographically, his sculpture is envisioned as a separate, autonomous plane detached from its surroundings. This transformation, this mediation, raises questions about some of the most foundational narratives of his objects.

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2 AERIAL VISION, PHOTOGRAPHIC ABSTRACTION, AND THE SURFACE OF SCULPTURE But those who study these conditions thoroughly soon learn that they do not pass beyond the surface and nowhere penetrate the core of the thing; and that the most one can do is to produce a surface that is self-contained and in no sense fortuitous, a surface which, surrounded, shadowed, and illuminated like natural things by the atmosphere, is absolutely nothing but surface. RAINER MARIA RILKE, AUGUSTE RODIN, PART 2, 1907

On one of the many flights David Smith took across the United States in the early 1950s, he pointed his camera at the ground thirty thousand feet below. The resulting photographs—​seven in all—​are casual shots of the shifting geography (plates 6 and 7). Some present the curved edge of the passenger window, a frame internal to the photograph that organizes the landscape. Others capture the plane’s propeller, evidence of the airplane in motion. Two additional shots depict an angled image of the earth below with the farmland tilting upward. Smith’s photographs frame and delimit landscapes that are incidental and mundane: rippling foothills; the gridded farms of a midwestern landscape; and the open expanse of a western no-place divided by county roads. His interest lay not in picturing a marked site or a definable geography but rather in the nonidentity of the landscape, or its generic and nonspecific qualities—​all the better to transform it into a surface of two-dimensional abstraction. The edges of the photographs—​to use the language of John Macarthur, describing aerial photography as a modern picturesque—​ “sample the horizontal field.”1 Smith’s aerial photographs portray an encounter of distance and detachment, or placelessness and sitelessness, as the airplane travels high above the earth. The artist himself described the possibilities opened by the aerial view, telling a WNYC radio audience in 1952: “Today the landscape may be viewed on a cross-country journey from a plane three miles up. Looking down all is space until the eye stops on the floor of solid earth, its rocks and hills become an endless flat plane. Houses, factories, hard objects, solids, become only pattern. Rivers, highways, man-made boundaries are ­flowing,

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graceful sweeping lines, opposed by spots of lakes and squares of fields. The view from space makes solid form appear pattern.”2 Smith observed how, when seen from aloft, a sprawling expanse of natural and human-made landscapes—​of mountains, rivers, agricultural fields, and highways—​becomes a geometric plane. From the vantage of an airplane the familiar geographies of inhabited space were made strange. Smith had explored the theme of flight before in a series of antiwar, anti-imperialist sculptures. In Bombing Civilian Populations, for instance, a relief that is part of his Medals for Dishonor series, made between 1938 and 1940, a figural statue is burst apart, flayed open in a star shape to expose a fetus (fig. 32). With gnarled limbs and feet, the statue is both human and machine, a ravaged symbol of total war. Her maternity is flanked by her assaulted offspring: one bomb pierces the body of a dying child and another inhabits a highchair, standing in for a murdered child. Birds fly in the distance, their falling eggs symbols of the bombs that fracture landscape and cityscape alike. The ground, pitched up, is torn and fragmented. When he exhibited these works at the Willard Gallery in 1940, Smith identified the birds as “Stuka storks,” shorthand for the Nazi dive-bombers that flew, at Franco’s request, in 1937 to bomb unarmed civilians in Madrid and Guernica. Smith responded urgently to these and other bombing campaigns abroad, and he would have had in mind Picasso’s prints and large mural, having seen them in New York in 1939 as well as in reproduction.3 But Smith’s symbolism is distinct: the birds in the Medals for Dishonor figure as aerial specters that survey, gas, and bomb the populations below.4 When he pointed his camera downward from an airplane seven years later, the artist had shifted from a politically engaged commentary—​in which the aerial view metaphorized the human toll of mass destruction—​to an aesthetic one. Drained of its antiwar force, the view from aloft now signified the artist’s individualism in the postwar era, at a moment when artists were moving away from the political commitments that characterized their art of the 1930s.5 In Smith’s postwar lexicon, the aerial view thematized artistic alienation and withdrawal, qualities he articulated in his 1952 WNYC radio address: “Sculpture isn’t made from three miles up, but pattern and line, to represent form, are working on equal basis in contemporary expression. The view of nature changes; the cause of art changes. New views of nature are now man’s freedom point, to depart with his flight of imagination.”6 This statement—​full of postwar rhetoric of individualism—​links the new views of the airline industry to artistic freedom. The airplane in a domestic context could signify artistic independence, the quasi autonomy of the avantgarde or, as Smith said, a “flight of imagination.” The view from the air was but one of many vantages Smith adopted in the 1950s: he also pointed his camera at the earth underfoot, photographing rocks, sand, seaweed, and detritus. These color slide transparencies, which he used to illustrate his lectures, deployed the camera’s frame and vantage point to organize the world into a flattened, geometric plane. Not incidental snapshots, these photographs were central to the definition of sculptural surface that Smith was developing in his sculptures and writings in the 1950s.

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Figure 32. David Smith, Bombing Civilian Populations, c. 1938–​40. Cast bronze, 10 × 10 ×⅞ in. (25.4 × 25.4 cm). The Estate of David Smith, New York. (Photograph: David Heald.)

His slides explore the concept of surface as a vehicle of spatial disjunction—​a concept that he explained to Belle Krasne in an interview for Art Digest in 1952, describing sculptural viewing: “I don’t see [a sculpture] from five different angles at once. I see one view. The round is only a series of fronts. . . . The notion that a good piece of sculpture should be able to roll down a hill—​that belongs to another age, and I should think a barrel could do it better.”7 Comparing his sculpture to a barrel, an object whose volumetric sides predictably fit together to indicate a symmetrical “core,” Smith indicates that his sculptures operate differently, as an incongruous series of “fronts.” For Smith, the experience of viewing his sculptures would be fragmented and unpredictable as viewers grappled with a range of incompatible and delimited surfaces. The concept of surface also lies at the heart of discourses of modern sculpture. In a passage that serves as the epigraph to this chapter, Rainer Maria Rilke described how Auguste Rodin’s luminous, material surfaces repudiate idealist definitions of objects as stable, predictable objects. Rilke was drawn to the ways in which Rodin’s contingent surfaces—​which contain the marks of their making, the visible traces of the casting process, and which seem anatomically incorrect—​fail to match assumptions about a sculpture’s internal core. Surface is self-contained, Rilke notes; viewers cannot penetrate it to get at “the core of the thing.”8 Rosalind Krauss, too, made surface opacity the central thread of her study of modern sculpture, Passages in Modern Sculpture (1977), which she developed out of her book on Smith’s sculpture, Terminal Iron Works (1971). Mapping a chronology of case studies that begins with Rodin and concludes with Richard Serra, Krauss explores modern sculpture’s rejection of a transparent and idealist core as a negation of a priori knowledge. By making surface self-referential—​one of several tropes used by modern sculptors—​

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­ odernist objects could stage an immediate and unpremeditated experience with the m world. They could reject a Hildebrandean sculptural aesthetic. In both of Krauss’s books, and in her two-part essay “The Essential David Smith,” published in Artforum in 1969, Smith’s sculpture Blackburn, Song of an Irish Blacksmith (1949–​50) plays a central role (plate 8).9 The work announced Smith’s visual language of totemism and distinguishes his objects from constructivist sculptures by Naum Gabo and Ibram Lassaw, which rely on an idealist model of sculptural perception. Blackburn, Krauss writes in Passages in Modern Sculpture, structures “a grammar of extreme visual disjunction,” refusing viewers a stable and totalizing view of the whole.10 Smith’s sculpture unfolds unpredictably in time and space in a sequence of unresolvable fronts. The object is visually incoherent, disjointed because, as Krauss writes, “the two major views of the work—​full-front and profile—​cannot be related to each other through the constructivist mode of internal transparency that had become the major resource for abstract sculptural composition over the preceding four decades.”11 When viewed in the round, the sculpture’s separate surfaces are capricious, opaque, and she describes how the work registers as two different things: “Confronted by the profile of Blackburn one feels that one is not so much seeing another view of the work, as that one is almost seeing another work.”12 The sculpture’s visual openness denies its transparency, or the possibility that the object has an internal “core.”13 Its surface instability secures the sculpture’s self-sufficiency—​it operates beyond our conceptual reach. In his slide transparencies, Smith explored this notion of opacity using the photographic surface. His photographs flatten mundane objects and spaces into a restrictive, self-contained plane that wrestles with illusionism. These photographs also relate directly to his photographs of his sculptures. In the 1950s, the sculptor seized on the photograph as an independent surface, as part of a modernist politics of sculptural viewing.

ABS TR AC T COMPOSITIONS

In 1954 Smith gave a lecture at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Madison, Maine, which he illustrated with slides of his own sculptures and of those by other modernists. But Smith also presented slides of rock specimens, a beach strewn with seaweed, an abstract pattern of paint found on a barn wall, and flotsam and jetsam sinking in the sand. These casual “snapshots,” as Smith termed them, offered “certain organizations” of nature.14 They all relied upon a vantage point predicated on bodily detachment—​on the “unusual elevation” that the mobile instrument of the camera allowed. Smith’s slides, when read with a transcript of his lecture, argue for a model of photography as a process of abstraction. Working against illusionism, Smith used his camera to navigate between the known and the unknown, the familiar and the unfamiliar, borrowing New Vision traditions of photographic formalism. His images—​all measuring 2¼ × 2¼ inches—​use the format of the square to explore concepts of the frame

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and the edge. And they do so using color slide transparencies, a medium designed to be projected. The sculptor began his talk with a discussion of tradition, which he called “a burden to our progress.”15 Restating an argument he had made in “The Language Is Image,” the sculptor told his audience, “Our working language is vision. Art is made from dreams, and visions, and things not known, and least of all things said.”16 Stressing the visual language of modernism, he presented slides of works by modern sculptors. Describing Julio González’s Large Maternity (1934), Smith observed that no part of the sculpture was found; rather it was “all made.”17 Next showing a slide of Alberto Giacometti’s Woman with Her Throat Cut (1937), probably taken by Smith himself, at eye level rather than from his signature low vantage point, he remarked, “It’s made of cast bronze forms that are rather loosely hinged. They can take different positions, but I think that is the way it’s usually shown in a museum.”18 The lecture quickly turned, however, to slides that he claimed were “just parts of nature that I look at and admire. I have no immediate, translatable thing. But I also will say that no man can ever make an abstract sculpture, an abstract painting, in the sense that no man can make what he hasn’t seen in nature. He makes certain organizations.”19 Projected in a sequence, these images argued for photography’s reorientation and abstraction of embodied vision. Take, for a start, a photograph (plate 9) that followed an image of Gaston Lachaise’s Standing Woman (1932).20 It was what Smith described as “a Cubist piece of rock—​a specimen of fluorite. And if you can examine it closely, there are very wonderful, little cubic structures that take place in there, ordered by the crystal construction of nature.”21 Smith photographed the rock from above, its purple crystalline form laid out for viewing. But the photograph does more than document a geological specimen. Its close vantage point and shallow depth of field amplify the rock’s cubic composition; the luminescent surface pops into high relief, and the individual crystals become a cubist canvas, receding into and emerging from space. The dowel or rod, the edge of a brown table, the shadows cast: these angular elements reinforce the image’s allover fragmentation. Viewed from above and magnified to almost fill the frame, the purple rock is managed as a surface of abstraction. In another slide, this one of a round stone, Smith exploited a close vantage point and tight frame to remove the object from its geological context (plate 10). The photograph presents the rock in a shallow field against a black background; the blurred focus softens its crevices and spots of lichen, amplifying it and abstracting it from its ordinary setting. The contrast between the stone and the dark ground is striking, and the distorted focus conjures a trick of scale so that the object appears at once pebble size and planetary, a full moon seen against a dark night. Smith’s slide presentation moved fluidly from dislocated objects to unidentifiable spaces. Describing a photograph of a clapboard structure, he stressed that what the audience saw was “not a painting” but rather the side of a barn he had encountered the

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summer before in Maine (plate 11). “Some farmer,” he explained, “had been spotting spots on knotholes before putting on a coat of paint,” resulting in a black-and-white composition.22 By aligning the photographic surface with the wall and narrowly restricting the frame, Smith’s photograph organizes an ordinary barn into an abstract canvas. The photograph’s edge cuts off a common building, transforming it into a pictorial composition. Like his aerial shots, this image calls attention to the photographic frame as a strategy of disassociation. In still other photographs, Smith pointed his camera at the earth, reorienting space as a two-dimensional arrangement of shapes. The sites the artist chose to photograph were unremarkable in themselves. One slide, in his words, depicted “a piece of beach after a wave had receded—​w ith stone, with seaweed and things” (plate 12).23 Smith has trained his camera down—​and not at the horizon—​an unexpected vantage point that organizes the debris-filled sand into an abstract composition. Space is limited and compressed, and the camera orders the flotsam and jetsam as a flattened surface dotted with color: red algae or seaweed permeates the scene like a stain on a canvas. The photograph lifts up the space under Smith’s foot to present it in an isolated pictorial format. Yet what is made present by the camera’s frame seems arbitrary. The image’s top edge bisects the round forms of pebbles, and at lower right it cuts off the arcing lines of seaweed. The photograph samples a narrow square of horizontal earth that seems to extend infinitely beyond the frame, calling attention to the action of framing the picture. In another photograph taken from above, Smith capitalized on the camera’s dislocation of scale (plate 13). The edges of the frame mark off a subset of a larger space, picturing within them a relief pattern of mountains, ridges, and planes composed by geological patterns in sand or mud. The picture evokes a sculpture—​a carving in shallow relief. It is difficult to place this scene: we have no geographic markers to ground us. The aerial vantage point suggests a space that could be as vast as the ocean floor or as scaled down as a tide pool. The picture dislocates us, and our relationship to this geological formation is uncertain. A third slide depicts a license plate partially submerged in silt (plate 14). A rusted piece of industrial equipment rests on sand recently flooded by a wave. On the picture’s lower right, a crack fractures this smooth surface, tearing downward. Polished stones, bits of gravel, and pieces of trash are strewn throughout the scene. What caught Smith’s attention here? Was it the resemblance of the rusted bar to Picasso’s Bull sculpture (1943) made up of handlebars and a bicycle seat? Or was it the detritus of industry, sinking in the sand? The photograph’s content is hard to pin down in an image that dislocates space using the controls of vantage point, focus, and frame. Smith has heightened this sense of pictorial confusion by blurring the image: the sharp contours of the bar in the foreground give way to an indefinite, blurry space in the distance. The scene is familiar yet concealed. Smith’s photographs make strange the inhabited world, compressing place and space into an abstract canvas. Coupled with the narrow framing of these shots, which delimits

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the pictures, the unexpected points of view suggest an upending of the here and now. These two central strategies—​exploiting the camera’s frame and vantage point—​signaled Smith’s participation in modernist discourses of photography. Writing about Alfred Stieglitz’s Equivalents series (1925–​31), Rosalind Krauss has described how they locate meaning in the frame, or the cut, as a way to indicate the mediation of the camera.24 “These are images without grounds,” she writes, describing Stieglitz’s photographs of clouds pictured from the earth. “In their verticality the clouds echo or double the initial meaning of the cut, or rather, each reinforces and doubles the other. For both are involved in displaying the world only by means of an image that is radically cut loose from its moorings, an image that is about being unmoored.”25 To make his Equivalents series, Stieglitz pointed his camera at the sky and emphasized the edge of the frame to decontextualize the clouds, remaking them into an abstract picture devoid of illusionistic content, a free-floating signifier. Krauss stresses how the photographic edge is amplified—​not a by-product of taking a picture, it is a signifier of a radical ungroundedness from the world. Like Stieglitz’s Equivalents series, or Aaron Siskind’s postwar photographs that fragment signs, billboards, or rocks, Smith’s photographs underscore the frame as a demarcation of vision, arbitrarily sampling its environment.26 The edge that severs the pebbles, the side that arbitrarily samples a ridge of sand, the cut that ruptures the barn wall: Smith’s photographs insist on how a photograph can isolate, demarcate, and dislodge objects, transforming them into an independent image. In calling attention to the frame, these photographs make visible the edge as a structuring device of taking a picture. This was not the only formalist strategy the artist employed. Smith’s aerial vantage points reference the New Vision photography of László Moholy-Nagy and the many photographs Moholy-Nagy took from the lofty vantages of the Berlin radio tower and other urban structures, and which were published in Cahiers d’Art and elsewhere in the 1920s and 1930s.27 As Abigail Solomon-Godeau and others have argued, Aleksandr Rodchenko first pointed his camera toward the earth to achieve a politically engaged mode of viewing by upsetting ocular conventions of perspectival space.28 His German successors—​including Moholy-Nagy, who would have been the more immediate reference for Smith—​used disorienting vantages as part of a modernist aesthetic that embraced photography’s technological mediation.29 Broadly speaking, the incorporation of the aerial view in modernism signaled a dislocation of pictorial space, a shift from illusionism to surface, as Krauss has written: It is not just that objects are hard to recognize from great heights, which they are, but more crucially, the sculptural dimensions of reality are made highly ambiguous, as the difference between projections and depressions—​t he convex and the concave—​is erased. The aerial photograph confronts us, then, with “reality” turned into a text, into something that necessitates a reading or decoding. There is a caesura between the angle of

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vision through which it was made and that other angle of vision which is required in order to comprehend it. The aerial photograph opens up a rift, then, within the very fabric of reality-apprehended, a rift which most ground-oriented photographs do much to mask. If most photography promotes, deepens, and is the accomplice to our fantasy of an unmediated relationship to the “real,” aerial photography tends—​w ithin the very terms of photography itself—​to prick the bubble of that fantasy.30

Krauss observes how aerial photography disconnects vision from the three-dimensional concavities and convexities of the landscape seen from the ground. It reorders volumetric space as a flattened surface that requires “reading or decoding,” she writes, again analogizing the photograph to a text. Like the unusual vantage point Stieglitz used to picture a visual plane of clouds, the aerial view ruptures the fantasy that a photograph should be a window onto a perspectival world, instead shedding light on the image’s construction and reorientation of vision. Smith’s Skowhegan slides are not windows onto a world but transformations of it. Orienting his camera to the earth, the sculptor calls attention to the mechanisms of photography and its artificial construction of vision. The images of flotsam and jetsam or of a ridge of sand do not contain horizon lines indicative of an inhabitable space, and they distance the beholder. Others—​the slide picturing detritus sinking in sand—​gesture to the ground plane but distort the picture’s illusionism by blurring and warping the background. These techniques disorient viewers by playing up the camera’s mediation. Like Smith’s photographs of his sculptures, which crop objects at the base and employ unusually low vantage points, the artist’s slides choreograph a modernist aesthetic of ungroundedness or sitelessness. In these images, which appropriate a modernist rhetoric of defamiliarization, Smith makes visible the camera’s controls, showing photography to be capable of ordering the world as a series of delimited, abstract surfaces. Smith had experimented with a photographic encounter of estrangement and detachment in the 1930s. His photo-collages and photomontages emphasize the photographic surface as a text dense with self-referential meaning. In those first photographs, the artist layered disparate images to cloud and confuse vision (see fig. 10). Smith’s photocollage, for instance, structures an abstract pattern of cutout shapes. Viewers are drawn into the different registers of space even as they are thrust back out, forced to confront the surface of the photograph through Smith’s painted alterations to the negative, the dots scattered throughout the image. When photographing familiar objects and landscapes in the 1950s, he returned to this model of pictorial disruption; rather than cutting and superimposing negatives, however, he used unconventional vantage points to materialize the photographic surface, a blurred focus to distort perspectival space, and close cropping to emphasize the edge of the camera’s frame. This trope of pictorial flatness—​and the experience of dislocation it elicited—​was one of the distinctly modern modes of picturing that Leo Steinberg described in “Other Criteria” (1972), an essay that lists among other “flat documentary surfaces” the aerial

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view.31 Charting a shift in modernism, Steinberg focused on how 1950s painting insists “on a radically new orientation, in which the painted surface is no longer the analogue of a visual experience of nature but of operational processes. . . . What I have in mind is the psychic address of the image, its special mode of imaginative confrontation, and I tend to regard the tilt of the picture plane from vertical to horizontal as expressive of the most radical shift in the subject matter of art, the shift from nature to culture.”32 While Steinberg locates the beginnings of this shift in Claude Monet’s Nymphéas, he notes a break in the late 1950s when painting no longer “simulates vertical fields, but opaque flatbed horizontals,” situating Robert Rauschenberg’s canvases in the latter camp.33 As surfaces that refer neither to uprightness nor to a vertical alignment of picturing, Rauschenberg’s paintings acknowledge the opacity of the picture plane by layering it with a collage of waste and detritus and by referencing other culturally constructed surfaces, including projected screens, billboards, and dashboards.34 Smith’s Skowhegan photographs are in dialogue with this shift. They use the technology of the camera to orient viewers to what lies underfoot and, in doing so, register the technology of the camera. The emphasis on horizontality was not new in Smith’s broader practice across media, however. When fabricating sculptures, he often combined pieces of steel and iron on the floor of his studio, placing them on white painted rectangles, structuring them against a background (see fig. 5). His drawings and paintings of the 1950s, too, experiment with what Steinberg describes as a reorientation away from the vertical axis of the picture plane. These drawings imagine a dislocation from the familiar world of figural forms—​perhaps none more so than several drawings Smith made in 1952 as a metaphor for the disorienting experiences of technology and the artificially mobile vantage point of the camera. As Susan Cooke has pointed out, Smith in 1952—​t he year he analogized sculptural viewing with aerial vision—​conceived one series of drawings as a comment on the aerial view (fig. 33).35 In them, lines map space as if ordering a topography, flattening the contours of foothills or a mountain range. Still other drawings that Smith made in 1952 and 1953 are oriented to the sky rather than the earth and organize pictorial space like a constellation—​a galaxy of interconnected lines made up of economical drips and controlled splatters. In both modes, the sculptor jettisons a perspectival organization, instead rendering its surface as a topographical or astral view seen aerially or telescopically. Though the medium of the drawings is dripped lines and pools of ink—​and not the visual encoding of the photograph—​like Smith’s aerial photographs they frame a disembodied vantage point. The world seen in the drawings and photographs is glimpsed through technology, made unfamiliar and strange by the mediation of camera, airplane, or telescope. In these images, Smith tests out a mode of imaging that calls attention to the “operational processes” Steinberg described. The picture’s surface is the analog not of experience but of a vision mediated by technology and culture. Smith experimented with surface in still other ways in drawings. In a series he began in 1957, the sculptor placed everyday objects—​discarded tools, nuts and bolts,

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Figure 33. David Smith, ΔΣ 9/8/52, 1952. Egg ink and tempera on paper, 18⅛ × 23¼ in. (46 × 59.1 cm). The Estate of David Smith, New York.

slices of cucumber, cut pieces of cardboard, and watermelon rind—​on pieces of paper or canvas, coated them with spray paint, and then removed them.36 The resulting images are indexes of the contours of things. Like the cameraless images, or photograms, by Man Ray and Moholy-Nagy, made by placing objects on prepared photographic paper and exposing the image to light, Smith’s sprays similarly create a pictorial composition based on presence and absence; the white spaces left by the “absent objects,” as Peter Stevens has termed them, can also be read as positive figures depicted against a luminous ground of sprayed paint.37 The sprays move between flatness and depth, between the horizontal plane of the paper—​t he ghostly imprint of the now absent objects—​and the vertical format of the picture, which structures an empty figure against a luminous ground. Several of the sprays were sketches for possible sculptures—​Untitled (1963), for instance, is a two-dimensional outline for a sculpture composed of geometric shapes (plate 15). The drawing presents an imaginary sculpture atop a narrow pedestal or base. Smith has oriented the sculpture’s base to the bottom edge of the composition, an alignment that he repeated in many of his spray drawings for sculptures. The ori-

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entation recalls the format the artist used to present his sculptures individually in his photographs, positioning his camera low to the ground and cropping the photograph at the juncture of sculpture and pedestal. In the drawing, he also shifts the pictorial orientation from vertical to horizontal, flattening space to a geometry of bold contrasts. Together these images, which cover a broad range of media, show a sculptor experimenting with surface to challenge pictorial illusionism. Like the drawings, the Skowhegan slides emphasize the matter-of-fact surface to present fragmented spaces that are adrift.

“A G R A M M A R O F E X T R E M E V I S UA L D I S J U N C T I O N ”

The images shown in Smith’s Skowhegan lecture departed from his work in other media in one crucial way, however: as slides, these photographs would have been presented in a temporal sequence, as slide after slide was illuminated in the darkened space of the room. This format contributed to their meaning, and it literalized the spatially elusive encounter that Smith’s sculptures provoked.38 After the cubist piece of fluorite, as the transcript of the talk makes clear, the sculptor presented the out-of focus stone and the white clapboard wall spotted with dark paint. Then he showed several images of the ground: the flotsam and jetsam, the geological relief, and the detritus sinking into the sand. The sequence of images is incongruous; together they structure not a seamless unraveling of narrative time but rather a fragmentary constellation of free-floating, autonomous, and disjunctive views. Projected on the wall—​in succession, and not in a Wölfflinian binary comparison—​ these disparate images would have elicited an experience similar to Smith’s concept of sculptural viewing. In his 1952 essay “The Language Is Image,” Smith described his sculpture as “a train of hooked visions [that] arise from very ordinary locales,” and he inventoried what those things might be, including the arrangement of things under an old board; stress patterns; fissures; the structure pattern of growth; stains; tracks of men, animals, machines; the accidental or unknown order of forces; accidental evidences such as spilled paint, patched sidewalks, broken parts, structural faults; the force lines in rock or marble laid by glacial sedimentation. Realistic all, made by ancient pattern or unknown force to be recorded, repeated, varied, transformed in analogy or as keys to contemporary celebrations. Some works are the celebration of wonders. After several of these a specter.39

Smith’s list of “hooked visions” contributes to a larger story about perception. The sculptor’s inventory names material objects, marks, and remnants that have been altered by human history and geological time. Like his Skowhegan photographs, the list excerpts fragments of a larger world. These partial images would be first “recorded,” then “repeated,” “varied,” and “transformed by analogies”—​abstracted to the pictorial and combined to form a dissonant flow of recorded images. Linked together like cars on a

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train, these things, these images, would combine to structure a fragmentary process of perception. No single element would stand in for the whole; rather, the larger spatial experience would be made up of a series of unrelated and contingent views. The succession of heterogeneous images would have emphasized the disparities between them—​qualities of disjunction that Henri Bergson located in Creative Evolution (1907), when he theorized the cinematograph as an animation of snapshots: It is to take a series of snapshots of the passing regiment and to throw these instantaneous views on the screen, so that they replace each other very rapidly. This is what the cinematograph does. With photographs, each of which represents the regiment in a fixed attitude, it reconstitutes the mobility of the regiment marching. . . . We take snapshots, as it were, of the passing reality, and, as these are characteristic of the reality, we have only to string them on a becoming, abstract, uniform, and invisible, situated at the back of the apparatus of knowledge, in order to imitate what there is that is characteristic in this becoming itself.40

The cinematograph represents movement by stringing together instantaneous static views. But this movement is always only an imitation of motion, not motion itself. For Bergson, the sequence of snapshots constituted by the cinematograph can never stand in for duration—​an experience that he analogized to the stretching of an elastic band, which does not divide as it elongates. In Bergson’s description, the images in a sequence can only approximate mobility because they are divisible, each a separate unity. Smith’s Skowhegan lecture followed the fragmentation of projected vision that Bergson theorizes. His photographs do not stand in for three-dimensional viewing but rather are a sequence of dissonant views, like a visual chain of signification that yields an abstract and temporally discontinuous encounter. At Skowhegan, Smith enacted the very mode of fragmentation that he also built into his photographs of his sculptures. These, too, took the form of a disjunctive sequence. In the 1950s, Smith frequently photographed his sculptures in succession. Compare, for instance, two of Smith’s copy prints of Bouquet of Concaves (1959; figs. 34 and 35). As in his photographs of Cockfight (see fig. 23), The Hero (see plate 2), and other sculptures, Smith used a low vantage point, projecting the sculpture against a white sky. He placed his camera well below the wire crate—​an ad hoc pedestal—​and reframed the photograph to cut out the surrounding pile of materials outside his sculpture workshop. A narrow depth of field heightens the differences between the sharp textures of steel and the out-of-focus trees behind it, which serve as a backdrop to the sculpture. These tactics disconnect the sculpture from its surroundings, framing and designating its autonomy. From one photograph to the next, Smith rotated Bouquet of Concaves. In one image, it registers as a set of vertical concave shapes; shadows amplify the cut pieces of pipe that are lined up in a row (see fig. 34). In the other image, its three horizontal concavities are

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Figures 34 and 35. David Smith, Photographs of Bouquet of Concaves (1959), Bolton Landing, NY, c. 1959. Black-andwhite negatives and masking tape. 34: 2⅞ × 2½ in. (7.3 × 6.4 cm). 35: 3¾ × 6½ in. (9.5 × 16.5 cm). The Estate of David Smith, New York.

suspended across the bulky convex shapes (see fig. 35). The sculpture’s organization is now reversed: concavities become convex; what was smooth and linear now looks dense and bulky. Read together, Smith’s two photographs elicit an unsettling encounter: viewers must reconcile two seemingly different views—​t wo incongruous surfaces—​of the same sculpture. In photographs like these, Smith creates an experience that distances the beholder by compressing the object to a single surface and dislodging it from inhabited space. As in his Skowhegan photographs, Smith stops perception at the surface of the image, limiting our view to a mere plane. When these photographs are seen in sequence, the two views register as two separate sculptures, literalizing the fragmentary process of viewing that Smith described when he compared his sculpture to a barrel in 1952.41 The photographs present disconnected surfaces, or “fronts,” that do not relate to a central, volumetric core. As images that distance and transform his sculptures by calling into question the surface of the image, Smith’s photographs raise questions about their impact on critics’ definitions of his objects as spatially elusive things—​a reading authored chiefly by Rosalind Krauss. In the late 1960s, Krauss consulted Smith’s photographic archive as she wrote her Harvard dissertation, which MIT Press published as Terminal Iron Works: The Sculpture of David Smith in 1971. Her catalogue raisonné, which she wrote as part of her dissertation, followed in 1977, and again she depended on the artist’s archives, using his own photographs as illustrations, along with those by Ugo Mulas—​

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whom the Archives of American Art and the trustees of the Estate of David Smith ­commissioned to document Smith’s studio and sculpture after his death in 1965—​as well as photographs she took herself.42 Krauss’s forceful and wide-ranging analysis of Smith’s sculpture moved beyond Greenberg’s formalist appraisal. Terminal Iron Works took seriously Smith’s subject matter and examined his surrealist-influenced imagery. Drawing from discourses of phenomenology and poststructuralism, Krauss argued for the self-sufficiency of Smith’s works based on their totemic qualities, which she read as soliciting and refusing a viewer’s possessive powers. In her studies she relied directly on Smith’s own photographs to launch her arguments. This dependence is manifest in her discussions of Blackburn, Song of an Irish Blacksmith, a work that, as we have seen, Krauss argues structures “a grammar of extreme visual disjunction.” 43 In Passages in Modern Sculpture, she writes that Blackburn is a “a formal counterpart to what Smith saw as the essence of totemism itself. Thus the form of his work and the notion of the totem became two interlocking and reciprocal metaphors which pointed to the same thing: a statement about how the work could not be possessed.” 44 Krauss used two photographs to illustrate her argument, both taken by Smith (fig. 36). The sculptor approached Blackburn by adopting a low vantage point, suspending the sculpture above the range of mountains in the distance. Smith also cropped the photograph at the base of the sculpture, erasing any view of the pedestal on which it was propped, as well as the ground. Seen photographically, Blackburn appears as a set of opposing, unstable surfaces (figs. 37 and 38). One view depicts the work as an elongated, open form; the other presents it as a dense knot of linear clusters. The two frames differ radically from each other by each presenting a different two-dimensional image of the sculpture that seems not to relate to the other. When she analyzed his sculptures, Krauss did not stress the disjunctive visual encounter Smith’s own photographs elicit, but her language is tied to the two surfaces that Smith’s photographs provide. “From one view,” she writes in Terminal Iron Works, “Blackburn is all open silhouette. Small clusters of cotter pins and pipe section punctuate the joints of its hieratic torso. . . . From another view Blackburn fans out in precarious balance across the viewer’s plane of vision as irregular gesture. By moving ninety degrees around the work we have the powerful sense of seeing a different work, not merely a new aspect of Blackburn.” 45 Although her description suggests a firsthand encounter with the sculpture, it closely follows the structure of the photographs, which present two dissonant views taken when Smith rotated the sculpture ninety degrees: one an open silhouette and the other a dense knot. What would an account of Blackburn look like that considers the differences between sculpture and photograph? For one, it would consider how the sculpture appears as more than those two views. Such an account might demonstrate, for instance, how the work unfolds unpredictably when seen from a number of different vantages: it is not only an open, pictorial shape and densely compacted structure similar to the views

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Figure 36. Pages 154 and 155 of Rosalind E. Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977), illustrating David Smith, Blackburn, Song of an Irish Blacksmith (1949–​50; photographs by David Smith). © 1981 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, by permission of The MIT Press.

Krauss describes but also a precarious or awkward thing that teeters on collapse, and a dense, material object whose surface contains the marks of its making. Smith applied hatch marks to the bronze surface after it was cast, and he left unground the welded joints between the found objects and the iron parts, deliberately leaving them as an aesthetic component of the work (see plate 8). Krauss omits from her account these haptic qualities—​what the sculpture looks like from close up. Viewing Blackburn in the round means encountering all the possible destabilizing images of the sculpture, which hinge on texture, scale, materiality, and surface. Krauss offers an important descriptive vocabulary for his objects and makes a vital case for Smith’s rejection of idealism. But how do we decouple that vocabulary from Smith’s photographic mediations, which dramatize the autonomy of his objects by presenting a sequence of irresolvable surfaces? Krauss suggested answers to these questions in a 1998 essay published in the first exhibition catalog of Smith’s photography. Then she described how he photographically shaped his sculptures in two ways. The first entailed “organiz[ing] settings and points of view that bring out the figurative character of the sculptures—​their existence as ‘personages’—​while simultaneously ­emphasizing their

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Figure 37. David Smith, Photograph of Blackburn, Song of an Irish Blacksmith (1949–​ 50), Bolton Landing, NY, c. 1949–​50. Gelatin-silver contact print, 5 × 3½ in. (12.7 × 8.9 cm). The Estate of David Smith, New York. Figure 38. David Smith, Photograph of Blackburn, Song of an Irish Blacksmith (1949– ​50), Bolton Landing, NY, c. 1949–​50. Gelatin silver print, 8¼ × 10 in. (21 × 25.4 cm). The Estate of David Smith, New York.

unapproachability, their ‘sentinel’ aspect.” 46 The second involved staging his work by structuring “a succession of images, many of which seemed to have nothing to do with one another.” 47 Setting the sculptures outside, she writes, “and shooting them against the sky, he took advantage of backlighting that would obliterate detail and all sense of relief to render the work mostly a matter of silhouettes and linear pattern.” 4 8 Krauss describes how these photographic strategies echo those Smith used in his sculpture to reject volume and illusionism in favor of a spatially elusive object. Yet she does not suggest that these photographs mediated her own reading of Smith’s sculpture. Accounting for Smith’s photographs means recognizing their transformation of sculptural space, or how they emphasize the silhouette at the expense of tactility and dimensionality. For Smith, the photograph was a mediating surface. It was a technological and representational framework to distance the beholder by destabilizing three-dimensional illusionism. When seen in sequence, these views further unsettled perception by presenting irresolvable, abstract fronts. By these lights, sculpture and photograph are separate media that construe different encounters with sculptural space. Consider how Smith photographed Australia (1951), a large-scale work in steel that is roughly six feet by eight feet by sixteen inches (fig. 39). In a photograph he took soon after the sculpture was completed—​an image that was published frequently—​he organized the sculpture as a linear pictogram.49 It registers as a silhouetted form similar to the cave drawings that Greenberg sent him reproductions of, which possibly influenced the work.50 Using his characteristically low point of view and abrupt crop lines, Smith compressed the sculpture into shallow space. Australia becomes mere surface; flattened to two dimensions, it is envisioned as a horizontal plane, as if it were a geography seen aerially. By juxtaposing a crisp steel outline with the blurred forms of mountains and trees, the photograph separates Australia from its Adirondack surroundings. It hovers between figuration and abstraction by presenting a linear sculpture—​a figure—​against an empty landscape background. The work is not located within its surroundings; nor is it totally apart from it, a homeless object. Smith photographed the sculpture again several months later, from a new angle (fig. 40).51 Once again the vantage point is low, beneath its spindle base. But Australia looks rather different now: its headlike form is lost in a jumble of steel, while the tail arches up and toward the picture plane. No longer a clear silhouette, the sculpture appears cluttered and on the verge of collapse. In a comparison of the two photographs, Australia registers as two different surfaces—​t wo distinct things—​that seem impossible to resolve. Smith built spatial elusiveness into the sculpture in yet another way, however, by ­creating a form whose unpredictability plays out in three dimensions.52 From a distance it reads as a pictorial contour similar to the first photograph; when seen up close, however, the sculpture’s felt scale becomes apparent, and it intrudes on physical space in erratic ways. The sculpture’s head and torso contain vestibules of space that undulate, disrupting expectations of stability, and its end protrudes awkwardly and at a distance from the base. Viewers become aware of its imbalance as steel juts into space. Seen

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Figure 39. David Smith, Photograph of Australia (1951), Bolton Landing, NY, c. 1951. Gelatin silver print, 715⁄16 × 915⁄16 in. (20.2 × 25.2 cm). The Estate of David Smith, New York. Figure 40. David Smith, Photograph of Australia (1951), Bolton Landing, NY, c. 1951. Gelatin silver print, 10 × 83⁄16 in. (25.4 × 20.8 cm). The Estate of David Smith, New York.

up close, the sculpture also registers as a dense and contingent thing that evidences the process of welding: the erratic cuts of the torch, and the viscous seam of the weld. Taken together, these spatial views do not add up to a totalizing image of the sculpture. Encountering Australia firsthand means grasping its awkward materiality and its linear presence, its hulking size and its fabricated structure.53 In Smith’s project, sculpture and photograph elicit a range of disparate encounters. His photographs transform and distance his objects by calling attention to the material facets of photography—​vantage point, edge, and planar surface—​t hat is, to the image as a constructed picture. His photographs both overlap with and depart from an experience with his sculpture in the round—​which itself is complex in its structuring and destabilizing of the silhouette through an experience of the object’s scale, materiality, and spatial precarity. The photograph emphasizes an encounter with sculpture as a flattened surface, only one of the possible associations Smith’s sculptures elicit. The artist also used photography to distance the beholder in other ways. Depicting works from his Cubi series in the 1960s, for instance, he made double exposures that captured the contingent effects of burnished stainless steel. The images dissolve the hard boundaries of sculptural form with bright reflections of light, translating the luminous contingency of the Cubis into the language of photography. Here it is light, in addition to point of view and frame, that plays the deciding role in disrupting the photographic surface. In several photographs of sculptures clustered together in groups, Smith also distorted the image by emphasizing the overlapping and merging contours of sculptural shapes (fig. 41). Installed in a jumble outside his workshop, the sculptures resemble a cubist drawing positioned just inside the photograph. Here, photographic surface operates as an extension of his sculpture; like the unsettling sides of his sculptures, his photographs are capable of closing off the beholder, withholding the objects from view. By blocking or distorting the camera’s claims to illusionism, Smith’s photographs echo images that were taken by Brancusi and Rosso of their objects, and which similarly call attention to the photographic surface. Photographing Mademoiselle Pogany II (1920), for instance, Brancusi disrupted a clear view of the work with bright flashes of light that dissolve sculptural form and volume (fig. 42). As Paul Paret has put it in an essay on Brancusi’s photographs, these images “dissolv[e] the distinction between the real and the illusory, the known and the unknown.”54 Mademoiselle Pogany II appears to be a contingent surface, the result of a mechanical illumination. In another mode, the sculptor used a double exposure to unsettle the stable contours and edges of Architectural Project (1918; fig. 43). Brancusi jostled the camera during the exposure, creating a double image of a vibrating form.55 The sculpture—​a carved wood totemic structure—​and its black shadow, projected on the wall, have no stable boundaries. Sculpture, shadow, and their ghostly traces merge to create an allover surface composition. These photographs destabilize the objects they represent by making visible the photographic process, underscoring the camera’s intervention at the expense of illusionism.

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Figure 41. David Smith, Photograph of a Group of Sculptures from the Voltri–​Bolton Landing Series, Bolton Landing, NY, c. 1963. Gelatin silver print, 8 × 10 in. (20.3 × 25.4 cm). The Estate of David Smith, New York. Figure 42. Constantin Brancusi, Mademoiselle Pogany II, View of the Profile, Polished Bronze (1920), c. 1920. Gelatin silver print, 23 × 17 cm. Centre Pompidou, Paris (MNAM-CCI [PH 302 A]). © 2013 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.

Figure 43. Constantin Brancusi, Architectural Project (1918), c. 1920s. Gelatin silver print, 30 × 23.9 cm. Centre Pompidou, Paris (MNAM-CCI [PH 639 B]). © 2013 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.

Rosso, for his part, also drew attention to the mediating framework of photography through a range of different effects.56 He experimented with the developing process by adding metal or sepia pigments that re-toned his images black, brown, white, blue, or red or by leaving visible the marks made by the instruments used to develop the picture. He applied color to some of his photographs, spraying a grayish-white ground on the background of photographs of Enfant au Sein (1890), Madame X (1896), and Ecce Puer (1906), for instance. Rosso also scratched the surfaces of his photographs, calling attention to the materiality of the photographic paper. In one photograph of Enfant Malade (1893–​95), which he took in 1901 or 1902 from another photograph, the sculptor scraped out a section of the paper near the child’s eye (fig. 44)—​a practice he repeated in a 1910 photograph of Yvette Guilbert (1895) that he printed on thick mat board, which also contains applied white ground.57 The photograph of Enfant Malade is out of focus, and the edges of the sculpture are softened, so that the differences between sculpture, pedestal, and background are indistinct. Rosso also added a layer of sepia-colored watercolor paint to the surface of the image, a veil of rain that coats

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Figure 4 4. Medardo Rosso, Photograph of Enfant Malade (1893–​95), Photograph from a Photograph, Enlarged, with Watercolor and Sepia Stains, an Abrasion in Center and White Stain on Lower Left, c. 1901–​2 . Gelatin silver print, 41.4 × 33.5 cm. Private collection.

the image.58 On the bottom left is a small dab of white. Together with the tear on the surface, these effects further distance the sick child from our gaze; the sculpture is an apparition that floats beyond our reach. Enlarged to sixteen inches by thirteen inches, the photograph is materialized—​not a transparent image, it is an opaque screen that masks and transforms the wax child. Smith’s photographs similarly hold the viewer at bay by using controls specific to the medium of photography. Like his aerial photographs or those he took of flotsam and jetsam on the ground, his photographs of his sculpture restrict the object in a planar surface through the edge, or cut, the focus, and the point of view. These images acknowledge and reflect the camera’s mediation of space, recognizing its “operational processes,” to quote Steinberg again from his discussion of 1950s painting. In photographs of works like The Hero (see plate 2) and Bouquet of Concaves (see figs. 34 and 35), Smith compresses and restricts volume into a flattened silhouette. A comparison of the sculptor’s own photographs of his works with those taken by other professional photographers demonstrates the radicalness of Smith’s intervention. In 1962 and 1963 the photographer Dan Budnik visited the sculptor’s studio in upstate New York to document Smith’s working process, as well as his sculpture, studio, house, and fields. Photographing Seven Hours (1961) in black-and-white film, Budnik mapped the sculpture in six shots (figs. 45–​47). As copy prints of his negatives show, Budnik first framed the sculpture in a distant view and then moved closer. In one shot, he pictured the top portion of Seven Hours from an oblique angle, cutting from the view the sculpture’s round tank shape. In two additional shots, Budnik located his camera close to the sculpture’s painted surface, framing the snow-filled field and woods beyond in the sculpture’s abstract cutout shape. Budnik’s series of photographs documents a threedimensional encounter as the photographer moved around the sculpture. His photographs tack between surface and depth, creating a comprehensive volumetric image of the work. In Budnik’s photographs, Seven Hours looks like a spatial thing. In 2006 Budnik recounted photographing Smith’s sculpture: “If one directional thought was in my head when I entered the T.I.W. [Terminal Iron Works] that first day, it was simply that, to photograph Smith in a sequential, highly anecdotal way. Like a film, but with a distillation of time.”59 The photographer describes his pursuit of Smith’s sculpture as an “anecdotal” unraveling in which he sought to capture a seamless sequence of views that would narrate—​even replicate—​an encounter with sculpture. Looking at his photographs in succession, this is what he achieved: they record a cinematic encounter that animates a process of seeing sculpture-in-the-round, both close to and at a distance. What could be more different from this documentary model than the photographs Smith took of the same sculpture? Consider, for instance, the sculptor’s copy print of Seven Hours, which bears his signature photographic marks. Smith positioned his camera at the level of the snow-covered grass; in the foreground, blades poke up into the image. The sculpture is framed from a distance, like an imposing, monumental thing

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Figure 45. Dan Budnik, Photograph of David Smith’s Seven Hours (1961), Bolton Landing, NY, c. 1962–​63. Digital scan from 35-mm black-and-white negative, 35 × 24 mm. © Dan Budnik.

(fig. 48). Smith has indicated crop lines that restrict the space of the image, cutting off the snow and hay in the foreground. Although the sculptor does not eliminate the meeting point between sculpture and ground, by cropping the foreground he disconnects the sculpture from its physical setting. The spatial characteristics of the work—​how it looks from different angles, close up, and farther away—​are restricted in the photograph’s flattened view. It is Budnik’s photograph that gives more information about the work in human scale. His eye-level shots, for instance, convey the sculpture’s approximate size and suggest what it is like to encounter the work’s linear “drawn” opening in space: to look through it and at the landscape beyond. Smith’s photograph, by contrast, closes off these tangible and haptic elements in favor of an image of pictorial abstraction. Captured by the sculptor himself, Seven Hours is all silhouette and contour. As documents, Budnik’s photographs may be the more descriptive because they relay a narrative about volumetric space. But Smith’s were central to his conception of sculpture because they fostered an encounter of distance and detachment. His images reorient the spatial qualities of his sculptures, pinpointing one side of a dialectic that Smith outlined in 1952, when he described his sculptural aesthetic as entailing both

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Figure 46. Dan Budnik, Photograph of David Smith’s Seven Hours (1961), Bolton Landing, NY, c. 1962–​63. Digital scan from 35-mm black-and-white negative, 35 × 24 mm. © Dan Budnik.

Figure 47. Dan Budnik, Photograph of David Smith’s Seven Hours (1961), Bolton Landing, NY, c. 1962–​63. Digital scan from 35-mm black-and-white negative, 35 × 24 mm. © Dan Budnik.

pictorial and spatial modes of viewing. In a lecture at the Museum of Modern Art, he again emphasized the aerial view: “My position for vision in my works aims to be in it, and not a scientific physical viewing it as subject. I wish to comment in the travel. It is an adventure viewed. I do not enter its order as lover, brother or associate, I seem to view it equally as from the traveling height of a plane two miles up, or from my mountain workshop viewing a cloud-like procession.”60 As an explanation of artistic practice, this passage is remarkably personal; it also articulates a vision of the modernist object, caught up in a complex spatial and temporal terrain. Smith imagines the process of viewing taking place simultaneously at a distant remove and at arm’s length—​close to the sculpture, but not in it. Viewing his sculpture involved visual travel, a tacking between two distinct vantage points, each of which framed a viewing scenario for Smith’s sculpture. The first was structured by the material place of the studio: the “mountain workshop.” From there, sculpture seemed bulky, volumetric, and ephemeral, a procession of clouds, both atmospheric and welded.61 The second, however, envisioned sculpture as an abstract shape, seen from a distance where “importances [sic] [became] pattern—​depth, bulk [were] not so evident,” as Smith wrote in a draft of the lecture.62 The sculptor’s two vantage

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Figure 48. David Smith, Photograph of Seven Hours (1961), Bolton Landing, NY, c. 1963. Gelatinsilver contact print and crayon, 2⁷⁄16 × 2⁷⁄16 in. (6.2 × 6.2 cm). The Estate of David Smith, New York.

points also define psychic roles. Being in the work, but not of it; entering the work, but not “as lover, brother or associate.” Smith specifies modes of engagement that evoke a simultaneous absorption and separation, identification and distance, fascination and detachment. If the view from the studio sought to grasp Smith’s sculpture as a physical and weighty mass, the more distant vantage established a horizontal picture in which his sculpture appeared in outline, as if seen from an airplane two miles up—​a height that Smith indicated more directly in a draft of the lecture, writing, “When I am in the clouds I am there to look at my work.”63 The two vantages sketched out a definition of sculpture as entailing embodied and pictorially abstract modes of viewing. Smith’s description of the “adventure viewed” defines photography’s place in his project for sculpture. Like the airplane window, the camera could organize space from a mobile, disengaged vantage, structuring an experience of distance and abstraction. If the cabin window presented a view of patterns in a sprawling geography, the portable camera, with its aperture and zoom lens, could arrest and capture the shifting and elusive process of viewing—​to defamiliarize it by suspending it in a pictorial surface. Not neutral images, Smith’s photographs of his sculpture incorporate modernist con-

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ventions of abstraction to activate a destabilizing pictorial encounter with sculpture. His photographs are documents that underscore and materialize the camera’s intervention into vision by making visible the actions of framing, focusing, and taking a picture. These strategies were tested out and deepened in his Skowhegan slides, which distort and fragment the familiar world. By emphasizing photography’s mediating framework, the artist could upend, dematerialize, or flatten his objects. His photographs situate objects between the illusionistic space of the picture and its planar surface. The aerial view, photography, and sculpture merge in Smith’s project, anticipating new ways of defining spatial perception in the 1960s that incorporated unexpected vantage points. To take one example, Robert Smithson explored aerial sight in a project with the architectural firm Tibbetts, Abbott, McCarthy, and Stratton (TAMS) to conceptualize the Dallas–​Fort Worth Regional Airport. Smithson’s proposal for the airport included earthwork sculptures on the grounds composed of mounds of sand or spirals and squares of colored rocks. Images of the works would be fed into monitors in the terminal. According to Ann Reynolds in her discussion of Smithson’s Terminal Area Concepts: In setting up a situation in which two sites, one inside and the other outside the terminal, come together, he acknowledges a third condition of the air terminal—​v isual convergence. As one travels in and out of an airport, one views the air terminal from a sequence of different points of view—​from the air above the terminal, from the ground out on the airfield, and from inside the main air terminal building. Each of these points of view provides a different image. From the air, the terminal appears as a cluster of two-dimensional shapes and lines, and from the tarmac or from inside the main terminal building, most of the terminal’s structures appear as three-dimensional forms. At some point during the plane’s descent or ascent, these two sets of images momentarily converge and then transform into either two-dimensional or three-dimensional images depending on the upward or downward direction of one’s movement.64

In Reynolds’s account, the experience of this sculpture involves both viewing from above the two-dimensional contours of the site and encountering it on the ground. Both views of the structures—​appearing and converging in two and three dimensions as planes take off and land—​relied on addressing artificial technologies of vision. Smithson, in his 1969 essay “Aerial Art,” which detailed his proposal for the airport and described those by Robert Morris, Carl Andre, and Sol Lewitt, wrote, “In fact, the entire air terminal may be considered conceptually as an artificial universe, and as everyone knows, everything in the known universe isn’t entirely visible. There is no reason why one shouldn’t look at art through a telescope.”65 Smithson was interested in the technological mediation of sculptural space, and he wrote that aerial photography and travel “bring into view the surface features of [a] shifting world of perspectives.”66 In Smithson’s proposal, airplane, telescope, and television are instruments of vision that

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organize and flatten embodied space, transforming the sculptures on the ground into a surface. For Smith, whose incorporation of the aerial view into sculpture unfolded a little more than a decade before Smithson’s, both aerial distance and grounded proximity mattered in his work, as two different modes of viewing that stood in for the media of photography and sculpture. Each medium solicited a different perceptual encounter with sculpture: one a two-dimensional surface and the other a three-dimensional object that impinges on the space of the beholder. In his Skowhegan slides and his photographs of sculptures like Australia (see figs. 39 and 40), Smith mapped out a modernist fantasy of viewing that acknowledged—​even materialized—​t he technological workings of the camera. These images also influenced readings of his sculpture as self-sufficient things, or how Smith’s dislodging of his sculpture from the ground had radical effects on discourses of modern sculpture’s homelessness. Disconnected, weightless, unmoored: these qualities were tied to Smith’s picturing of his work’s autonomy. Perhaps this photographic dramatization of his sculpture’s independence was what Greenberg had in mind when, commenting on their possible use in an exhibition catalog in 1967, he termed the illustrative use of Smith’s photographs “romantic.”67 Not only had the sculptor’s photographs upset neat boundaries between media, but they had also departed from the “literary,” or straightforward, approach Greenberg recommended for the medium of photography in a 1964 essay.68 Smith’s photographs, with their jarring points of view and emphasis on contrast, did not accommodate Greenberg’s investment in the transparency of the photographic medium.

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3 IMAGES OF NONBELONGING Dramatizing Autonomy in the Sculptural Group

The art would be to be able to feel homesick, even though one is at home. Expertness in the use of illusion is required for this. SØREN KIERKEGAARD, STAGES ON LIFE’S WAY (1845), AS QUOTED IN WALTER BENJAMIN, THE ARCADES PROJECT, 1927– ​4 0

In 1953 David Smith hauled several of his recent sculptures down the hill from his studio to photograph them on a dock on Lake George, New York. The sculptures—​7/29/53, Tanktotem III, and Tanktotem IV, completed that year—​were large-scale constructions, each made of sheared ends of boiler tanks, welded iron rods, and other scraps or cuts of metal. Smith made eight photographs of the scene, arranging the works differently in each. In one, he frames the sculptures so that they overlap to form an abstract, cubic pattern of shapes that order the view in the distance: the leftmost object organizes a forested island, its iron rectangle miming the camera’s frame (fig. 49). A shallow depth of field accentuates the differences between sculpture and its out-of-focus background. In another photograph, the sculptor placed 7/29/53 atop a pallet, blocking the view of the sculpture with Tanktotem IV; the two objects merge as one (fig. 50). Off to the right, Tanktotem III is poised to move beyond the frame, only peripherally part of the group. Smith has introduced the insectlike sculpture Bi-Cycle (1953) to the ensemble; its small size acts as a measure of scale. In these lakeside photographs, Smith staged his sculptures in a pastoral setting to dramatize their anthropomorphism.1 Standing directly on the dock’s uneven planks without the support of pedestals—​w ith the exception of 7/29/53 in the second view—​t he sculptures resemble figures, yet their spindly legs and disjointed torsos seem at odds with the generalized landscape around them.2 The photographs frame an odd collision of sculpture and landscape: were these structures meant as stand-ins for bodies enacting other lakeside activities—​swimming, jumping, resting? Or were they m ­ aterials—​

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pieces of discarded tanks that together constitute a sculpture? Which is it: active bodies or welded frames? In the photographs, this question—​t his irresolution—​both animates and abstracts the work. It stirs up suggestions of figuration and abstraction, of belonging and place, implying lakeside activities all the better to show the sculptures’ separateness from their surroundings. In these 1953 shots, Smith imagines sculpture to be part of an alternative world. Many of Smith’s critics, beginning in the 1950s, noted how the artist’s staging of his work elicited an unsettling juxtaposition between abstract steel sculpture and landscape setting. Robert Motherwell, for instance, offered the following view in a 1950 catalog essay that reproduced some of Smith’s own photographs: “When I saw that David places his work against the mountains and sky, the impulse was plain, an ineffable desire to see his humanness related to exterior reality, to nature at least if not man, for the marvel of the felt scale that exists between a true work and the immovable world, the relation that makes both human.”3 Motherwell leaves out the photographs’ mediation when he remarks how the correlation of sculpture and landscape proposed an aesthetic possibility of humanization, of the resolution of difference. For the painter-viewer, the juxtaposition declared an “ineffable desire” to reconcile the two, sparking a longing for sculpture to be given a home or a place. Motherwell’s hopeful account highlights how Smith’s steel sculpture was defined in a wider postwar world in opposition to a human landscape—​envisaged within a mountain setting, against a backdrop of field and sky. This public reception of his work was sponsored in part by Smith’s “sculpture farm,” as one contemporaneous viewer called it—​t he fields surrounding his house and studio in upstate New York, where the sculptor installed his works.4 But Smith’s photographs, published alongside descriptions such as Motherwell’s, also organized and solicited such a response, by framing a pictorial encounter with sculpture that hinged on a series of opposing terms. Once again relying on the photographic controls of vantage point, focus, and frame, the sculptor juxtaposed steel with hill and forest; linear abstract form, with open sky; familiar, with alien; communal, with singular; present, with absent. For Smith, the difference between these terms was part of the point. It was the crux of his sculpture’s modernism, allowing him to animate the deep otherness of his work. This chapter considers how the sculptor used his camera to display his objects in ways that distanced them from the here and now. Returning to discourses of modern sculptural autonomy, I show how the artist crafted a photographic display for his objects that dramatized their autonomy or homelessness, a sense of the temporal and spatial dislocation that is deemed central to the discourse of modernism. Smith’s photographs exaggerated the siteless, or “nomadic,” condition of modern sculpture that Rosalind Krauss identified in her pivotal 1979 essay “Sculpture in the Expanded Field.”5 Alex Potts has argued that qualities of autonomy are located not exclusively in the formal characteristics of an object but are constituted by “a display that induces a viewer to see [the object] as isolated from its surroundings and set in a sphere apart.”6 Here I

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Figure 49. David Smith, Photograph of (Left to Right) 7/9/53, Tanktotem IV, and Tanktotem III (All 1953), Bolton Landing Dock, Lake George, NY, c. 1953. Gelatin silver print, 10 × 8 in. (25.4 × 20.3 cm). The Estate of David Smith, New York.

Figure 50. David Smith, Photograph of (Left to Right) Bi-Cycle, 7/9/53, Tanktotem III, and Tanktotem IV (All 1953), Bolton Landing Dock, Lake George, NY, c. 1953. Gelatin silver print, 10 × 8 in. (25.4 × 20.3 cm). The Estate of David Smith, New York.

propose a new, paradoxically intermedial account of modern sculptural autonomy that shows how qualities of homelessness and placelessness are built into Smith’s photographic staging of sculpture, tied to how the sculptor envisioned his objects as contingent and unmoored. I extend Potts’s definition of display to include photography by demonstrating how Smith and other modernists used the camera to imagine their objects as both tied to the familiar world and isolated or withdrawn. Smith staged his sculptures’ separateness in different ways. In one-on-one shots—​in photographing Cockfight, The Hero, and Oculus, for instance (see fig. 23, plate 2, and fig. 30)—​he used low vantage points and cropping to flatten his sculptures and dislodge them from their surroundings. A shallow depth of field underscores the difference between sculpture and landscape by focusing attention on the object as opposed to its blurred backdrop. With its connection to place, base, and space cropped from view, the object hovers above its setting, appearing to ward off the beholder.7 As Smith told his dealer in 1947, writing of his photograph of Oculus, sculpture “was meant to be disconnected from its base,” or severed from its spatial environment when seen photographically.8 Much like a pedestal or base, his photographs cordon off the sculptural object from everyday objects and things, as well as from inhabited space, so that it seems aloof or distinct. Smith also made photographs of sculptures clustered together in groups in the landscape, and when he pictured sculptures from his Tanktotem series on a dock on Lake George, Smith was staging a dialogue about autonomy. In the dock photographs—​and in many other shots Smith took in the 1950s of his sculptures arranged in loose collectives—​he used a landscape setting to point up how his sculpture was both in and radically displaced from its surroundings. By coordinating a set of tensions—​between figural presence and steel sculpture, between inhabited space and fabricated thing—​t he photographs raise questions about sculpture’s place or home. They suggest a reading of sculpture as unsettled and provisional. Standing on the dock in an odd configuration, the objects are animated as alien forms that seem only tentatively to form a collective. In photographs such as these, Smith questions the public identity of modern sculpture in the postwar era, suggesting that sculpture cannot belong. Smith relied on these two types of photographs—​of his sculptures framed one-onone and in groups—​to present his work to the public. He published his group photographs alongside solo shots of his sculptures in exhibition catalogs, encouraging viewers to shuttle between views of singular objects and sculptures grouped in a setting. By doing so, viewers could grasp the individuality of Smith’s objects, each one a unique thing, while also understanding how the works were part of an alternative world. The images of multiple objects became ingrained in the public’s conception of his work and influenced gallery displays of his objects; the organizers of a 1960 French and Company exhibition, for instance, echoed Smith’s photographic stagings by installing clusters of sculptures directly on the floor. Smith’s group photographs can be situated within a history of the photographic dis-

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play of sculpture that includes works by Constantin Brancusi, Henry Moore, Alberto Giacometti, and Louise Bourgeois, who each installed his or her objects in collectives and photographed them or hired professional photographers to do so. These photographs inform a broader discussion about the staging of sculpture before 1965. Smith, like these other modernists, was invested in exploring uprightness, fragmentation, and scale. He was also participating in a dialogue about the relationship between figuration and abstraction, the solitary individual and the collective.9 By staging sculptures in groups, often directly on the ground, sculptors could activate and dramatize the resemblances and differences of their objects. Smith’s photographs, read alongside these other displays, question the role of sculptural figuration and belonging—​the very place of public sculpture—​in the postwar world.10

“ I M PA S S I V E I D O L S O F T H E M A C H I N E AG E ”

In 1961 the poet and curator Frank O’Hara recounted a visit to Bolton Landing in an essay published in Art News, illustrated with Smith’s own photographs. O’Hara noted how Smith had displayed his sculptures in the landscape in ways that seemed out of place: Outside the studio huge piles of steel lay waiting to be used, and along the road up to the house a procession of new works, in various stages of painting, stood in the attitudes of some of Smith’s characteristic titles: they stood there like a Sentinel or Totem or Ziggurat, not at all menacing, but very aware. . . . The contrast between the sculptures and this rural scene is striking: to see a cow or pony in the same perspective as one of the Ziggurats, with the trees and mountains behind, is to find nature soft and art harsh; nature looks intimate and vulnerable, the sculptures powerful, indomitable. Smith’s works in galleries have often looked rugged and in-the-American-grain, which indeed they are in some respects, but at Bolton Landing the sophistication of vision and means comes to the fore strongly. Earlier works, mounted on pedestals or stones about the terrace and garden, seem to partake of the physical atmosphere, but the recent works assert an authoritative presence over the panorama of mountains, divorced from nature by the insistence of their individual personalities, by the originality of their scale and the exclusion of specific references to natural forms.11

As O’Hara’s description suggests, to view Smith’s sculpture against the “panorama of mountains” was to see sculpture as a powerful, authoritarian presence: nature was “soft” and art was “harsh.” The self-sufficiency of the objects in scale and in reference created that effect. As if repelling the landscape, sculpture neither related to the landscape nor required it for its meaning, instead remaining distinct from it, refusing to belong to it.12 For O’Hara, Smith’s fantasy of sculptural viewing both placed the object in the landscape and set it apart, like a sovereign power with dominion over its natural surroundings—​not threatening, but “very aware.”13 O’Hara’s account describes how the sculptures he saw at Bolton Landing assert a

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Figure 51. Unknown photographer, Slow Movement, Painted Steel, 1965, by Anthony Caro, c. 1965. Gelatin silver print, dimensions unknown. Arts Council Collection, U.K. © Barford Sculptures Ltd., Anthony Caro.

commanding independence. Such qualities also resided in Smith’s photographic stagings of his sculpture. Cockfight is positioned above and against the blurry landscape behind it, its subject matter mythologized in an image of triumph. The Hero is envisaged as a solitary figure looming over the soft contours of an Adirondack mountain range. These photographs celebrate welded steel sculpture as powerful, authoritative forms, traits that are tied to how the photographs pictorialize sculptures, dislodging them from their surroundings. Smith’s use of the landscape differs markedly from that of other photographers of abstract sculpture in similar settings. In a late 1960s shot of Anthony Caro’s Slow Movement (1965; fig. 51), for example, a professional photographer staged an interplay between the work and its surroundings that orients viewers to the sculpture’s flattened surface. Seen from a high vantage point, the sculpture looks like a set of geometric shapes cut into a pictorial field, a space shaped by the vanishing fence, which actualizes a perspectival system. Slow Movement registers either as a collaged element, added to the illusionism of the photographic image, or as a gouge into it, a gaping hole. Either way, Caro’s sculpture is structured as a pictorial plane against its landscape surroundings, an effect that points up its abstraction, its radical difference from its setting. In this photograph, Slow Movement appears as pictorially other. In The Hero (see plate 2) and other photographs by Smith, the relationship between artwork and setting is less cut-and-dried. The low vantage points animate the objects, setting up a dialectical give-and-take between fabricated object and humanscaled space. Yet the use of focus and cropping disconnects the sculpture from its surrounding space. In Smith’s one-on-one photographs, sculptures seem to take on fantastical qualities; not inert objects, they appear about to lift off in flight, or they

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Figure 52. Ernst Scheidegger, Photograph of L’Homme au Doigt, Bronze, 1947, by Alberto Giacometti, Photographed on the Street in Front of the Artist’s Studio, c. 1950s. Gelatin silver print, dimensions unknown. Estate of Ernst Scheidegger, Zurich (1051). © Estate of Ernst Scheidegger, Zurich, 2013, and 2013 Alberto Giacometti Estate/Licensed by VAGA and Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, NY.

take on mythic qualities of heroism or victory. The landscape is both a location and a backdrop for sculpture; sculptures pictured in and against it seem both resonantly present and curiously distant, removed. In his group photographs, Smith similarly used the landscape as a backdrop to enliven his objects. Again, the artist used a low point of view, but rather than crop his photographs at the base of the sculpture, he presented them as situated in their surroundings. The environments varied, and the dock on Lake George was one of many incongruous settings that Smith chose. He photographed his sculptures on a frozen Lake George, covered in snow; on the dirt driveway leading to his studio; in the center of a paved road; and in the fields outside his studio. Like Ernst Scheidegger’s wellpublicized 1950s photographs of Giacometti’s standing figures in empty urban spaces, these photographs place sculptures in unexpected settings (fig. 52). Scheidegger chose city squares, the space between train tracks, a country path, and the edge of a quay to

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stage and frame Giacometti’s work.14 In one, he pushed to an extreme the differences between the slender, upright figure, with its densely compacted surfaces, and a seemingly empty street, through a shallow depth of field. The sculpture is both evocatively present and curiously detached, not belonging to its urban setting. Smith, by contrast, was drawn to the rural landscape to suggest the nonbelonging of his sculptures, or how they seem displaced from ordinary space. Consider, for instance, a photograph Smith made of works from his Forging series of 1955–​56, which he presented alongside The Iron Woman (1954–​58) and Man and Woman in Cathedral (1956; plate 16). The artist positioned his sculptures on mismatched, ad hoc pedestals—​a barrel, cans of paint, and a crate—​in the snow on Lake George. This odd assortment of irregularly shaped totems seems not to fit the familiar landscape. They also seem not to belong together. By presenting them as flattened contours against the pale backdrop, Smith has underscored the originality and uniqueness of each individual thing. He achieves this push and pull—​between landscape and abstract steel sculpture, between individual and collective—​using a low point of view and crisp focus to exaggerate and amplify his objects. Situated against the landscape, the sculptures articulate the polarities that O’Hara described. In this photograph as well as in the dock series, Smith uses the landscape as both a location and a backdrop to show sculpture’s otherness, emphasizing its dissociation from the present. In a 1947 poem, Smith described the landscape in similar terms, offering a model for imagining alterity by looking at what is close at hand: I have never looked at a landscape without seeing other landscapes I have never seen a landscape without visions of things I desire and despise lower landscapes have crusts of heat—​raw epidermis and the choke of vines the separate lines of salt errors—​monadnocks of fungus the balance of stone—​w ith gestures to grow the lost posts of manmaid boundaries—​in molten shade a landscape is a stilllife in Chaldean history it has faces I do not know its mountains are always sobbing females it is bags of melons and prickle pears its woods are sawed to boards its black hills bristle with maiden fern its stones are Assyrian fragments it flows the bogside beauty of the river Liffey it is colored by Indiana gas green it is steeped in veritable Indian yellow it is the place I’ve traveled to and never found it is somehow veiled to vision by pious bastards and the lord of Varu the nobleman from Gascogne in the distance it seems threatened by the destruction of gold15

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In textual images infused with fictional, geographic, and historical place-names, Smith tacks between the present and a dream, between the landscape he is in and the other landscapes he seeks. Alterity is figured in the landscape he describes as the “faces I do not know” and is couched in a list of places that are literary (Dublin’s river Liffey, made famous by Joyce), ancient (the Chaldean soothsayer’s still-life), and geologic (the monadnocks). The landscape, like Smith’s sculpture, is represented as infinitely present. The poem’s descriptive terms ground a viewer in a range of evocative and disquieting scenes—​the choke of vines, the black hills bristling with maiden ferns, or the mountains that are sobbing females—​representing the landscape as vividly present but also unavailable: it is the place never found, “veiled to vision.” Throughout, the travelerviewer is witness to the landscape’s conflicting terms.16 The space Smith envisions is made up of diverse material facts and histories. It is a landscape that invokes beauty and unease, location and detachment, the space he sees and other possible spaces. Smith maps a fantasy of peripatetic inquiry, distance, and separation. The same year Smith penned this poem, he also explored themes of groundedness and alterity in an untitled painting that pictures a sculpture in the landscape (plate 17). Positioned in the foreground of the image, an imaginative rendering of Terpsichore and Euterpe (1947) frames the space around it. The sculpture appears monumentalized, overtaking its surroundings. Smith juxtaposes the abstract edges and contours of the sculpture with the smooth shapes of the mountain range and clouds. The setting is envisioned as incongruous: the sprawling shape rests atop an abstract pattern of lines, perhaps signifying a field. Here Smith imagines sculpture as not entirely situated within the human space but also not disconnected from it. Like his poem, the painting shuttles between these two poles, visually enacting Freud’s theory of the uncanny, or as Anthony Vidler writes, “the transformation of something that once seemed homely into something decidedly not so.”17 In Smith’s painting, we move from the familiar world of the landscape to an unfamiliar and destabilizing encounter through disparities of scale and shape. Smith’s photographs of his sculpture similarly shuttle between the known and the unknown, portraying an encounter of alienation and withdrawal. In 1961 Smith made a series of photographs, several of which were used to illustrate O’Hara’s article, in which he presented recent works from his Zig and Sentinel series in the fields outside his studio (fig. 53). In some photographs, Smith homes in on the interplay of the different forms. The planes of objects overlap and touch in a cubist surface or a pictorial collage of shapes, framing a compositional geometry that makes the contours and edges of objects difficult to read. In others, Smith used a higher vantage point to emphasize the contours of his objects and show their placement in the sloping meadow outside his studio (figs. 54 and 55). Composed of large-scale convex and concave shapes, the sculptures seem incongruous in their natural setting, as if they do not belong to it. Viewers are drawn into the scene only to be thrust back out as they recognize that the image presents an alternative world for sculpture.

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Figure 53. David Smith, Carnegie Group, Sculptures from the Zig and Sentinel Series (Left to Right): Zig III, Two Circle Sentinel, Two Box Structure, March Sentinel (Stainless Steel Planes), and Zig II (All 1961), Bolton Landing, NY, 1961. Gelatin silver print, 8⅛ × 915⁄16 in. The Estate of David Smith, New York. Figure 54. David Smith, Carnegie Group, Photograph of a Group of Sculptures from the Zig and Sentinel Series (Left to Right): Two Circle Sentinel, Two Box Structure, Zig III, March Sentinel (Stainless Steel Planes), and Zig II (All 1961), Bolton Landing, NY, 1961. Gelatin silver print, 915⁄16 × 8⅙ in. (25.2 × 20.3 cm). The Estate of David Smith, New York.

Figure 55. David Smith, Carnegie Group, Photograph of a Group of Sculptures from the Zig and Sentinel Series (Left to Right): March Sentinel (Stainless Steel Planes), Two Box Structure, Two Circle Sentinel, Zig II, and Zig III (All 1961), Bolton Landing, NY, 1961. Gelatin silver print, 8⅛ × 10 in. (20.6 × 25.4 cm). The Estate of David Smith, New York.

Defining his sculpture in these group photographs as autonomous, Smith met a contemporaneous critical response to his work that described it as alien or otherworldly. Reviewing exhibitions of his work in 1953 and 1961, critic Emily Genauer observed that the sculptures were “M[e]n-from-Mars” or “mysteriously amused Martians,” anthropomorphic forms made alien.18 These epithets relate to the collision that his group photographs convey, or how Smith’s sculpture in these images seems to straddle the human present and some distant future. Welded steel sculptures are made into quasi-figural forms, construed in an Arcadian scene. Genauer saw Smith’s abstraction as full of promise and found his “aggressive, talon-like monumental abstractions . . . immensely, mysteriously, menacingly expressive,” the list of descriptive words and phrases itself invoking a festival of qualities of openness.19 The mystery she found suggests the aloofness of these objects, their self-sufficiency. If Genauer’s analogies seemed bound up in the space-age possibilities of these objects, those of other critics revealed the nostalgia evoked by Smith’s melding of human and machine. The curator Sam Hunter wrote in 1961 that Smith’s world was “peopled by bland, amiable giants, impassive idols of the machine age,” underscoring both the historical traces borne by those sculptures and their deep mythical identities.20 The discarded machine parts Smith incorporated—​like the welded seams that hold them in place—​stand in for and mark out what the sculptor recognized was the impending obsolescence of welded objects. As Anne Wagner has argued, “When the age of tanks and locomotives was over, [sculpture] would preserve the skills that had once brought them to be. Which is to say not only that Smith grasped the inevitable obsolescence of welded objects but also that he understood welded sculpture as both a quintessential

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Figure 56. Ugo Mulas, Installation of Sculptures in the Voltri Series by David Smith, Installed in the Anfiteatro Romano, Spoleto, Italy, 1962. Gelatin silver print, 7 × 9⁷⁄16 in. (17.8 × 24 cm). The Estate of David Smith, New York. © Ugo Mulas Heirs.

product of its moment and a means of manufacture ideally positioned to exhibit the skilled labor by which other products came to be. In so doing, it testified to skills, livelihoods, and lifeworlds that, as Smith recognized, capitalism makes use of only to leave behind.”21 The works contain traces of a modern industry that was being superseded, representing a loss that Hunter described in a mournful tone. Smith’s photographs memorialize his works’ connection to industry by exaggerating their disconnection from the landscape. His images of objects clustered in provisional groups designate and mark out another world for welded steel sculpture, operating like self-contained dioramas, an analogy that painter Kenneth Noland used to describe Smith’s staging of his works in his fields.22 In photographs of the Tanktotems on the dock or the Forgings on the lake, Smith’s sculptures are imagined to be in a self-contained space commemorating the remains of a passing industrial age. In 1962 Smith found a new setting in which to pictorialize his steel sculpture. He received a residential grant that year from the Italian steel corporation Italsider and was asked to make two sculptures for the Spoleto Festival of the Two Worlds while in Italy. Italsider gave Smith access to an unused factory in Voltri, Italy, in which to produce sculptures, and for the first time Smith had the assistance of a staff of six skilled work-

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Figure 57. David Smith, Photograph of Voltri VI (1962), Installed in the Anfiteatro Romano, Spoleto, Italy, 1962. Gelatinsilver contact print and crayon, 2⁷⁄16 × 2⅜ in. (6.2 × 6 cm). The Estate of David Smith, New York.

men. With their help, he began working on a larger scale and made twenty-seven works in one month—​sculptures of monumental size that incorporated discarded machine parts and scraps from other Italsider factories.23 When it came time to install his work, the director of the Spoleto Festival, Giovanni Caradente, placed the sculptures in the reconstructed Roman amphitheater and in the town of Spoleto (fig. 56). The classical ruin offered a new foil for Smith’s modernist structures, which the photographer Ugo Mulas dramatized in shots that show welded steel sculptures occupying the ancient ruin, some taken at night. The human scale of the setting amplifies these already-large, industrially scaled forms. The space of the amphitheater is incongruous with the welded steel sculptures scattered through it—​which are like an army of foreign objects, each one different from the next. Smith, too, took photographs of the scene; in one, he positioned his camera low to the ground to monumentalize Voltri VI (1962) against its ancient Roman backdrop (fig. 57). The photograph frames a composition in which the sculpture’s cut steel shape seems to merge with the architectural structure behind it. The sculpture is presented as a form in motion seen within and against the enduring architecture of antiquity. Smith was drawn to this presentation of his work. He noted how the juxtaposed stainless steel cubes of Cubi IX (1961)—​which Caradente placed in front of a medieval church after Smith shipped the sculpture from Bolton Landing before the show—​played off the “soft variables of the church wall stones.”24

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In collaboration with Mulas, Smith also installed his sculptures atop an empty railroad car to create a colossal sculpture. In Mulas’s photograph, the sculptor labors to move the heavy sculptures Voltri III, Voltri V, and Voltri IV (all 1962) so that they form a large-scale iteration of the wheel-based sculpture Voltri XIII (1962). On his return to the United States, Smith described how his “dream” had been to make a sculpture out of a flatcar, imagining loading it with “vertical sheets, inclined planes, uprights with holes, horizontals supported”; or “the nude bodies of machines, undressed of their details and teeth”; or “a hundred anvils of varying sizes and character which I found at forge stations”; or “painted skeletal wooden patterns.”25 From these sculpted flatcars, he wrote, “in a year I could have made a train.”26 The dream unrealizable, Smith settled for the installation of completed sculptures on a flatbed car and for Mulas’s photograph (fig. 58). The markers of the dream appear in the photograph, which relays the sculptor’s monumental ambitions to put his sculpture physically on a par with the once ultramodern industry it memorialized. In the photograph, Smith envisions his work magnified by its installation on a railroad car, at a larger size than was otherwise possible.27 In stagings such as those at Spoleto, Smith relied on the medium of photography to commemorate and embellish his sculptures, articulating their connections to industry through setting, cropping, and vantage point. These images tell us something about how the artist used photography as a representational device capable of capturing and transforming the objects of its focus. Notably, Smith did not use drawing to visualize these scenes, although that medium also served a role in his project. The sculptor often made preparatory sketches of works and recorded his sculptures in his notebooks by sketching their contours. In his 1952 study for the Tanktotem series (plate 18), for example, Smith used inked lines as well as brown and gray paint to imagine sculptural forms. Each form is based on a tripod support composed of iron rods and ball bearings. Round tank shapes, abstract pieces of steel, and pictogram letters make up the rest of the forms. The spindly legs and arms of these sculptures invoke an army of otherworldly bodies, fodder for the sculptor’s torch. Studies or imaginative renderings, these drawings do not conceptualize sculptures’ placement or settings or conjure a believable world. Look again at Smith’s dock photographs of 1953 (see figs. 49 and 50). Smith uses the camera to stage an unsettling collision between the industrial and the pastoral, present and past, figure and machine. Unlike the drawings, the photograph conjures a convincing, illusionistic space for sculpture, all the better to picture the radical otherness of his work. Situated in the human setting of the dock, his sculptures form a loose collective of quasi-figural, primordial totems in a space that seems mundane. Yet Smith has construed them at a remove using a low vantage point and blurring the landscape background through a shallow depth of field. As contact sheets of these images reveal, Smith also reframed the scene from the original shot, cropping the dock and landscape to fit an eight-by-ten format (fig. 59). By restricting the surrounding space, Smith placed emphasis on his sculptures, heightening their command over their setting. In the final

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Figure 58. Ugo Mulas, Photograph of David Smith with Voltri III, Voltri V, Voltri IX, Voltri X, and Voltri IV (All 1962) on a Train Car in Voltri, Italy, 1962. Gelatin silver print, dimensions unknown. Archivio Ugo Mulas, Milan. © Ugo Mulas Heirs.

prints, the sculptures form a disorderly group of individualized forms dislodged from their surroundings. Here is where the memorializing function of Smith’s photographs lies. The dock photographs stir up suggestions of belonging and place, of community and groundedness, only to leave them unresolved. For the sculptures are not fully at home on the dock; nor are they fully confident as a group. The photographs raise questions about belonging and collectivity by upending connections to place and site. To borrow the words of Blake Stimson, writing about postwar photography, they ask “how to belong in this world and constitute new forms of such belonging?”28 In placing industrially made sculpture in

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Figure 59. David Smith, Photographs of 7/9/53, Tanktotem III, Tanktotem IV, and Bi-Cycle (All 1953), Bolton Landing Dock, Lake George, NY, c. 1953. Gelatin-silver contact prints and ink on paper stationery envelope, 4½ × 61⁄16 in. (11.4 × 15.4 cm). The Estate of David Smith, New York.

a landscape setting, the dock photographs visualize an unsettling of expectations for encountering solid objects in the round, by suggesting that sculpture is both within and apart from the here and now.

THE NONBELONGING OF SCULP TURE

Smith’s staging of sculpture proposes a fantasy of viewing in which the modernist object is part of a separate world of fragmentary things. It was a fantasy prevalent among many modern sculptors’ photographic displays of their work, the most famous of them Constantin Brancusi’s shots of his Paris studio at 8 Impasse Ronsin taken around 1923 (figs. 60 and 61). In these evocative group images, the sculptor staged elaborate scenes, using large blocks of wood and stone as props. He situated his sculptures amid these colossal pieces of raw material, animating them in an imagined scene of primordial ruin. Beginning in the 1920s Brancusi frequently published these photographs.29 They appeared alongside one-on-one photographs of his works (see figs. 42 and 43), forming concise yet suggestive photo-essays of his sculptures that, as Potts has argued, invited

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Figure 60. Constantin Brancusi, View of the Artist’s Studio at 8 Impasse Ronsin (with The Sorceress [in Progress; 1916– ​2 4], Bird in Space, Plaster [1923–​2 4], Bird in Space, Yellow Marble [1923–​2 4], Socrates [1921–​2 2], and Princess X [1915– ​16]), c. 1923–​ 24. Gelatin-silver glass negative, 18 × 13 cm. Centre Pompidou, Paris (MNAM-CCI [PH 37]). © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ ADAGP, Paris. Figure 61. Constantin Brancusi, View of the Artist’s Studio at 8 Impasse Ronsin (with Bird in Space, Plaster [1923–​2 4], The Sorceress [in Progress; 1916–​2 4], Plato [1919–​20, Dismantled c. 1923–​ 24], Socrates [1921–​2 2], and Princess X [1915– ​16]), c. 1923–​2 4. Gelatin silver print, 23.9 × 17.7 cm. Centre Pompidou, Paris (MNAM-CCI [PH 35]). © 2013 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.

viewers to move between individual shots and group studies “presented as if one were coming across them almost accidentally while scanning the studio environment.”30 In one of the 1923 photographs, several objects appear in shadow, while others are illuminated by a flash of light erupting from behind a block of wood. The smooth finish of polished bronze is juxtaposed with the rough surfaces of wood and stone. Off to the left, a canvas drapes and cloaks a form. Brancusi’s framing seems arbitrary. Objects are cut off haphazardly by the frame, suggesting that the scene continues beyond what is visible in the picture. The photograph structures, as contemporaneous writers repeatedly observed, an order of space and time outside the rational structure of urban space. The scene suggests a “dream,” “wild space,” “forest of spheres”—​phrases Brancusi’s contemporaries used to describe what they saw on actual visits to his studio in the 1920s or derived from the sculptor’s photographs. These writers painted an encounter of deep nostalgic fascination and engagement with a dislocated, timeless sphere.31 In Brancusi’s images, the studio emerges as a place with a disordered order of its own, like an untamed frontier or a space of wild abandon and wreckage.32 Sculpture in this world is a native presence: it is what remains, a survivor that emerges from the ruin. In these fantastical images, the sculptor has crafted a separate world for sculpture using the artist’s studio. As Jon Wood has described these photographs, they frame a “microcosmic world where stone, wood and metal all take their place within a strange, quasi-natural order.”33 Sculpture, Brancusi’s images suggest, is meant to be read within that microcosmic world—​a place that unsettles any expectation that sculptures have boundaries and edges, just as it subverts more sanitized aesthetic displays. Whereas a museum or gallery would present Brancusi’s works on pedestals lining the room, his microcosm, as contemporaneous installation shots show, departs from such an ordered installation and the logic of consumption that goes hand in hand with it, proposing instead a timeless dreamworld.34 Like Brancusi’s studio views, Smith’s photographs of his objects present an autonomous space in which sculpture is radically dissociated from the present, untethered and groundless. His photographs return to an enduring narrative of modern sculpture’s alienation and homelessness—​what Rainer Maria Rilke termed its “own-ness.” In 1900, in a passage about the sculpture of Auguste Rodin, Rilke described a romanticized fantasy of sculpture’s solitary stance: “The room in which a statue stands is its foreign land—​it has its environment within itself, and its eye and the expression of its face relate to that environment concealed and folded within its shape. There are figures which radiate tightness, crowdedness, interior, and others which are undoubtedly imagined and seen in a wide open space, in a plain, against the sky. To him who sees them correctly it is always their Own-ness that is their native setting, not the accidental room in which they are placed or the empty wall against which they stand out.”35 This would be modern sculpture’s identity: its relationship to its accidental environment would be foreign. Meaning is located in the object, as a product of its making and display. Such self-sufficiency carried an aesthetic mandate: in order to be grasped as

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an artwork, sculpture must refuse the everyday world, to remain independent of “the people,” as Rilke wrote, conjuring an incidental crowd.36 Yet what Rilke construed as an aesthetic necessity also became an embellished fiction. “It has its environment within itself,” he claimed, calling attention to the somewhat forlorn solitariness of the modernist object.37 Sculptural autonomy, in this view, is construed as a romantic individualism. Taken after Rilke wrote these phrases, Edward Steichen’s 1908 sensationalizing shots of Rodin’s Balzac, pictured as an individualized, looming figure under moonlight, conjure a similar vision.38 In her fundamental description of twentieth-century sculpture, Rosalind Krauss subsequently jettisoned this mythologizing rhetoric of individualism. In “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” (1979), she categorized what she saw as the recent turn in sculpture to site-based practices, and her argument hinged on an encapsulation of the earlier model, what she called modern sculpture’s nomadism: With these two sculptural projects [Rodin’s Gates of Hell and Balzac], I would say, one crosses the threshold of the logic of the monument, entering the space of what could be called its negative condition—​a kind of sitelessness, or homelessness, an absolute loss of place. Which is to say one enters modernism, since it is the modernist period of sculptural production that operates in relation to this loss of site, producing the monument as abstraction, the monument as pure marker or base, functionally placeless and largely selfreferential. It is these two characteristics of modernist sculpture that declare its status, and therefore its meaning and function, as essentially nomadic.39

Krauss’s text frames modern sculpture’s separateness or autonomy as a by-product of the alienating effects of modernization and rationalization—​or as part of the disenchantment of the world, to call upon Max Weber’s formulation. Mirroring technological modernization—​specifically, processes of replication and reproduction—​sculpture operated in modernism as a negation of the monument, a loss of site. According to Krauss, it was repeatable and itinerant, not requiring any particular placement for its meaning. Siteless or placeless, sculpture functioned increasingly in modernism as pure negativity, as the absence of place, marker, and base. By the 1950s, Krauss writes, “modernist sculpture appeared as a kind of black hole in the space of consciousness, something whose positive content was increasingly difficult to define, something that was possible to locate only in terms of what it was not.” 4 0 This negative condition serves as the basis of her formulation of sculpture in the twentieth century. Modern sculpture registered as an unattainable, nomadic object—​a loss of place she claims was righted in site-specific projects of the 1970s in their opposition to landscape and architecture. I am proposing that photography’s intervention in sculptural display offers an altogether different and more nuanced picture of modern sculpture’s homelessness. In photographs taken by Smith and other modern sculptors, the disconnection of sculpture from the here and now appears as a positive condition, something to be imagined and

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attained photographically, something to be magnified and rendered. Homelessness, by these lights, describes not the object’s alienated stance, its abstraction or lack, but the possibility of an open work of art. These proposals are felt most deeply in photographs that stage a separate yet unstable world for sculpture, forging new relationships of difference and precariousness. One of the common ways in which sculptors imagined their works’ independence was by dramatizing their primitivism using the theme of the archaeological ruin. Brancusi’s studio views and Smith’s and Mulas’s Spoleto photographs stage groups of objects in ways that draw attention to their primitivist features, or to how they appear as archaeological remnants or primeval forms. This primitivizing of sculpture went hand in hand with conceptions of the modernist object as a figure that was familiar but distant and unknowable. In 1931, for instance, Alberto Giacometti staged three plaster abstract figures in Maloja, in the Swiss Alps, and had them photographed (fig. 62). The works are studies he made for a commission of a single sculpture he would complete later that year in Paris. In the photograph, which was published in Minotaure in 1933 in the same article presenting Brancusi’s studio views, Giacometti displays the triad in an alpine meadow, and viewers are encouraged to read the figures as a familial group of prehistoric plinths or primordial totems in the landscape. Framing the top of the sculptures just under the top of a hill, the photograph uses the dark grass as a foil for their white plaster shapes. Henry Moore, too, animated his sculptures as primitive forms by photographing them just outside his cottage in Burcroft, Kent, amid rough-hewn, uneven plinths of Hopton Wood stone he had set in the garden and used as temporary bases for his work (fig. 63).41 In his photographs, he linked sculptures to their setting, as if the carved objects were also totemic, archaic forms that had been found amid the stones. In these photographs, Moore stages an interaction between sculpture and landscape that differs from the unsettling one Smith construed. Whereas Smith’s photographs portray a disconnection of abstract steel sculpture from the resonant, mountain landscape, Moore’s photograph represents his sculpture in harmony with its surroundings—​Reclining Figure (1939) is an eternal, enduring body unified with the landscape setting, conveying notions of sculptural solidity and permanence. Moore’s photographs of his sculptures were published regularly in his lifetime, and it was possibly their primitivist associations—​staged photographically—​that W. R. Valentiner and Carola Giedion-Welcker were drawn to in their studies of modern sculpture, which unfold as photo-essays interspersed with text. Several of Moore’s photographs figured in Valentiner’s Origins of Modern Sculpture (1946), which adopted its format and content from Giedion-Welcker’s Modern Plastic Art (1937), a debt Valentiner acknowledged in his introduction. Both texts recount a history of modern sculpture in their constellation of photographs, which illustrate ancient tombs and prehistoric sites as well as sculptures. The viewer is invited to compare modernist objects to archaeological ruins, suggesting a primitivist reading of modern sculpture that is based on the visual

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Figure 62. Unknown photographer, Photograph of Alberto Giacometti, Three Figures at Maloja (1930–​31), c. 1931. Silver print on paper, 7.9 × 5.2 cm. Collection Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti, Paris (2003–​ 0693). © Alberto Giacometti Estate/Licensed by VAGA and Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, NY, 2013.

Figure 63. Henry Moore, Photograph of Reclining Figure (1939), at Burcroft, Kent, 1939. Gelatin silver print, dimensions unknown. Henry Moore Foundation, Perry Green, England (LH 210). Reproduced by permission of the Henry Moore Foundation.

correspondence of forms. Giedion-Welcker, for instance, interspersed illustrations of Jean Arp’s sculpture with photographs of landscapes of round stones in a streambed and images of prehistoric monoliths. Valentiner borrowed this format and even used the same contextual photographs to make his arguments. He juxtaposed Moore’s 1930s photographs, for instance, with images of the standing stones of Mên-an Tol and Ménec and the ordered archaeological sites of Chinese tombs (fig. 64). Valentiner makes the claim that these prehistoric monuments are a corrective to urbanism and modern warfare. Their abstract shapes directly mark the landscape, exhibiting signs of wholeness, an eternal oneness with nature that is no longer possible in modernity. Comparing Moore’s sculptures to these monuments, he finds in them an expression of “our deep longing for a closer connection with the elemental forces of nature as found in primeval deserts, mountains, and forests, away from cities, away from artificial life guided by intellect instead of by emotional energies.” 42 In Valentiner’s text, the series of comparative photographs asks readers to see in Moore’s sculptures a similarity to the inscrutable remnants of an archaic past—​as if Moore’s carved figures too had been found in the landscape, strange objects whose original import and function remain opaque yet whose promise of dwelling and unity captivates. Like the photograph of Mên-an Tol that illustrates both Giedion-Welcker’s and Valentiner’s books, which directs an encounter with the stones from a low point of view, Moore’s photographs suggest that his objects be read as immortal things, as if sculpture is innate to the enduring landscape. Penelope Curtis and Fiona Russell have argued that these images of sculpture contain resonant proposals for “comfort and renewal”: “The

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Figure 64. Page 121 of W. R. Valentiner, Origins of Modern Sculpture (New York: Wittenborn Press, 1946), illustrating “Men-an-Tol, Cornwall,” “Menec, Brittany,” “Tombs, Ming Dynasty,” and “Tomb, T’ang Kao-tsong” (figures 99–​102).

emptied-out body of a reclining female figure is filled by the landscape which it frames or holds. We are on a level with both the landscape and the sculpture. It is a sculpture of apparent continuity, a sculpture over which time has already passed, but it is also a sculpture which empties the landscape of its historical uneasiness and particularity.” 43 Curtis and Russell describe an effect of timelessness—​a generalized, continuous time—​t hat adheres to Moore’s photographs, which represent sculpture as an expansive bodily form that is part of an enduring, Edenic world. Unlike Brancusi’s use of ruins to suggest a space of clutter and creative disorder, Moore construes a space of community and wholeness, of harmony and renewal in the landscape. Smith’s photographs, by contrast, present a discordant and disparate collective unsettled from their surroundings. His group photographs set off tensions between objects, which exhibit disparate sizes and compositional structures. They do not picture

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a relationship of harmony or of homogeneity, like the serial repetitions that minimalists would later foreground in their displays. For Smith, the differences between objects set them in motion and raised questions about their collective identity. The psychological drama Smith’s photographs stage is closer to that of Bourgeois’s installations in 1949 and 1950 of works in her Personage series at the Peridot Gallery in New York, an exhibition Smith attended.44 Bourgeois installed her totemic structures directly on the floor of the gallery. Their bases—​if any—​were minimal, a mere few inches of steel to anchor the sculpture and secure the verticality of the forms. Because the works were freestanding, they could be shifted into new arrangements or “groups of objects relating to each other,” as Bourgeois emphasized.45 Sculptures were grouped in twos or threes, as if mapped on a “readable floor graph,” but not arranged in a grid, as a photograph of the 1950 show taken by Aaron Siskind makes clear (fig. 65).46 Siskind captured the scene from a high vantage point, probably from the top of two stairs that served as the entrance to the gallery, framing the installation from above. The photographer places viewers outside the grouping, just beyond a duo of sculptures, like intruders on a tense scene. The works are paired off, and they stand together tentatively in mismatched clusters, with each of the pairs pulling away from each other. Their human size and upright stance draw viewers into the group’s oppositional dynamic; yet the stark linear contrasts of the abstract forms, no match to fleshy bodies, keeps identification at bay. In the Peridot display, Bourgeois constructs a space in which one individual relates tentatively and uncertainly to the next. Bourgeois’s exhibition presented what she termed a “social space,” in which “you had the very strong sense of something going on,” as she told an interviewer in 1976.47 Writing in 1954, Bourgeois described how her “work grows from the duel between the isolated individual and the shared awareness of the group,” structuring a “drama of one among many.” 4 8 The drama might be one involving a raucous family or an alliance of close friends—​loose analogies of kinship that Bourgeois herself alluded to. In one narrative she often repeated, she identified the Personages as standing in for the family and friends that she left behind in France on moving to New York in 1938. The sculptures were “badly missed presences,” she noted, and the Peridot exhibition was “a tangible way of re-creating a missed past.” 49 But Bourgeois also stepped away from such autobiographical statements. Rather than name the sculptures as distinct identities, she stressed their spatial relationships, how they were “the expression, in abstract terms, of emotions and states of awareness.”50 Bourgeois’s installation relies on a primitivizing notion of sculptural form: each object’s totemic qualities ensures its distance from the beholder. But Bourgeois also used the collective staging of sculpture to conjure its otherness.51 Like Brancusi’s ­studio-as-ruin or Smith’s Arcadian dock, the gallery became a space to animate a group of works that registered as dramatically separate. Not tied to a particular place or location, Bourgeois’s installations emphasized sculpture’s mobility and openness while also raising questions about its collective identity.52 That identity is fractured in

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Figure 65. Aaron Siskind, Installation View of Louise Bourgeois: Sculptures, Peridot Gallery, New York (1950), 1950. Gelatin silver print, dimensions unknown. The Easton Foundation, New York (LB-1277). © Aaron Siskind Foundation, courtesy of Bruce Silverstein Gallery, NY, and The Easton Foundation, Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.

Bourgeois’s imagining, shot through with psychic discord so that the group of sculptures is envisaged as dissonant and broken. Smith’s photographs of works from his Forging series seem to speak directly to the Peridot installations, engaging their terms of difference. In an image Smith published in a 1956 Willard Gallery exhibition catalog, he again staged a group that included the Forgings (fig. 66). He used his signature low vantage point and cropped the photograph just below the plinth on which he placed his works. Flattened to linear pillars, the works take on monumental qualities, looming above the space of the beholder—​their sturdy shapes are softened by the out-of-focus shot. Smith has blurred the edges of the photograph using a vignette technique, creating an ethereal scene. The photograph structures a comparison to emphasize the differences between objects, how each one is handmade and unique in size and shape. Standing thirty-six inches tall, Untitled (1955) plays off the taller Forging XI (1955), which reaches a height of ninety-one inches. The group also contains a range of shapes: the smooth lines of the Forgings, which Smith made by hammering and punching hot lengths of steel using an industrial power forge, are contrasted with Construction in

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Figure 66. David Smith, Photograph of (Left to Right) Forging IV, Forging III, Forging I (Unfinished), Untitled, Forging IX, Forging XI, Construction in Rectangles, Forging II, and Construction with Forged Neck (All 1955), Bolton Landing, NY, c. 1955. Gelatin silver print, 8 × 915⁄16 in. (20.3 × 25.2 cm). The Estate of David Smith, New York.

Rectangles (1955), third from right, and Construction with Forged Neck (1955), on the far right, which the sculptor made by welding disparate parts together.53 In this photograph, the sculptor demonstrates the breadth of his skill, from forge to torch, by animating the distinctions in the interplay of objects. Each sculpture appears as an idiosyncratic thing that belongs to an object-language viewers cannot understand.

IN PL ACE OF THE PUBLIC

Together these diverse photographs of works by Smith, Bourgeois, and others comment on sculpture’s place in the public sphere. That it has a place was far from certain, an ambivalence revealed by sculptors’ photographs, which question sculpture’s belonging and collectivity in modernism. Those questions might be put this way: What does it mean to make public sculpture in the postwar era? What would such a sculpture look like, if it was meant to be a model of public collaboration? How would it give voice to notions of belonging and collectivity, when the notion of a monolithic public was increasingly tied to consumerism and corporatization? Smith sought a model for sculpture that proposed community as a tentative possibility; its place in a broader collective would be provisional and open. Stephen Melville and Margaret Iversen, in Writing Art History, have described Smith’s photographs as presenting “conversational groups, asking [sculptures] to manifest among themselves something like the terms they imagine for their audience.”54 What Melville and Iversen observe in this brief description of Smith’s work is how

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the photographs might suggest dissonance as a term for public sculpture, reflecting friction in their presentation of objects. In late modernism, according to this Hegelian model, wholeness, the ideal ascribed to classical sculpture, is no longer possible given the structural disconnection of inside and outside, surface and core, that Smith’s sculptures register in their structural vacancy. By modeling incongruity—​absence and emptiness—​Smith’s photographs communicated their terms to their public, mirroring the only collective possible in modernism, one of dispersal and fragmentation.55 The sculptor himself was vocal about the impossibility of public sculpture in the postwar era. He increasingly expressed dismay at the corporatization of public art. This was a radical shift from his earlier commitment to public sculpture, which he envisioned as taking place as a collaboration with architecture. In the early 1940s, Smith wrote a series of essays in which he mapped out a vision for a collaborative give-and-take between the two media as a model for societal ideals of community. In this collaboration, sculpture would not be an afterthought—​a monument, adornment, or “mere billboard”—​in relation to the surrounding structure but would influence and instruct architectural design by incorporating steel and iron, the very materials of the modern urban landscape.56 In an essay written for Architectural Record in 1940, Smith underscored what it meant to view sculpture in its architectural surround: “Lines can indicate form by outline, can confine areas, can maintain their own sculptural import, yet lose nothing by permitting a view of a building or the landscape through the open areas which may represent the inside of the sculptural form. To view a building through the branches of a tree destroys neither the aesthetic value of the tree nor the aesthetic value of the building; they both bear the added interest of associated objects.”57 With these phrases, Smith sketched a scenario in which sculpture and architecture framed each other in windows or through well-situated branches. The scene’s protagonist, the viewer, would move from one compositional vantage to another, building a resonant and interactive picture by juxtaposing views. Conceived visually, the collaboration would also find spatial footing. Smith’s ideals were short-lived, however. In 1950 he noted that sculpture no longer depended “upon a setting or continuity for its impact,” and declared its separation from architecture complete.58 What caused Smith to confirm the split? He had come to believe architecture a “strictly commercial art,” subject to the pressures of the market and contingent on a building’s function.59 Increasingly “complex and collective,” “big” architecture involved mechanisms of serialization and bureaucracy that ran counter to Smith’s conception of his sculpture: as a one-on-one sustained “direct action in working” that produced a single and original object.60 Looking back in 1957, he referred to his earlier hope for a community of sculpture and architecture as a “marvel of idealism.”61 With different aims and motivations, architecture could only dominate sculpture; the “collaboration” would never be one of equals. In an article he published in Arts that year, Smith dealt the final blow: “To get art, architects will have to prepare themselves to take sculpture on its own independent merits. And they will have to subordinate their

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own egos to the extent of permitting the work of sculpture to relate itself to the work of architecture as one contemporary autonomy to another, in a relationship of esthetic strength and joint excellence. This is up to the architect, not the sculptor, and until the architect acquires the needed humility, the two arts will remain the strangers they have long been to one another.”62 These declarations about the failed collaboration of architecture and sculpture go hand in hand with statements Smith made about the fate of public sculpture in the postwar years. When he was interviewed by David Sylvester in 1961, he expressed nostalgia for the 1930s and early 1940s as a time of belonging and community: “In a sense, we [artists] belonged to society at large. It was the first time that we ever belonged or had recognition from our own government that we existed.”63 Smith chalked up the shift away from communal forms of artistic practice to the dearth of public patronage or commissions. He also told Thomas Hess in 1964 that the public was unlikely to welcome his work: “I don’t see it being accepted in present capitalist society, nor in a contemporary socialist society[;] the only regards that I get in the way of compliments are from other artists.”64 Here Smith articulated a withdrawal from the public sphere by invoking concepts of antimonumentality. He mapped a shift from a communal artistic identity of the 1930s to one of independence; as Potts describes, Smith, like other postwar artists, “was forced to conclude that the only viable destiny for a modern sculpture was as an individual creation that would address the viewer on a one-to-one basis, and would thus have to be siteless or homeless.”65 Smith used photography in the 1950s and 1960s to frame these concepts of alienation and distance, independence and withdrawal, by staging his works in unexpected settings. In his photographs of multiple sculptures as collectives, the sculptor gave visual form to what he described as the impossibility of belonging in the postwar era and the failure of public sculpture as a claim to monumentality. Yet his images are not nostalgic, meant to restore the lost ideals of community and collaboration. Unlike the images of harmony conveyed by Moore’s 1930s presentations of his works as one with the landscape, Smith staged uneasy relationships between objects and their surroundings. The photographs posit an alternative space for sculpture that hinges on asymmetry and difference, suggesting the impossibility of the public monument as a stable model of communal wholeness. To return to Melville and Iversen’s description of the “conversational” group photographs, they “claim a collective audience of a certain dispersed kind.”66 Paradoxically, even as Smith visualized his sculptures as autonomous from the here and now, imagining a withdrawal from the public sphere, he did so in a medium that communicated his sculpture to a wide and heteronomous audience.67 Smith seized on mechanical reproduction as an alternative venue for his work, to reach a community he may have imagined as separate from the world of corporate patronage and the false ideals of monumental sculpture. He circulated his photographs widely, leaving open the possibility that it was in the reproducible medium of photography that Smith had

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Figure 67. David Smith, Photograph of Tanktotem IV (1953), Bolton Landing, NY, c. 1953. Gelatin silver print, 95⁄16 × 79⁄16 in. (23.7 × 19.2 cm). The Estate of David Smith, New York.

found his sculpture’s public life, through unconventional and provisional channels. Rather than engage with the increasingly corporate structures of public art, he could use photography to launch his objects into the public sphere and do so in a way that would suggest an unsettling of expectations for the solid object. In a photograph of Tanktotem IV (1953; fig. 67), Smith imagined this dislocation of his objects in a new pictorial model by staging a single work in an unexpected setting. The sculpture is positioned directly on the ground, without a pedestal or supporting structure. Its three lanky legs rest on the sandy dirt, a space marked by tire tracks; these signs of an inhabited, everyday place are brought into view through a crisp focus. The image presents a picture of sculpture that is difficult to resolve. For this much is clear: Tanktotem IV is not at home in the dirt driveway. How can it be, when awkward iron legs and welded tank tops are placed over a tire track, a space marked by human—​but not sculptural—​activities? Yet the sculpture is also resolutely there, standing in the way. In the photograph, Tanktotem IV looks like a self-sufficient, independent thing, in the landscape yet removed from it.68 The shallow depth of field isolates the harsh edges of the abstract steel sculpture from its softened background, repeating the oppositional terms of Smith’s dock photographs in a one-on-one encounter. The sculpture is imagined to be suspended between ideas of place and placelessness, dwelling and homelessness. Or as O’Hara put it simply to Smith in 1961, struggling to absorb and describe his recent trip to Bolton Landing: “They get to me but I don’t get to them.”69 Sculpture would register as both proximity and distance, impinging on, yet resisting, the space of the beholder. Using photography, Smith framed these elusive, contingent relationships by presenting his sculptures in unexpected settings and photographing them from unusually low points of view. Smith’s photographs destabilize objects by questioning concepts of solidity, belonging, groundedness, and permanence. They do so, moreover, through the sheer diversity of their approach, as if no single image could stand in for the work itself. Tanktotem IV is unsettled by the manifold sites in which it appears: on the dock, in the field, and on the driveway. Seen photographically, it registers as a shifting, contingent thing that changes according to its setting and the camera’s point of view. In the early 1960s, Smith sought to limit his sales, having decided instead to keep his works together in his fields. He wrote to a collector in 1961: “I want to fill my field with my own work.”70 Smith’s decision has been read as a desire to structure a place or a home for his works by making his fields a permanent installation site. But as I have suggested here, his photographs tell a different story. They position his works in ways that upend their connections to site and place.71 The provisional relationships he staged between objects posed a question about belonging. Modernist objects in Smith’s photographs are provisional; they are tied to this world while signaling another, separate space. These qualities rest on photography’s discursive framework, on Smith’s taking charge of his sculpture’s public life. In photography—​a medium that could be reproduced and widely circulated—​Smith found his public, even as he fictionalized his sculpture’s separateness in an image.

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4 PICTURING COLOR IN SPACE A cabin stands, Deserted, on a beach. It is white, As by a custom or according to An ancestral theme or as a consequence Of an infinite course. The flowers against the wall Are white, a little dried, a kind of mark Reminding, trying to remind, of a white That was different, something else, last year Or before, not the white of an aging afternoon, Whether fresher or duller, whether of winter cloud Or of winter sky, from horizon to horizon. WALLACE STEVENS, “THE AURORAS OF AUTUMN,” 1950

How the uncertain murmur of colors can present us with things, forests, storms—​in short the world. MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY, “EYE AND MIND,” 1961

In the winter of 1960–​61, David Smith made a series of color slide transparencies in the snow-filled landscape surrounding his upstate New York studio. The setup was casual: he placed five of his recent works directly on the gravel and snow just outside his workshop, none with an intermediary pedestal or supporting plinth—​props on which he had relied in his shots in the 1950s. Abandoning his favored low point of view, Smith mapped his sculptures at a higher vantage point. The square, medium-format slides situate sculpture in its surroundings, inciting an interchange between objects and the landscape, in which paint is the deciding term. A photograph of Doorway on Wheels (1960; plate 19), for instance, sets the sculpture’s black interplay of lines in stark relief against the white snow. Other colors appear against the white expanse: the red of the sculpture’s wheel, the lone green pine at right, and the subdued brown of deciduous trees in winter. Another photograph in the series, of Tanktotem VII (1960; plate 20), places the work in dialogue with a field awash in grays and browns. The sculpture’s white plane cuts a rectangular hole in the quiet landscape, reconciling the white shades of the abstract shapes with a receding snow-filled space. Smith’s slide of Tanktotem

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IX (1960; plate 22) sparks a similar dialogue, between the sculpture’s variations on white—​in the gold-tinged tank head and the gray-white of the torso—​and the range of whites of the birch trees and snow. In the slides he made in the winter of 1960–​61 and in the ensuing years, Smith explored the effects of paint using the medium of photography. In his images, viewers are asked to compare and differentiate between fabricated color and natural color, to locate correspondences between the sculptures’ hues and tones and the ambient colors of the landscape, which fill the frame. Smith stepped away from the monochrome sky backdrops he used in his signature photographic style, which resulted from a low point of view, to place sculpture instead firmly in its surroundings. His photographs suggest that color be perceived through a spatial and embodied response. Not a mere ornament or decoration, color is intrinsic to the fabric of visual experience. Returning to modernist debates about color, and introducing Smith’s body of color photographs, this chapter sheds new light on his commitment to color as situated in the phenomenal world. In these slides, the artist also orients viewers to the intersections of different media in his practice—​painting, sculpture, and photography—​as if to eschew modernist narratives of medium specificity or purity. Smith’s 1960–​61 experiments with Ektachrome film coincided with his return to polychrome sculpture toward the end of the 1950s. In 1960, Smith rounded out his Tanktotem series, completing four works that, like the first six, are composed of distinctive boiler parts but also depart from the earlier steel and bronze works and their subtle applied surfaces. These new works displayed vibrant red, yellow, and blue colors, inaugurating an emphasis on paint that Smith would fortify and deepen in his Zig, Circle, and Gondola series, as well as in over forty individual works he made from 1960 to 1965, among them Bouquet of Concaves II (1960; see plate 36), Circles Intercepted (1961; see plate 38), and Bec-Dida Day (1963; see plate 41). In these sculptures, composed of the convex and concave parts that the artist used beginning in the late 1950s in a turn to cubic shape, Smith presents color in dialogue with spatial volume. Their painted surfaces both coalesce with and diverge from a sculpture’s volumetric parts, so that viewers perceive both painterly and sculptural conceptions of space.1 In them, Smith joins the kinesthetic and shifting effects of paint to the welded hollow, pocket, and bulge. Although color had long been vital to Smith’s conception of his work, he returned to it now with new urgency. He noted often—​and with increasing frequency in the 1960s—​that he had come to sculpture through painting.2 Smith had studied painting with John Sloan and Jan Matulka at the Art Students League from 1927 to 1931, and he was well versed in the chemistries of pigments and technical components of paint applications, having researched them when he worked from 1934 to 1938 in the murals divisions of the Public Works of Art Project, the Temporary Emergency Relief Administration, and the Treasury Relief Art Project.3 In an essay he wrote drawing on this research, published in Architectural Record in 1940, Smith explained in vivid terms the significance of polychrome sculpture. He argued against the marginalizing

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of color in the history of sculpture, and he built his case by pointing to the painted surfaces of Greek and Roman sculptures—​effects that he had studied firsthand when he took paint samples from classical sculptures in the National Archaeological Museum of Athens in 1936.4 Smith’s essay pressed for a new consideration of color: “Contemporary sculpture has made timid use of color, although it has been an important factor in the best periods of the past. It is obvious that there exists a logic of color in relationship to sculptural form just as there exists a logic in the scale of sculpture. Yet for centuries, bronzes have been dead dark, and marble, dead white.”5 To make his case, Smith also underscored color’s presence in contemporary commercial objects, “articles of everyday use, from hacksaw blades to automobiles,” and he cited the vitreous enamels of “gasoline stations, hamburger stands, and stew pans.”6 If color was a vital part of the technological fabric of modern life, Smith reasoned, it should be integral to modern sculpture, too. His essay reads like a primer for achieving that objective. Building on his technical research of the 1930s, Smith detailed the industrial materials and chemistries available to the early-twentieth-century sculptor. Molten zinc or cadmium, for instance, sprayed on steel, would make it resistant to corrosion. These same elements could also be “applied, used as accents or as separate color areas.” 7 After buffing, steel would exhibit “a silver-and-pink-colored granulated surface. This could be held by lacquer or permitted to take on a natural green and white-gray oxide patina. . . . A cuprous oxide deposit in violet, blue, green, yellow, orange, and red has been produced by cathodic deposits from alkaline solutions of copper lactate. The color of the deposit is a function of thickness, or plating time. As the thickness of the deposit increases, complete color cycles take place, each cycle building different shades.”8 The artist rationalized the need for polychrome sculpture by demonstrating color as an invention of the machine age; it was produced in the lab or factory and developed through tested reactions and applications. Just as Smith exhorted his audience to make color a material for sculpture, he also made it integral to his fabricating process. Paint resembled the welding seams he left unfiled in works of the Raven series (see figs. 2 and 3), for instance, whose dense puddles of welding material are a visual element of the work, or the surface pockmarks and indentations of the Forging series, an effect of the forging process remade as an aesthetic component of sculpture (see plate 16). Like welds, grooves, and striations, color was a material part of sculpture, born of meticulous research and experimental technologies.9 Although Smith had applied paint to his earliest wooden constructions of 1932, only toward the end of the 1930s did he make direct use of the techniques described in his Architectural Record essay. Sculptures such as Blue Construction (1938) and Pillar of Sunday (1945; plate 23) presented metallic surfaces derived from chemical reactions or from coating the objects in molten metal. As Elizabeth McCausland observed in 1940, such shimmering surfaces evoked a tension between “the hard, nonhuman material, steel, and the sensuous relief of the rusts, roses, silvers, dark grays and blacks.”10 Smith tempered the harshness of steel with industrially produced, variegated streaks and shines.

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In the early 1950s, Smith applied color to the found objects that he used in his sculptures, such as Agricola I (1951–​52) and Agricola VIII (1952), which included agricultural and machine parts. He used paint to connect the elements of these works. Rather than augment the surface of the object, color operated like a membrane to unify its disparate parts and integrate their textures and surfaces. With the human and industrial reference points masked by paint, the work presented itself as a unified object. In the early 1960s, Smith returned with full force to the problem of color and began to use it in new ways. He sought to combine the spatial elusiveness of his sculptures—​ whose volumetric parts shaped space unpredictably—​w ith an unexpected or contingent painted surface. Working from a constructivist model, Smith used color to indicate and direct sculptural space. In Tanktotem VII, among the painted sculptures he made in the winter of 1960–​61, Smith’s use of paint differs from that of Alexander Calder and Anthony Caro. In Calder’s and Caro’s sculptures, color and sculptural form often align, and paint operates like a skin draped over the object (see plate 29). Smith, by contrast, highlighted the differences between the painted surface and sculptural space. A viewer walking around Tanktotem VII cannot predict how black and white will look from one side to the next. On one side, the curving line swings to the right and supports a rectangle painted with a blue-black stripe on the left (see plate 20). A small white rectangle is painted into the concave side of the tank top. On the other side, the curving line swings to the left, and supports a rectangle painted in a different pattern (plate 21). The convex side of the tank top is painted blue and black, unlike its reverse. Using paint, Smith has created an object whose two sides are incongruous. Color and space, together yet separate, destabilize the viewer’s encounter. Anne Truitt adopted a similar model for color in her sculpture and cited Smith, whom she knew, as a key influence. Writing in 1962, she described how she “came to realize that what [she] was actually trying to do was to take paintings off the wall, to set color free in three dimensions for its own sake.”11 In her painted columns, color spatially guides the viewer’s response, changing course unforeseeably on the otherwise predictable shape of the minimalist box. Truitt’s use of color, as Anne Wagner has argued, was a form of flux, or “bodily freedom and release,” a way to counter the rules of structure.12 Smith, too, “set color free”—​disconnecting it from systems of illusionism—​not only by using disjunctive planes of color but also by creating dynamic and irregular textured surfaces. Just as he created uneven marks on the stainless steel surfaces of the Cubis by using an electric disk grinder, Smith also applied paint in nonuniform ways. The critic Emily Genauer described his pigment in 1961 as “loose, uneven, shimmering, [and] spontaneous.”13 Her words suggest how in works such as the Tanktotems, Zigs, and Circles, planes of color are rarely seamless. Black is shot through with blue; red, with orange and pink. Dabs of color appear in unanticipated places, visible only when a viewer encounters the sculpture close up—​for instance, on the lavender-inflected salmon-colored surface of Circle I (1962; plate 24). In these sculptures of the late 1950s

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and early 1960s, paint is textured and changing, fragmented and localized. It is made specific and concrete in ways that challenge the unbroken endlessness of the color chart or grid.14 In the early 1960s Smith posited a model for sculpture in which color was spatially and perceptually elusive. He described this new model in a 1964 interview, reflecting, “I’ve come closer to arriving at the proper relationship between the two things [painting and sculpture] recently than I ever have before, I think.”15 At the very moment when he returned energetically to painted sculpture, he changed his photographic tactics. He used color slide transparencies to document his work, although he continued to make black-and-white prints of singular sculptures and of works clustered together in groups. The medium format organized scenes in a square composition; and although these positive images could be masked, they could not be cropped. In another change, he also placed his sculptures directly on the ground, situating his painted works within a luminous terrain and photographing them both up close and from a distant view, in a manner akin to Dan Budnik’s photographs. The new approach mimed viewing in the round. Though the artist had used color film to organize everyday objects and spaces in the 1950s—​and used it from time to time to document sculptures—​in the 1960s he adopted a new direction to organize and structure the phenomenal and changing effects of paint. Color in these photographs is inextricably linked to an embodied space. It’s worth mentioning what role Smith’s color photographs served in his wider project. Smith used his slides, like his prints, to publicize his work; the copies he sent to editors and critics appeared in such venues as Art News, albeit sometimes in black and white. Once again recognizing the values of reproduction, Smith also sent the Portable Gallery Press a set of his thirty-five-millimeter slides in 1965, along with a note describing them: “What I refer to is color snow field group shots of new work, mostly not named. Scenic views. These have not been photographed or published by anyone.”16 By this time, Smith felt the need to claim authorship of these photographs. No longer stressing their anonymity as he did in the 1950s, he emphasized, “These are all my own photos.”17 Smith also showed his color slides at the many lectures he gave, and he increasingly relied on them to outline and characterize his project for color. As records, these color slides also helped Smith decide on his works’ surfaces. Choosing a final color for a sculpture was a laborious process, and he used many coats of primer—​up to twenty-five or thirty, he claimed—​before applying a final pigment.18 “Sometimes I look at things for a year before I know what the color is,” he told an audience in Bennington, Vermont, in 1965, in a talk he illustrated with his own slides. “I like to think that I can find a correlation between that shape and its proper color and, of course, somewhere way back is an association in mind from an object.”19 Comprehending the relationship between sculptural shape and painted surface involved modifications: “I have to paint them wrong and look at them and sometimes change all the various odd formalities, or even change colors.”20 Photography was instrumental to this process. Smith’s photographic archive con-

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tains several instances of his changing course after he had consulted his photographic record. In one shot, Zig IV (1961) appears with a rust-red undercoat, before the artist applied a top coat of yellow green. In a series of slides of Wagon I (1963–​64), a work Smith ultimately painted black (plate 25), the sculpture appears with a kaleidoscopic surface of irregular drips (plate 26). Portraying his work against a light-filled landscape, the artist captured the melting of its multicolored drips from shade to shade. The sculpture’s vibrant surface opposes its object’s dense and hulking form. There is no record of what prompted Smith to paint the sculpture black, but the photographs testify to an alternative vision of the sculpture, in Technicolor. Smith’s experiments with color occurred at a moment when pop and minimalist artists like Truitt, Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Carl Andre, Andy Warhol, and John Chamberlain were finding new ways to use color in their sculptural work. These artists often employed ready-made colors—​from the color chart or grid, the fluorescent tube, the Plexiglas surface, brick, polished copper, the Brillo box, or the soup can.21 As the painter Frank Stella noted in 1964, his aim with color was to “keep . . . the paint as good as it was in the can.”22 Nongestural, nonexpressive, color in the final work was prefabricated and standardized, referencing consumerism and industry and, above all, how chance—​ rather than the artist’s authorial brush—​might shape the meaning of a work of art. As Briony Fer has argued, the color procedures of artists working with ready-made color in the 1960s signaled a break with abstract expressionism. “Instead of a world of nuance, of fine splatterings, of indeterminacy in those edges,” she writes, “readymade color offers a way of being outside this kind of [abstract expressionist] aesthetic decisionmaking.”23 The promise of ready-made color went hand in hand with a distancing from skill, from the artist’s carefully structured tones, stains, or performative drips. For Smith, such distance from craft was never an option. Even though he avoided some of the gestural painterly techniques of the abstract expressionists, the modernist sculptor insisted on the handmade process of constructing steel sculpture, which, as he declared as early as 1940, included color. He produced surfaces that were original and nonreproducible. As a self-portrait of 1960 makes clear—​it shows the artist applying paint to the concave half-moon top of Tanktotem IX (fig. 68)—​he applied paint expertly, layering stroke on stroke, a labored process that here yielded a textured, goldflecked surface. Another view of the studio—​a photograph by Alexander Liberman, taken in 1965 to document the artist’s workshop—​is equally revealing of the sculptor’s painting practices (plate 27). Smith’s paint cans line the windowsill; a door serves as a sample palette. In this image the paint can is just one component of the sculptural process, as vital to Smith’s sculpture as the neatly stacked materials—​the collection of agricultural and machine parts—​and the saw and torch. Smith acquired his techniques from industry and purchased his paint from commercial sources; his was the paint of battleships and cars, he liked to say.24 Whereas in his 1940 essay, gas stations, hacksaws, and stew pans served as reference points for machine-age color, in the 1960s he would add to

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Color in Space

Figure 68. David Smith, SelfPortrait of Smith Painting Tanktotem IX (1960), Bolton Landing, NY, 1960. Two negatives uncut, 5⅛ × 2⅜ in. (13 × 6 cm). The Estate of David Smith, New York.

this list of objects Mercedes Benz and Chevrolet cars and Bull Durham cigarettes, commemorating in sculpture the pulsing hues of American consumerism.25 As in the unidentifiable found object whose human and industrial reference points Smith rerouted in sculpture to create “new unit[ies that were] strictly visual,” as he described them, he used paint both to mark out and to obscure industrial or consumerist color.26 In this way, his approach resembled that of Barnett Newman, who said, referencing his own use of color, that it was “color I made out of colors.” Colors were what “anybody can buy and squeeze . . . out of tubes,” Newman said; they were universal and generic.27 Smith’s color, like Newman’s, would be visually specific and unique. Yet Smith’s color was not applied on a canvas: it was resolutely three-dimensional. His commitment to rethinking color and space in the early 1960s was part of a broader sea change in the early 1960s. In 1993, Donald Judd championed the minimalist embrace of color in sculpture, writing, “The achievement of Pollock and others meant that the century’s development of color could continue no further on a flat surface. Its adventitious capacity to destroy naturalism also could not continue. . . . Color, to continue, had to occur in space.”28 While Smith, like the abstract expressionists, used painterly techniques to create multilayered, textured surfaces, his use of color was spatial, capable of eliciting an emphatically open-ended response. Smith’s 1960s photographs of his sculpture also structure an embodied and spatialized encounter with color. In these photographs, color is tied to the changing and phenomenal world, contingent on the light-filled space of the setting and the shifting perspective of the beholder. They suggest a reading of Smith’s use of paint as generating and framing a spatially complex visual response—​a reading that has long been obscured in writings on his work. Although exhibitions have highlighted Smith’s painted objects, and conservators have detailed his painting techniques, Clement Greenberg’s approach to polychrome sculpture still casts a long shadow over Smith’s exploration of color.29 Greenberg championed Smith’s sculpture from 1943 on, but he also critiqued the artist’s use of color, writing a particularly crisp rebuke in 1964: “The question of color in Smith’s art (as in all recent sculpture along the same lines), remains a vexed one. I don’t think he has ever used applied color with real success.”30 Greenberg did not limit his criticisms to the written page. After the sculptor’s death in 1965, acting in his capacity as one of the three executors of Smith’s estate, Greenberg stripped the paint from five of Smith’s sculptures and left three others outside over a long period to deteriorate in upstate New York’s rough winter weather.31 The subsequent controversy tainted Greenberg’s reputation; only late in life would he express remorse.32 Smith had confronted the critic’s expunging of color even during his lifetime. Greenberg wrote to Smith in 1951 requesting permission to alter a sculpture the artist had given him as a gift. “It should be black,” the critic thought, adding that any supplemental coating could “always [be scraped] off again.”33 Smith’s response, if any, has not survived. Nonetheless, we can surmise in the context of his long commitment to color and his statements on damaged works that he responded with bewildered indignation.

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In 1960 the artist publicly renounced authorship of a sculpture that had been stripped for resale by the Leo Castelli Gallery and “brand[ed] it a ruin.”34 Greenberg couched his opposition to painted sculpture in formalist language about the purity of medium. Rosalind Krauss would echo this approach in Terminal Iron Works, which did not explore Smith’s use of color in his sculpture except to note that it was “wholly unproblematic.”35 Krauss’s omission is surprising, given that her argument hinges on key works such as Zig IV and Helmholtzian Landscape (1946; plate 28), which were painted.36 With few exceptions, the exclusion of color authored by Greenberg, Krauss, and others has held sway.37 Such an approach relegates to the sidelines not only Smith’s paint and theory of color but also the contemporaneous readings of his sculpture—​by Frank O’Hara, for example, discussed later in this chapter—​that were attuned to color. Color in Smith’s photographs transgressed Greenberg’s narrowly policed boundaries of medium, highlighting the intersections of painting, sculpture, and photography. These photographs insist on the collision of media. The critic Sam Hunter, writing in 1961, got Smith’s color right when he described the sculptor’s “daring use of color” as “breaking down our most cherished illusions about the integrity of painting and sculpture as separate and distinct modes.”38 In Smith’s color photographs, those illusions are resolutely shattered.

THE FORMALIS T PROBLEM OF COLOR

Greenberg was not the only critic to fault Smith’s use of color. In a review of a 1961–​62 exhibition in Pittsburgh, Hilton Kramer harshly critiqued Smith’s polychrome surfaces, claiming that color reduced his works to decoration—​t hat is, to “being sculpture about painting.”39 Reviewing the same exhibition, Dore Ashton found “perturbing” the “almost surrealistic note [Smith had introduced] by painting some of his curving surfaces in pastel colours illusionistically modeled.” 4 0 Color offended good taste and transgressed the boundaries of medium. Though negative reviews of Smith’s color abounded, Greenberg’s were among the most strident, and they took on new weight after his alterations were revealed. Krauss herself disclosed them in 1974 in an essay that signaled her break with Greenberg.41 The editors of Art in America approached her about writing an essay to be published alongside photographs taken by Dan Budnik that documented the changes Greenberg had made to Smith’s work. Without mentioning him by name, the editors detailed the alterations as follows: five sculptures, in various stages of priming and painting, were stripped and varnished; two works were stripped and repainted rust brown; three additional sculptures were allowed to deteriorate outdoors.42 They claimed that the changes were due to “direct intervention,” “negligence,” and a “lack of protection or lack of restoration of fragile paint surfaces, the loss of which will ultimately affect the sculptures just as basically as deliberate stripping.” 43

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Krauss went even further in her essay, speculating that the changes were driven by “a taste for the monochrome of unadorned metal,” a statement from which a reader might infer that the market value of the sculptures would be higher if they were left unpainted. But Krauss backed away from any overt charges, stating simply “that these pieces reveal an impairment of the integrity of the oeuvre of a major artist—​an aggressive act against the sprawling, contradictory vitality of his work as Smith himself conceived it—​and left it.” 4 4 Even though Krauss mentioned Greenberg’s name only once, along with those of the other executors, Robert Motherwell and Ira Lowe, a Washington lawyer, her message was unambiguous. An outpouring of editorial letters ensued. Critics, scholars, dealers, and artists sided with or against Greenberg; their missives raised questions about Smith’s intentions and the ethics of Greenberg’s intervention. The debate hinged on the question of primer. According to those involved, white paint—​the color of the works stripped—​was taken as a sign of incompleteness, even though, as Krauss herself noted elsewhere, Smith had explored white as a color in sculptures such as Untitled (1955).45 The debates did not linger on Smith’s own description of his process in the 1960s, in which white was a vital step toward color, not a primer coat.46 He frequently applied it over a primer, like a painter exploring the possibilities of a blank canvas, a process that could take several years as he worked toward a final color. It is also possible that Smith could have been exploring white as a final color in the years leading up to his death.47 In the discussions of Greenberg’s actions, in the pages of both Art in America and the New York Times, white was assessed in different ways. For some, it had been a mistake to take it for an end point, and Greenberg was simply carrying out Smith’s wishes by removing a temporary coat of paint. For others, however, incompleteness mattered in itself: the white surface was part of Smith’s working process. It was an intermediary step toward polychrome. Greenberg’s “restoration” in this view was a bombastic statement that occluded Smith’s authorship. Sculptor Beverly Pepper framed the question this way: “Should we not value phases of the artist’s research as much as the conclusions he came to?” 4 8 For Greenberg, the answer was apparently no. Few of those who weighed in asked what precisely was wrong with color as the critic conceived it. On this topic, Greenberg’s writings are curiously silent. The critic did not elaborate on his claim that color was incompatible with sculpture. Nor did he elucidate in plain terms how paint spilled over the neatly defined boundaries of medium that he set out in “Towards a Newer Laocoon” in 1940.49 Greenberg’s essays on Smith, however, give some insight into his valuation of applied color as antithetical to sculpture. The issue hinged on color’s materiality. In “David Smith’s New Sculpture” (1964), Greenberg noted that painted sculpture “failed” when its colored surfaces invoked the “substantial” and “textured.”50 These characteristics stood in the way of purity, immateriality, essence, and the effacement of the substance and texture, the sculptural qualities of opticality he valued. Paint, Greenberg argued, was aligned with other sculptural qualities of his formalist aesthetic: tactility, impermeability, weight, and the bodily.

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Like these physical qualities, color was something to be transcended in favor of pure visual form. “The human body is no longer postulated as the agent of space,” Greenberg wrote in a pivotal essay of 1958 that defines an optical sculpture: “now it is eyesight alone.”51 The emphasis on the optical, he added, “allows sculpture to be as pictorial as it pleases. . . . Sculpture can confine itself to virtually two dimensions (as some of David Smith’s pieces do) without being felt to violate the limitations of its medium, because the eye recognizes that what offers itself in two dimensions is actually (not palpably) fashioned in three.”52 Greenberg was drawn to Smith’s sculpture by its emphasis on visual effect, or how its two-dimensional form transcended the weight and materiality of iron and steel. There is an uncomfortable conflict here, between a sculpture’s material and its aesthetic meaning, as Hope Mauzerall and others have argued.53 Even as Greenberg insisted on the specificity of medium, he also defined sculpture as pictorial. Describing Smith’s Wagon II, he observed that it “tellingly marries squatness with openness, rawness with cleanness,” terms based on a sense of the work’s physical makeup.54 Nevertheless, in his aesthetic, sculpture was to renounce the substance from which it was made—​its weight and mass, its tangibility and materiality—​to create an illusion of matter, weightlessness, or “sheer visibility.”55 This ideal of sculptural transcendence also relegated color to a mere ornament or secondary effect. Color would work in Greenberg’s aesthetic only if it were pictorial, not tactile; optical, not material. Consider, for instance, how he described what he considered to be the rare instance in which Smith’s color “worked,” in Helmholtzian Landscape (see plate 28).56 The sculpture uses color so that it is “as much pictorial as it is sculptural. . . . [It] emphasizes at the same time that it controls the in and out movement of these elements in relation to the plane of the frame.”57 Used effectively, color was a means to control the effects of matter, to transform metal into plane and frame. More often than not, however, color was, for Greenberg, a hindrance to sculpture’s opticality. A provisional, superfluous effect, it would distract the eye from a direct visual encounter, as Greenberg had found in Smith’s Voltri–​Bolton Landing series with its “raw, discolored surfaces.”58 Contrasting these unpainted works with the “polished or painted surfaces” of other works, he noted how they elicited different visual processes. Painted surfaces, he wrote, might “attract the eye too much, and the attracted eye lingers, while the unattracted eye hastens towards the essential.”59 Unpainted surfaces brought directness and immediacy; painted sculpture presented a distraction. Writing of the role of color in Anthony Caro’s “superb” Sculpture Two of 1962 (plate 29), Greenberg complains that it acts—​especially in the high-keyed off-shades that Caro favors—​to deprive metal surfaces of their tactile connotations and render them more “optical.” I grant the essential importance to Caro’s art of color in this role, but this is not to say that I, for one, find his color satisfactory. I know of no piece of his, not even an unsuccessful one, that does not

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transcend its color, or whose specific color or combination of colors does not detract from the quality of the whole (especially when there is more than one color). In every case I have the impression that the color is aesthetically (as well as literally) provisional—​t hat it can be changed at will without decisively affecting quality. Here, as almost everywhere else in Western sculpture, color remains truly the “secondary” property that philosophers used to think color in general was.60

However effectively paint contributed to the effect of weightlessness, its role was always minor.61 Never an end in itself, color was unconnected to the work of art, inessential, changing, and unreliable, a diversion from a greater visual encounter. It would make the sculpture a “matter-of-fact ornamental object”—​t hat is, an ineffectual work, a description that echoes Greenberg’s 1939 essay on kitsch.62 With its “faked sensations” and “vicarious experience,” kitsch “changes according to style,” he wrote, “but remains always the same.”63 Excessive, textured, secondary: Greenberg’s 1960s critique of color alludes to kitsch as its defining, if unspoken, term. Krauss herself invoked kitsch as Greenberg’s aesthetic motivation in her 1974 essay, situating his actions in a larger narrative about the marginalization of color in sculpture.64 She opened her article with a discussion of Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt (1963), presenting a thinly veiled critique of Greenberg’s actions as an arbitrary imposition of aesthetic judgment. Godard’s film depicts classical marble statues made crudely polychrome, with an effect, as Krauss described them, so jarring that it throws a social unease into relief. She notes the blank cerulean eyes, garish red mouths, hair the color of mahogany. One is upset to be in the presence of a classicism made vulgar—​and somehow implausible—​by color. And one is irritated by this reminder that Greek sculpture was, after all, originally painted, that what one has come to love is a kind of fiction produced by the erasures of time and the expurgative criticism of later cultures. . . . Yet our irritation does not arise so much from Godard’s flouting of our ignorance as from something else: we like those statues white. We have a taste for monochrome sculpture. Color seems to dislocate the surface, to interrupt the gradual modeling through which three-dimensional works stand revealed in their primary tactility. And so we find ourselves prudishly wanting to set limits on the sensibility of antiquity—​to lop off all those irregularities of taste that don’t seem to fit, to disallow to that art the colors of its own convictions.65

The statues seemed vulgar because they did not fit the modernist fiction of medium purity and simplicity. They belonged to the material facticity of history, not the sanitized realm of aesthetic taste. Greenberg’s complaint about color is couched in a tradition of Western sculptural aesthetics that has been critical of color. In eighteenth-century discourses that established the differences between painting and sculpture, color was assigned to painting because it did not sit comfortably with designations of sculpture as shape and form.

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Johann Gottfried Herder’s work of 1778, Sculpture: Some Observations on Shape and Form from Pygmalion’s Creative Dream, for instance, emphasized the need to exclude color, to purify a medium that was literal and substantive, built from a medium that could be shaped or contoured.66 The issue, as Alex Potts has written, “was not so much the question of color as such, but rather a doctrine of pure plastic form that dominated sculpture aesthetics during the nineteenth and much of the twentieth centuries. This sought to efface the complexities of visual effect created by the surface of a sculpture in the interests of a purified art, where perception of shape alone counted.”67 The definition of sculpture as pure form left little room for a consideration of color’s phenomenal and contingent surfaces. One technological factor contributing to the preference for whiteness in the nineteenth century is photography: as scholars have noted, white plaster casts and black-andwhite photographs supported a narrative of whiteness, relegating vibrant color to the sidelines of art history.68 But David Batchelor, in his book Chromophobia, has explored still other reasons for the absence of color in narratives of modernity: Chromophobia manifests itself in the many and varied attempts to purge color from culture, to devalue color, to diminish its significance, to deny its complexity. More specifically, this purging of color is usually accomplished in one of two ways. In the first, color is made out to be the property of some “foreign” body—​usually the feminine, the oriental, the primitive, the infantile, the vulgar, the queer or the pathological. In the second, color is relegated to the realm of the superficial, the supplementary, the inessential or the cosmetic. In one, color is regarded as alien and therefore dangerous; in the other, it is perceived merely as a secondary quality of experience, and thus unworthy of serious consideration. Color is dangerous, or it is trivial, or it is both. . . . Either way, color is routinely excluded from the higher concerns of the Mind. It is other to the higher values of Western culture. Or perhaps culture is other to the higher values of color. Or color is the corruption of culture.69

Seemingly impervious to normative representational tropes and rational categories; aligned with the bodily Other; excluded as superficial and supplementary, color has remained secondary to Western aesthetics. It stands for what does not fit the categorical norm. Ludwig Wittgenstein ascribed this type of intangibility to color, citing its resistance to language, naming, and verbal systems of thought.70 And Stephen Melville also explored these concepts in his essay “Color Has Not Yet Been Named: Objectivity in Deconstruction,” observing how color remains split between ineffability and systematization.71 Standardized by linguistic identification or objectification (as in the color chart or grid), color is also subjective and amorphous in ways that elude classification. It is both imagined and tied to the phenomenal world. Seemingly impossible to pin down as a stable sign, color is relegated to the low, to become something to control and eliminate. In narratives of formalism—​chief among them Greenberg’s own—​color exists outside of normative linguistic and aesthetic categories. For the critic, only when color

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delineated shape and plane could it succeed; otherwise it was a material excess, an inessential facet of the work. In a reading of Smith’s painted sculpture, however, Frank O’Hara bypassed this established narrative, mapping out a compelling case for attending to color in his 1961 essay “David Smith: The Color of Steel.” Rather than envision color as peripheral, O’Hara argued for its prominence in Smith’s sculpture, pointing out that the artist did not use paint in mere imitation of the medium of painting. “It is never sculpture being painting,” he wrote; “it is sculpture looking at painting and responding in its own fashion.”72 O’Hara began his essay by describing Smith’s “complicated” process of painting sculptures: The very large ones, which is to say almost all the ones done recently, require more than twenty coats, including several of rust-resistant paint of the kind used on battleships, and many coats of under-color to hide the brilliant orange yellow of the basic coats; these undercoats frequently give a velvety texture to the surface (like the iron hand in the velvet glove), and eventually disappear under a final color or colors, or show through, as Smith conceives the final piece. In some cases parts of a piece will be painted different colors, only to disappear under an over-all layer of paint as the ultimate image emerges.73

Sandwiched between descriptions of Smith’s sculptures in relationship to their landscape setting, this detailed account of the sculptural surface establishes Smith’s intent and skill with the brush and points up the materiality of his painted surfaces. The undercoats convey a “velvety texture,” a densely present coating. What could be further from Greenberg’s terse dismissal “It should be black”? O’Hara’s analysis of Smith’s color did not end with a description of the artist’s practices, however. The critic went on to analyze the phenomenal effects of viewing his painted works. The issue for O’Hara was to understand color as a phenomenon situated in a broader spatial environment. He describes what he termed an “esthetic of culmination rather than examination” in viewing Smith’s painted sculptures, a process in which color was used to spatially “shift their functions as visual elements of a single image. . . . In some pieces the color spreads over one plane onto a segment of the next and then to a third, like a drape partially concealing a nude. This is no longer the Constructivist intersection of colored planes, nor is the color used as a means of unifying the surface. Unification is approached by inviting the eye to travel over the complicated surface exhaustively, rather than inviting it to settle on the whole first and then explore details.” 74 In this passage, O’Hara outlines an expanded process of spatial travel. The eye—​an embodied eye, these phrases imply—​searches the surface comprehensively. Rather than grasp the whole instantaneously, it traces multivalent parts and shapes, making sense of a complex and densely textured surface from different vantages. O’Hara sketches here an aesthetic of phenomenological seeing that yields a spatial and temporal knowledge of color. He replaces instantaneousness and immediacy—​the central terms in Greenberg’s

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aesthetic critique—​w ith expansiveness and culmination, processes that take time and require space. O’Hara describes what Smith’s photographs aimed to relay: they propose a phenom­ enology of color, encountered with an embodied moving eye that connects color with its luminous and contingent local surroundings. It is a definition of color that comes closest to the one sketched by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in his essay of 1961, “Eye and Mind,” translated into English in 1964. For Merleau-Ponty, color is neither an ornament, the Cartesian designation, nor a simulacrum tied to pictorial systems of illusionism. It is a bodily and material dimension: Color is the “place where our brain and the universe meet,” [Cézanne] says in that admi­ rable idiom of the artisan of Being which Klee liked to quote. It is for the sake of color that we must break up the form qua spectacle. Thus the question is not of colors, “simulacra of the colors of nature.” The question, rather, concerns the dimension of color, that dimen­ sion which creates—​from itself to itself—​identities, differences, a texture, a materiality, a something. . . . Yet there is clearly no one master key of the visible, and color alone is no closer to being such a key than space is. The return to color has the virtue of getting somewhat nearer to “the heart of things,” but this heart is beyond the color envelope just as it is beyond the space envelope.75

Color operates neither as an embellishment nor as an ornament nor as a pictorial device to structure the illusion of perspectival space. It is a spatial and material facet in its own right: something that cannot be extrapolated from experience, just as it cannot be separated from line, texture, or form. Smith had in mind an analogous version of this spatially embedded color when he told an interviewer in 1964: “Well [color] is a thing that never is out of my mind; it’s part of the world.” 76 Using his camera, the sculptor sought to define his painted objects in the ambient colors and spaces around his Bolton Landing studio, exploring the proper­ ties photographically that O’Hara noted in print.

FR AMING A PHENOMENOLOGY OF COLOR

At first glance, the slide photographs that Smith took in the winter of 1960–​61 seem indifferent to conventions of display. Five recent works, all vibrantly painted, stand on the snow-covered driveway outside the artist’s sculpture workshop—​a space the photo­ graphs show us is an extension of the studio. Steel littering the scene awaits incorpora­ tion into sculptures. Smith’s truck is glimpsed in the distance. Although the sculptures seem positioned haphazardly, the artist has placed them to allow his camera to mime an embodied process of viewing. Charting a path through the installation, Smith’s pho­ tographs orient viewers to the contingent effects elicited by the surfaces of sculpture. Photographing Tanktotem X (1960; plates 30–​35) in eight shots, six of which are

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reproduced here, Smith circumnavigated the object, framing it from different vantages. In two views, its bright-red arcing curve and orange convex shapes pop out abruptly against a muted landscape, abstracting the sculpture from the space outside the studio. In slides taken from another point of view, the subtler tones of its pale yellow and pale blue shapes are visible, closer in hue to the gray of Smith’s cinder-block workshop and the white of his truck. From some vantages, Tanktotem X looks like an array of shapes spread out horizontally, and the vibrant tones of one side—​fire-engine red, navy blue, and orange—​contrast with the surroundings. From others, the sculpture registers as a dense cluster of overlapping similar forms; soft colors of the work—​white tinged with robin’s-egg blue and a pale creamy yellow—​harmonize with the backdrop. Surveying the sculpture in the round, both near to the work and from a distance, Smith organizes an encounter in which the sculpture, with its vibrantly painted convex and concave parts, unfolds spatially. The textured surfaces and hues—​t he layers of applied paint—​merge and contrast with the colors of the surroundings, changing in space. In this series of photographs, Tanktotem X is envisioned as a visually unpredictable object through an encounter with the contingent effects of surface. This model of circumambulating sculpture photographically differs from the approach Smith used in his one-on-one style, which the sculptor developed in the late 1940s. That style entailed low vantage points and abrupt cropping, positioning sculpture as a flat plane against a pale sky backdrop. Now Smith adopted a higher vantage point in relationship to the object and did not mask his slides—​his photographs situate sculpture within its surroundings. Gone are the weightless, heroizing images of Cockfight and The Hero (see fig. 23 and plate 2); in their place are serial views of sculptures as gravity-bound things. What prompted the shift in tactics? Smith’s photographs of Tanktotem X suggest that polychrome sculpture required a new pictorial strategy that highlighted the ambient effects of color seen in a spatial environment. Only by understanding the painted surfaces in three dimensions could their “velvety texture[s]” or the experience of “culmination,” O’Hara’s terms, be grasped. Tanktotem X, seen in the snow-filled space outside Smith’s sculpture workshop, invites visual travel, a temporal movement through space. Smith himself was attuned to the ways in which sculptural volume and surface color merged in his project, describing how his 1960s vocabulary of convex and concave shapes demanded a renewed attention to surface.77 Reflecting on the painted sculptures that were included in a Marlborough-Gerson Gallery exhibition in 1964, he told an interviewer, “I evolved in sculpture as a painter and I’ve always painted sculpture as long as I’ve made it. There are times I think that maybe these three in this show have come closer to getting a color relationship to the form[,] which is different than if the form was alone or different than if the color was in a picture. I’ve come closer to arriving at the proper relationship between the two things recently than I ever have before, I think.” 78 Smith stressed how the three painted works in the show—​Zig IV, Zig VII, and

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Zig VIII, illustrated in the catalog with his own photographs—​approached the balance he sought between sculptural form and pictorial surface, or in which shape and color would commingle on equal terms. When Smith photographed these productions, the issue for him was how to present a sculpture’s surface effects as an integral—​and not secondary—​component of the work. In his winter landscape series, Smith addressed this issue by situating his works in and against the snow-covered landscape. The white abstract forms of Tanktotem VII, for instance, placed in and against a muted white-and-gray field, break into that space (see plates 20 and 21). Viewers compare the white abstract plane with the soft white tones of the winter landscape. In Smith’s two photographs of the work, one of each side, the comparison rests on the object’s appearance as two different things in a similar surrounding. Seen together the two frames spark a process of differentiation, as the viewer struggles to make sense of the work’s opposing sides, whose black lines and white planes do not match up. In both images the landscape provides a luminous ground—​t he sculpture’s fabricated colors contrast with the quieter, natural hues of the surroundings. In a slide of Tanktotem IX (1960; see plate 22), Smith similarly maps color as a complex set of tonal and pictorial variations. Once more the sculptor positioned the object in its environment, but there is no confusing its gold-tinged totem head, crisp linear torso, or dark tripod legs with its surroundings. The photograph presents a range of differences that tabulate the color white as a set of shifting signs. Look, for instance, at the white plane of the sculpture’s central rectangular shape, mixed at the lower edge with vertical streaks of gray. The sculpture’s head, too, is a meditation on varied hues. Here, white is interspersed with a gold-toned yellow whose tactile application is clearly visible. These versions of white compare with the colors of the landscape: the gray-white of snow mixed with gravel, the bright yellow-white of snow reflecting sun, the blue-white of snow seen in shadow, the pale-blue-tinged white hovering just above the horizon, and the creamy white of birch bark. Each of these versions of a single color is made to appear in the image’s frame, showing that white is multiple and dispersed. Color here is not a stable and absolute term; it is fragmented and unknown, subject to the contingencies of space and light. We cannot point to one object or surface and name it white. Whiteness, the photograph insists by framing sculpture within the landscape, is composed of localized reflections and illuminated surfaces. In the photographs of Tanktotem VII and Tanktotem IX, Smith lays out a definition of color he had delineated in 1954, when he drew an analogy between sculptural viewing and the perception of the color black. Both experiences, he thought, instantiated a process of abstract association: Let me pose a question to black, Is it white? Is it day or night? Good or evil? Positive or negative? Is it life or death? Is it the superficial scientific explanation about the absence of light? Is it a solid wall or is it space? Is it pain, a man, a father? Or does black mean

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nothing? Did it come out blank having been censored out by some unknown or unrecognizable association? There is no one answer. Black is no one thing. It is many things. The answer depends upon individual reaction. The importance of black depends upon the conviction and the artistic projection of black, the mythopoetic view, the myth of black. And to the creative mind, the dream and the myth of black is the truth of black, not the scientific theory or dictionary explanation or the philosopher’s account of black. Black, as a word, or as an image recall, flashes in the mind as a dream, too fast for any rational word record. But its imagery is all involved by the artist when he uses black on a brush.79

Smith addresses the idea of black only to break it down into a set of unstable, conflicting associations. As a color and a term, it cannot be pinned to any single linguistic, scientific, or philosophical meaning. Rather, it subsists in cultural imagery—​what Smith termed the “mythopoetic view” of black—​and in individual projection, the conscious and unconscious meanings viewers ascribe to the object. Color here is neither universal nor absolute; nor is it the prefabricated color of a chart or grid. Instead, it is constituted locally and phenomenally, in Smith’s individual applications of paint and in specific acts of viewing—​encounters with the shifting surfaces of Tanktotem IX, for instance, themselves subject to a number of tonal variations. In emphasizing color’s relativity as it is constituted locally and by individual association, Smith drew on modernist theories of color that emphasize its subjective and psychological origins. Indeed, when the artist stressed in essays and interviews that his work grew from painting, he had color in mind. In his 1960 article “Notes on My Work,” he reiterated this lineage, writing, “My sculpture grew from painting. My analogy and reference is with color. Flash reference and afterimage vision is historied [sic] in painting.”80 Smith also cited Cézanne in his references to color and the afterimage, writing in an article published in the Everyday Art Quarterly in 1952: Cézanne believed in the atmosphere of things. He spoke of the soul found in a sugar bowl, and since a sugar bowl is inanimate and only one copy from a line of similarly pressed forms, the soul, or the visionary projection, of the sugar bowl, the animacy the animate nature [sic], the associations which become the true reality of that object must be in the eyes of the viewer.81

Objects, this poetic passage stresses, are animate projections of the artist’s own vision, a subjectivity that, as he wrote elsewhere, “has now become the point of departure.”82 For Smith, the lesson of Cézanne’s painting was the unfixing of objects through the artist’s phenomenal perception, or how objects were unconstrained by pictorial systems of modeling or linear perspective and constituted instead through the indeterminacy of vision. Smith was drawn to how Cézanne’s use of color was unhinged from systems of

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illusionism, and how it acknowledged the arbitrary perceptions of embodied viewing. In one of the many aphoristic quotations that run through his writings, talks, and notes, the sculptor observed that Camille Pissarro described how colors reflect their surroundings, responding to the “sky, water, branches, and ground,” an instability that required an unfixed, searching process of viewing.83 Color is constituted phenomenally; it is atmospheric and relational, as Smith also emphasized when quoting a phrase from Rainer Maria Rilke: “Blue summoned orange and green, etc.”84 The citation echoes the arbitrariness of vision that Smith championed in his 1953 lecture: “Black is no one thing. . . . The answer depends upon individual reaction.” In his winter photographs, Smith drew on these definitions of color as dependent on the local and accidental context of embodied vision. In his slide of Tanktotem IX, the camera presents hues of white that destabilize definitions of color as absolute (see plate 22). No single version of white stands in for the whole: viewers glean an understanding of white from the layered surface of the sculpture, and from the ambient tones of the landscape. Through its higher vantage point and square format, the photograph demands that viewers compare the sculpture’s hues to those of its surroundings. In the Tanktotem X series, colors also shift unpredictably from frame to frame (see plates 30–​ 35). The photographs link the sculpture’s range of hues to a three-dimensional world, showing that color is “that dimension which creates—​from itself to itself—​identities, differences, a texture, a materiality,” to quote Merleau-Ponty again.85 The images enact a three-dimensional process of viewing that moves from glimpses of the textured undercoat to structured views of the sculpture against its surroundings. Smith’s color slide transparencies, by organizing and framing the studied effects of his painted objects, cast doubt on Greenberg’s definition of color’s opticality. They present color as entrenched in the embodied world, as a material and dimensional effect. The surfaces of sculptures are shown to be subject to the shifting effects of light, vantage point, and space. Not a secondary ornament, color is substantive, tactile, and threedimensional—​it is grounded, like sculptural shape and form, in time and space. Using his camera, Smith enacts a spatial process of comparison, asking viewers to grasp and differentiate color’s dimensionality and tactility in a situational environment. Consider how these strategies work in Smith’s photograph of Bouquet of Concaves II, a color slide transparency the sculptor probably took in 1960 or 1961 (plate 36). Smith has photographed the work in bright sunlight, arresting the reflections on its cylindrical shapes. These highlights are a calculated aspect of the image, clues to the meaning of the work. The photograph, which uses the low vantage point Smith favored in the 1950s, flattens Bouquet of Concaves to a plane. The reflections draw the viewer’s attention to the physical volume of the sculpture. They also draw attention to the pink stripe on the left, a fictive reflection that Smith had painted in a concavity, making it appear convex. His inclusion of the actual reflections evokes a sense that the sculpture is caught up in multiple media, and the image emphasizes the complex interplay of painterly illusion, three-dimensional sculpture, and surrounding space. It shifts our

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perception of the work, so that our reading of the sculpture turns on both painting and photography. Smith would explore the pictorial effects of his painted objects in other ways, too. In the late summer or early fall of 1961, he photographed a group of works he had produced that year, including his last Tanktotems, as well as Hirebecca and Ninety Father and Ninety Son (plate 37). In the photographs, Smith placed his sculptures on a section of the field closest to his house. Most of them were to be shipped to Pittsburgh for the Carnegie International Exhibition of Contemporary Painting and Sculpture, which opened on October 27 at the Carnegie Institute. The show presented Smith’s color sculptures as a coherent, if controversial, body of work—​eliciting the vexed criticism of Hilton Kramer and Dore Ashton quoted earlier in this chapter. His staging on the field would have allowed him to anticipate the placement of the works in the gallery. Yet his photographs unsettle any stable associations. For some shots, he climbed to the roof of his house and photographed them in a formation, so that they seem an independent group of objects estranged from their surroundings. A photograph similar to the one O’Hara included in his December 1961 essay presents the vibrantly painted sculptures like an army of strange objects standing at attention in a field, evincing what O’Hara called their “powerful, indomitable” look.86 Here color works to distinguish sculpture from its environment. Smith took other views from the ground as he moved through their ranks, photographing the painted sculptures in a colorful network of planes and lines (plate 38). In one slide, Circles Intercepted frames Circles and Arcs, visually rhyming the round shapes, a pictorial composite of vibrant sculptural forms. In others, the sculptor navigates Hirebecca, tracking its shift from an open black circle that frames a collage of yellow and white rectangles, to a closed rectangular shape. In these closer views, Smith constructs a compositional latticework of abstract color. The painted shapes compose a cubist canvas. Smith’s photographs of his Carnegie group map a visual geography, calling on the two vantages he had described in his 1952 lecture at the Museum of Modern Art. His works are encountered from above, as if from “the travelling height of a plane two miles up,” so that they form a coherent pattern.87 At closer range, they seem all bulk and volume, the atmospheric depth and dimension of clouds. Smith’s two sets of photographs traverse this polarity of aerial and earthbound views, charting color as abstract and material, optical and spatial. In May 1965, a few weeks before his death, the sculptor gave a lecture illustrated with slides at Bennington College. Recorded, transcribed, and published along with Smith’s slides in Art International that October, the talk gives an extraordinary account of the artist’s explorations of color in the 1960s. Jettisoning his prepared remarks, he spoke about the slides, offering insight into his color photographs. He began his presentation with several slides of his Cubis—​“just a made-up name,” he said—​a series of twenty-eight works he produced concurrently with his painted sculptures.88 Composed of welded stainless-steel boxes, which Smith and his assistant fabricated and kept on hand as found objects for sculpture, the Cubis contain surfaces

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that reflect light in erratic ways. Wielding an electric disk grinder, a tool normally used to smooth welded seams and polish surfaces, Smith used it like a paintbrush to produce irregular lines and burnishing marks. The resulting surfaces shimmer and glow, as he noted in his May 1965 talk: This is the only time—​in these stainless steel pieces—​t hat I have ever been able to utilize light, and I depend a great deal on the reflective power of light. In this case, it is late afternoon, and there is a sort of golden color reflected by the late afternoon sun in the winter; and it (the sculpture) reflects a rather golden color; and when the sky is blue, there is a blue cast to it. It does have a semi-mirror reflection, and I like it (stainless steel) in that sense because no other material in that sculpture can do that.89

Smith stresses here how the Cubis rely on their surroundings for their color; they change appearance with the time of day, the weather, and the season. In the sculptor’s photographs of Cubi XIX (1964), he pictures the sculpture from two sides (plates 39 and 40). In one, the work reflects the blue sky, creating an optical confusion as the reflection dissolves the boundaries between the two uppermost shapes. In a second image, the sculpture appears solid against the landscape that stretches out in the distance. Seen photographically, Cubi XIX looks stable and upright and curiously dematerialized. The light-filled reflective surfaces are awash with ambient light and color. Smith presented other slides at Bennington that similarly show sculpture tethered to its atmosphere. Consider a photograph of Bec-Dida Day of 1963 (plate 41), a work that is just over seven feet tall. The sculpture’s core, a blue concave shape, Smith told his audience, was “made for big oil tanks . . . a convex-concave shape which is standard in the steel business.”90 It is suspended above—​as if about to “roll,” he said—​and below pieces of I beam, one painted red, the other yellow. Yet this structure is countered by the work’s overwhelming use of color. To stand directly in front of Bec-Dida Day is to be submerged by color, to risk losing one’s bearings in a sea of blue. In Smith’s photograph of the sculpture, he orients viewers to the dimensionality of color, or how the shadows fall across the concavity and skew and soften the bright blue. Rather than photograph the work head-on, Smith uses a low vantage point to underscore its physical monumentality and scale against the blue sky, asking viewers to comprehend how his painted sculpture is subject to embodied vision, engulfing the beholder. After his talk, a member of the audience asked Smith about his process: “When you do a colored sculpture, do you think of the color before you put it together, or do you do the color and shape together in your mind?” Smith’s answer, excerpted earlier, veered off course. But it nonetheless illuminates how his choice of hues related to a broader material world of colors: It goes deep sometimes, and sometimes it is simple, as you know. The blue on the seal of Bull Durham cigarettes—​you know—​t he kind you roll your own—​and there’s a little string on it, on a blue seal, and a blue tax stamp—​sometimes it is those two colors that

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determine something else. Sometimes I look at things for a year before I know what the color is. I like to think that I can find a correlation between that shape and its proper color and, of course, somewhere way back is an association in mind from an object. If I knew what the object was—​but usually I don’t want to know what the object was—​ and I try to get a relationship of colors that I don’t know about; and then, sometimes, it seems too close, and I have to be perverse and violate that relationship. If they are too pretty or too easy or too easily obtained, then I have to violate it and go a little more raw or a little more toward ugly. There is no answer really, and there is nothing very deep-seated about it. It is just the way things come. Sometimes you cut a melon in two; you see some colors in there that determine the way the sculpture should be painted.91

Smith drew his colors from the world around him: the blue of a cigarette tax stamp or the pale orange of a cut melon. But in his sculpture he individualized these citations and made them specific; his color, he stressed, was unexpected, outside conventions of beauty or taste. His chosen hues were “raw,” turning “a little more toward ugly,” he said, to ensure that they were not too pretty or “too easily obtained.” He similarly called up his aesthetic of the vulgar when he told O’Hara in an interview in 1964 that his colors were “rough,” “gutty,” and “acidic.”92 Here Smith defined his sculpture’s pigments as both like and unlike those of the everyday world. He drew his paint tones from common objects, but altered them, distinguishing, as Newman did, between his color and colors. Sculptural color, for Smith, was not ready-made. In his photographs, Smith mapped out these qualities of contingency, asking viewers to compare the textured tones of his painted surfaces with the vibrant fabric of the landscape. He said as much in his Bennington lecture when, presenting a slide of Tanktotem X (1960; plate 42), he quipped that he “depended upon the flowers and tomatoes to carry that one out.”93 It’s not hard to see why: the photograph—​which also appeared in O’Hara’s 1961 essay—​sets up a comparison of a vibrantly painted sculpture and the verdant sprawl of a late summer garden. “I actually think that the garden had something to do with (it) unconsciously,” he told the audience. “I wasn’t trying to use any colors that were in the garden, but I actually think that the colors I saw influenced painting of the sculpture.”94 Smith’s photograph frames Tanktotem X head-on, so that it seems nestled in its unconventional setting. The juxtaposition hinges on the photograph’s tones and hues: Smith sets the red crescent shape of Tanktotem X against the red and pink gladiolas in the background, and the dark-blue-and-white central shape against the green swell of vegetation. The image is one of connection and disconnection, similarity and difference. The photograph proposes the sculpture as an organic extension of the garden, an affinity that is tested through the photograph’s structuring of a give-and-take between painted abstract shapes and sprawling vines and arcing flower forms. Positioned in this curious setting, the sculpture’s rough and tactile surfaces are underscored. The

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sculpture has a spatial dimensionality that is tied to the colorful textures of its surfaces and the natural forms around it. Smith’s photographs present a model for color that departs from formalist definitions of polychrome sculpture as supplementary or decorative and contradicts Kramer’s invective stating that Smith’s painted objects were “sculpture about painting.”95 Seen in a landscape and subject to the conditional effects of embodied vision, Smith’s colorful surfaces assert their own identity. They “command attention like signposts,” Brian O’Doherty wrote in 1961, reviewing the Carnegie installation. “Indeed,” he thought, “they might be signals along the tracks of some impossible railway.”96 Vibrant beacons, Smith’s painted sculptures arrest attention and indicate the special objecthood of his sculptures, how they are both like and unlike the world of things. Smith’s photographs imagine the impossibility of this scene, of O’Doherty’s analogy. In them, he trained his camera on a world of luminous reflections and shadows, of innumerable hues, textures, and tones. In the sculptor’s vision, color is made to matter, not as an afterthought, but as an independent surface, a dimension of experience equal to the steel shapes the sculptor fused with his torch.

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5 THE TERRAIN OF THE VULGAR Smith’s 1963–​64 Nudes

The best of the current sculptures didn’t make me feel I wanted to have one, they made me feel I wanted to be one. FRANK O’HARA, “DAVID SMITH: THE COLOR OF STEEL,” 1961

In the winter of 1963 or the spring of 1964, David Smith photographed a female model as she posed on a bench on the terrace outside his house. In nearly fifty shots, Smith mapped the model as she moved and danced. The artist placed his camera close to the ground, using a vantage point that presents her body as a silhouette against the pale sky. Through focus, Smith draws attention to the model’s skin against a blurry landscape backdrop. In a style reminiscent of his 1950s photographs of sculptures presented individually, he framed the shots by cropping the body at the neck and knees. In what might be the first image (fig. 69), she faces front, her body signaling the discomfort of being naked in the cold air: her torso is hunched, arms are clasped, and knees are drawn together, with one leg set slightly forward. In the succeeding images, the body starts to turn, and the dialogue between model and sculpture begins. In two frames (figs. 70 and 71), Smith has captured the body in motion as the limbs move in different directions and the torso twists, causing the stomach to bulge. Her unwieldy volume echoes Menand V (1963), which Smith positioned behind the model; it, too, contains a series of volumetric parts, and it, too, seems bulky and unbalanced. As the model completes her turn, awkwardness and lopsidedness are mended by steady views of her back and rear (figs. 72 and 73). Projected against the sky again, the body is now flattened as a darkened shape mimicking the flat contours of Menand II (1963), at right in the second image.1 Bodily substance flattens into a figure projected against a white background. What are we to make of these nude photographs, which use the camera’s controls of

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Figure 69. David Smith, Untitled (Nude with Menand V [1963]), Bolton Landing, NY, c. 1963–​64. Gelatin silver print, 10 × 8 in. (25.4 × 20.3 cm). The Estate of David Smith, New York.

vantage point, focus, and frame? In these images, Smith returns to his photographic tactics of the 1950s to chart the body in black and white as both a material thing and a projected image, sparking a dialogue between model and sculpture. Why did Smith return to the subject of the female nude in the 1960s, resuming a category of representation that he had explored in the 1930s, picturing nudes in the studio? One answer to these questions follows the path laid by previous scholars, who connect the nude photographs to Smith’s nude paintings, a series of over one hundred canvases that he made in 1963 and 1964 by dripping paint from an ear syringe. Scholars have suggested that the nude photographs were stepping-stones to the final product: they were the artist’s reference images for his painting, although Smith also relied on direct observation.2 As Brooks Adams writes in a 2000 catalog essay, the photographs were a “sensory aide-mémoire to the process of creating some of the large abstract

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Figure 70. David Smith, Untitled (Nude with Menand V [1963]), Bolton Landing, NY, c. 1963–​64. Gelatin silver print, 10 × 8 in. (25.4 × 20.3 cm). The Estate of David Smith, New York.

sculptures as well as the Last Nudes.”3 Smith’s shots of female models posed indoors, Adams argues, “suggest[ed] a band of workaday muses whose purpose was—​haptically, subliminally—​to help keep alive a sense-memory of carnality, of fleshly mass, volume, texture, and weight, even as Smith worked in a non-literal fashion on large abstract structures and on freehanded depictions of nudes.” 4 Michael Brenson sounded a similar note, observing that “the nudes first had to be fixed in photographs, where they could be controlled by the eye before they initiated the liquid flow of the hand.”5 The camera has controlled the body so that paint could then unleash its “alluring sexuality [and] uncontrollable organicism,” Brenson’s descriptive terms for the paintings.6 These arguments are persuasive, since there is little doubt that the nude photographs served an instrumental role in Smith’s painting practice. Yet the differences between the two series are striking and raise questions about how the sculptor positioned the body using two separate media, each with its own scale, size, substance, and materiality—​and

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Figure 71. David Smith, Untitled (Nude with Menand V [1963]), Bolton Landing, NY, c. 1963–​64. Gelatin silver print, 915⁄16 × 8 in. (25.2 × 20.3 cm). The Estate of David Smith, New York.

its unique process of visualization. As Abigail Solomon-Godeau has argued, writing about the emergence of nude photography in the nineteenth century, the camera brought a new rhetoric for the spectacularization of the body that was crucially distinct from other erotic imagery in the graphic arts. Erotic photography, she writes, “demonstrates a shift from a concept of the sexual as an activity to a new emphasis on specularity—​the sexual constituted as a visual field rather than an activity as such.”7 Seen through the mechanical realism of the camera, the body is isolated as a fragmented object, managed through vantage point and frame, and the illusion of its tactility is heightened through supplemental textures and props. The female body becomes spectacle through a set of specifically photographic controls. Smith’s nude photographs also contain a representational rhetoric that is different from that of the medium of painting. Consider, for instance, a comparison of one of Smith’s paintings depicting a standing nude with a photograph of the model shot out-

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Figure 72. David Smith, Untitled (Nude with Menand V [1963]), Bolton Landing, NY, c. 1963–​64. Gelatin silver print, 915⁄16 × 8 in. (25.2 × 20.3 cm). The Estate of David Smith, New York.

side that was possibly a source image for the painting (fig. 74). In the photograph, Smith used a low vantage point, similar to the one he used to picture his sculpture one-onone. The nude is managed in black-and-white film; her flesh is translated into a narrow palette of grays—​the darkened shadows that fall across the arms, and the light gray sky, which merges with the overexposed leg—​and the pitch-black shape of the crotch, a darkened void. Smith positioned his camera close to the model’s body, amplifying the body’s curves and bulges through light and shadow. He cropped the model’s head from view to preserve her anonymity, a framing technique that also has the effect of fragmenting the torso and legs into disconnected parts. Once again Smith calls attention to the photograph’s edge as a way to dislodge its subject matter. The low vantage point and close proximity dramatize the body as an imposing, monumental form; compared with the small-scale sculpture that appears between her calves, Menand V, the body looks like a hulking, threatening figure about to topple into the space of the beholder.

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Figure 73. David Smith, Untitled (Nude with Menand II [1963]), Bolton Landing, NY, c. 1963–​64. Gelatin silver print, 915⁄16 × 8 in. (25.2 × 20.3 cm). The Estate of David Smith, New York.

If the photograph situates the body within a framework of indexical likeness, the loose and fragmentary lines of the painting distort that structured precision (fig. 75). The model’s right hip juts out erratically in a sweeping, uneven line that does not connect to the downward pull of the torso, itself containing several gestural marks. One of the breasts is indicated with a curving line that seems out of proportion with the head and neck, while the other is lost in a heavy cluster of broken lines. Smith cropped his photograph at the model’s neck. In the painting, he added a face that seems mismatched and out of place, not least because it bears a brawny grin similar to the smile of Willem de Kooning’s Woman I (1950–​52). The face seems collaged on, a distortion. In exaggerating the figure, the painting pushes to an extreme the monumentalizing qualities of Smith’s photograph. The specificities of the photograph—​how the low vantage point transforms the body into an intimidating form, for instance—​are hyperbolized in the painting, so that the nude body, floating in the nonspace of the canvas, registers as

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Figure 74. David Smith, Untitled (Nude with Menand V [1963]), Bolton Landing, NY, c. 1963–​64. Gelatin silver print, 915⁄16 × 8 in. (25.2 × 20.3 cm). The Estate of David Smith, New York.

­ erculean, an overembellished, dysmorphic figure. The photograph’s fantasy of aggresH sion is writ large in paint. Smith’s nude photographs manage an erotics of desire in a way that is specific to photography. Their conventions and codes are tied to the camera’s eroticization of the female nude, and they loosely draw from a broad set of eroticizing imagery in mass media—​in advertising, pornography, and nude photography. This much Ira Lowe, Smith’s lawyer, was sure of when, believing the nude photographs to be pornography, he censored the images after the artist’s death in 1965 and may have destroyed their negatives.8 That the nude photographs contain pornographic elements is not something that can be overlooked—​especially since Smith himself spotlighted the obscene aspects of his nude series in an interview with Thomas Hess in June 1964, an excerpt of which was printed in a Marlborough-Gerson Gallery catalog. The sculptor asks provocatively, “Did I tell you I just made 130 or 140 paintings this year from models, all nude ­models?”

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Figure 75. David Smith, Untitled (Nude), 1964. Enamel on canvas, 50 × 28⅞ in. (127 × 73.3 cm). Private collection, courtesy The Estate of David Smith, New York.

Pointing out that his paintings offered a direct and unmediated encounter with the body, Smith added, “I don’t use drapery.” In the phrases that followed—​which were expurgated from the published transcript of the interview—​Smith adopted a crass and chauvinist tone: “When there’s pussy, I put pussy in. And when there’s a crack—​on some of these girls who are so young you can’t even see a definition—​I put it in because I think it will be there, sooner or later.”9 The misogyny of his words—​tied to his mythologized identity as the virile Vulcan welder—​seems meant to scandalize Hess, then an art critic and editor of Art News. But the statements also underscore how Smith—​like so many modernists before him—​ consciously used the female body as a site of representational contest and innovation, a locus onto which he could project cultural fantasies of heteronormative desire and simultaneously insist on his artistic originality. Claiming not to use drapery was a sign of the artist’s avant-gardism. Indeed throughout his writings of the 1950s, Smith located his artistic creativity in statements about conventions of femininity. The crucial term, for him, was “the vulgar,” shorthand for an uncolonized realm of experience that disrupted artistic conventions and societal norms. It was “a vulgarity in [the professional aesthetician’s] code of beauty, because he has not [yet] recognized . . . or made rules for its acceptance. To the creative artist it is his beauty, but to the audience, who will wait for the aesthetician’s explanation, it is too new and has not yet hammered its way into acceptance. It will not conform to the past, it is beyond the pale.”10 The vulgar was what was not understood or recognized; it stood out as odd or debased and, therefore, ugly. The word vulgarization also often appears in Smith’s writings, suggesting that the resistance the vulgar performs against reified culture is an active one, as if catalyzing a process: the vulgar is a mobile territory that changes in relation to society.11 It was what was not yet identified and explained by society as part of a received tradition.12 As part of this formulation, Smith envisioned his artistic identity as that of an intrepid traveler who ventured alone into the new, away from the hardened conventions of the aesthetic: “The true artist projects into realms that have not been seen. . . . He has left behind what was once the subject, as well as other problems of the past, while the people of distinction are still heavily involved in mass form, perspective, beauty, dimension, design, communication, chiaroscuro, social responsibility, and their own limitations of nature.”13 Smith’s theory of the vulgar mapped a broad continuum between debased representations of sex and graceful depictions of beauty. Both extremes are characterized by cultural representations of the female body and heterosexual male codes of desire. At one end, Smith located the tradition of beauty, which he identified as an aestheticized, graceful feminine figure that adhered to societal expectations and established codes. He told a Museum of Modern Art audience in 1960: “I don’t feel at all like the age of graces. I like girls, but I don’t feel like using that feminine grace in concepts. The equality has worked it in. I don’t think this is the age of grace. I don’t know whether my monsters

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on wheels will become graces to other people and I don’t know whether or not they will be rationalized as being a need or a statement of my time. They are non-rational, but they fill a need in me.”14 In Smith’s vocabulary, grace signaled received conventions and stereotypes of beauty—​conventions that he actively rejected by terming his sculptures “monsters.” Monstrous, nonrational, or “vulgar,” his sculptural objects upset established codes and expectations. At the other end of the spectrum, Smith located literal representations of sex, which he also critiqued in the 1940s, describing realistic sex imagery as part of the public’s complacency: “Imagination and new ideas cause disturbance to the complacent cross-section, which is accustomed to an art representing the simplest elements of sex, confirmation of a happy experience, or a situation with a moral.”15 The “realistic” representation of sex, along with happiness and morality, makes for an easy, literal art, a convention that Smith likened to an advertising “billboard.”16 Smith’s preparatory drawings for the Medals for Dishonor series (1937–​40) further linked industry and pornography: in a drawing titled Fourth Estate: The Free Press, “sex and oil” lead to the corruption of the free press; the two are fed as a paper roll through the machinery of the press while a bound and stripped body lies off to the side. For Smith, the vulgar took place between the poles of realism in representations of sex and clichés or established codes of feminine beauty. The artist drew on this uncolonized terrain, or what was not yet controlled by society or hardened into a consumerist image. Gender is intricately linked to Smith’s written formulations. The female body also was the site of a contest between beauty and brutality in his sculpture. His photograph of Portrait of a Lady Painter, reproduced on the cover of Arts magazine in 1957 (see plate 1), for instance, distances the brutality of his misogynist imagery by projecting the sculpture as a silhouette against the landscape backdrop. The painter, who stands in for a stereotypical female artist that Smith disparaged, throws her head back in pain, a violence that is controlled photographically by projecting the sculpture as a shape against the soft contours of the landscape. The artist solidified this commingling of conventions of beauty and submission to violence in his imagery of the 1930s and 1940s. Smith’s sketchbooks and clippings files from those years are filled with tear sheets from magazines and newspapers that depict women dancing in synchronization or performing the jitterbug. Or, on one page presumably ripped from a pornographic magazine, a “curvey coquette, a double-barrelled version of sugar and spice and everything nice” parades in a tight black corset, a garter belt, and stockings. Smith made collages that presented these magazine-issued signs of beauty. He transformed their cultural imagery, juxtaposing the bodies with images of military aggression and violence. In a page titled “Fasc [sic] Little Mothers,” he composed an antiwar collage using photographs of naked women and mannequins, covering them with drawings of cannons (fig. 76). A loose study for Smith’s Medals for Dishonor series, the drawing connects a phallus of war to a landscape of anatomic parts. A woman wearing garters, her shirt undone, is mounted by the cannon-phallus. Another picture, on

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Figure 76. David Smith, Untitled (Study for Medals for Dishonor), c. 1938. Pencil, ink, gouache, and collage on cardboard, 11 x 7 in. (27.9 x 17.8 cm). The Estate of David Smith, New York.

the lower left, is cut in a shape that resembles a cannon. Rape and sexual violence dominate the scenes, and the female body is construed as a broken, war-torn object, undermined by masculine power and institutionalized violence.17 In his 1960s nudes, Smith returns to this aesthetic spectrum of vulgarity—​a trope he relied on throughout his career—​to give it visual and spatial form. These photographs map a body as it moves from being a material thing to being a projection, as it evokes and performs the stereotypes and clichés of femininity routed through mass cultural and pornographic imagery. Smith took the majority of his nude photographs using black-and-white film, a departure from the color slide transparencies he used at that time to picture an embodied encounter with painted sculpture.18 Smith’s nudes

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organize the body’s spatial form in a narrow gray palette, restricting and flattening its dimensionality in an image of contrast. By using photography, a medium capable of designating a vantage point and frame, Smith could chart the female nude in a range of different settings and situations to show—​and even frustrate—​t he workings of desire.

THE VULGAR NUDE

The settings and sites in which Smith posed his nude model varied. She appears outside in nature; on the bench outside his house, where she is positioned as if a sculpture; inside his house, where the model carries out such routine actions as eating, sitting, reading, talking on the phone, and leaning against the kitchen counter; and in the space of the studio. In photographing the model outside, the artist offered a close study of the body’s twisting passage from imbalance to formality (see figs. 69–​73). Using a low vantage point, positioning his camera close to the body, and cropping the figure at the neck and knees, the sculptor has framed the body as a contingent, fragmentary thing. He charts its changing postures as it moves from awkwardness to grace, from weighty corporeality to two-dimensional planarity, from unwieldy bulges and curves to a neat and stable silhouette—​mapping the mechanics of posing or becoming a pose. He isolates the body’s movements into and out of conventional postures, stereotypical norms, and bodily clichés as it inhabits and sheds a range of projections. The body is both a material, grounded thing and an apparitional facade. In still other photographs taken outside, Smith frames the body as it inhabits stereotypes of gender. Elsewhere in the series of photographs taken on his terrace, Smith moved his camera to a lower point of view, well below the bench. In one photograph, the figure seems imposing and monumental—​menacing, even, in her commanding stance that looms over the space of the beholder (see fig. 74). The nude registers as a misogynist projection of a threatening nude. In several other images, however this image is balanced with scenes of the body naturalized in the landscape (fig. 77). The model picks daffodils and uses them as a prop—​they are held as a loose bouquet in her hand, pointed at her breasts in a playful, dancing gesture, or they are suspended between her legs as if emerging from the crotch, like a phallus in full bloom. One resembles a pornographic image in Smith’s collection, of a female body bent over in a field. These photographs tie the nude to nature, visualizing an essentialist definition of gender by equating the body with her setting. In still another sequence, the model poses in various stances loosely reminiscent of mass cultural imagery: she grabs her knee, a position that seems preprogrammed; she stretches her arms out to the side to form graceful lines, invoking modern dance (fig. 78); and she twists in an easygoing dance (fig. 79), seemingly to a catchy tune, that ends in another frame in a dramatic gesture to the camera. With her right hand tightened into a fist, she confronts the camera, her left hand pointed at Smith (fig. 80). In these three images, Smith presented the nude in poses that loosely resemble mass cultural

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Figure 77. David Smith, Untitled (Nude), Bolton Landing, NY, c. 1963–​64. Gelatin silver print, 915⁄16 × 8 in. (25.2 × 20.3 cm). The Estate of David Smith, New York. Figures 78, 79, and 80. David Smith, Untitled (Nude with Menand V [1963]), Bolton Landing, NY, c. 1963–​64. Gelatin silver print, 915⁄16 × 8 in. (25.2 × 20.3 cm). The Estate of David Smith, New York.

projections of femininity. The body coheres in an eloquent dancer’s pose, stationing the arms in a hardened display; evokes the movements of a sexually free, “independent” woman who now performs an airy dance; and acts out an angry pose, full of melodrama. Smith achieves these references by putting the female body on display: the bench is a stage and the blurry tree branches and pale sky serve as a backdrop. Like the subjects in Smith’s one-on-one photographs of his sculptures, the body seems detached from its surroundings, heightening its projection as a flattened image, without the trappings of drapery or props. In these exterior shots, Smith manages the workings of desire by routing the body through cultural projections of femininity—​from frame to frame, the nude appears as threatening, at one with nature, self-possessed, carefree, or confrontational. The body takes up and inhabits these identities like so many pieces of clothing—​Smith depicts associations of femininity as much as he does the model herself. In his photographs, Smith makes visible the shifting terrain of the vulgar using the female body as a site of cultural signification. Writing about de Kooning’s Woman series in the context of abstract expressionism, T. J. Clark explores how it enacts a politics of the vulgar by projecting a deep-seated class longing.19 Transferred to a feminine Other, the vulgar was a sign of the failed aspirations to class power. Clark cites a phrase by John Ruskin—​“The black battle-stain on a soldier’s face is not vulgar, but the dirty face of a housemaid is”—​to emphasize that the heroic figure of the soldier had long since been replaced by another: that of the housemaid, who in modernism stands in for the petty bourgeoisie, representative of a class that aspires to power and heroic individuality at a moment when those qualities have been superseded.20 The comparison of soldier to housemaid relies on—​and makes visible—​stereotypes of gender: the housemaid’s face is vulgar because society has already assigned to her a truth that does not ennoble.21 De Kooning’s Woman series throws into high relief this mixing of class and gender by referencing an advertisement for Camel cigarettes. Appropriating the model’s smile for his densely fractured female body, de Kooning taps into the vulgar as a mechanism of social critique by appending it to an Other. Discussing Clark’s formulation of the vulgar—​as well as Lucy Lippard’s 1965 observation of the vulgarity in de Kooning’s surfaces—​Cornelia Butler notes that the Woman series accessed broader societal fears about the “newly empowered, if not fully liberated, American woman” in the postwar era.22 A central catalyst for this shift was Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, translated into English in 1953, which threatened to upset gender norms by ushering in second-wave feminism. As images that appropriate the shifting social identities of gender in the 1950s, the Woman paintings exhibit, like their advertising counterparts, “complicated hybridized beings,” which is to say that they display qualities of feminine self-possession even as they make manifest a broader cultural aggression toward those newly empowered roles. Smith’s photographs similarly target a shifting postwar world, making the female body an Other in response to cultural anxieties about gender and class. They present the

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Figure 81. David Smith, Untitled (Nude with Menand V [1963]), Bolton Landing, NY, c. 1963–​64. Gelatin silver print, 915⁄16 × 8 in. (25.2 × 20.3 cm). The Estate of David Smith, New York.

body as a looming, menacing form; temper it by harmonizing femininity and nature; or show it to take up clichés of dance. In the moments between—​when the body is captured in positions of precarious imbalance—​his photographs offer a glimpse of that cultural machinery’s inner workings. In one photograph in the series, for instance, Smith kept the camera low to the ground and tilted it up (fig. 81). The low vantage point monumentalizes the body, cropping it at the ankles and head, isolating the torso as seen from the rear. With no stable ground to anchor the form, the model’s stance makes her seem on the verge of collapse. The body, neither graceful nor iconic now, is mere weight and mass—​a contingent thing. That instability is amplified by natural lighting, which emphasizes the uneven dimples and textures of the skin. In this photograph, which suggests a body outside of cultural projections of gender, Smith underscores a corporeal materiality through an intimately close point of view. Smith also photographed the nude indoors as a way to map constructions of gender. Once again he structured the body within a narrow frame. Although he focuses on the familiar space of the home, setting for the housewife, Smith casts the model as a domestic muse. These images present an up-close, casual, and intimate encounter with a body that appears relaxed and self-contained. In one shot of the model eating while seated in a chair (fig. 82), Smith positioned his camera close to the body and cropped her head from view, focusing on the torso and thighs to emphasize the body’s materiality. Now Smith presents the nude not as an intimidating phantasm who looms above the space of the beholder but rather as an individualized, everyday body who seems at home in

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Figure 82. David Smith, Untitled (Nude), Bolton Landing, NY, c. 1963–​64. Gelatin silver print, 8 × 10 in. (20.3 × 25.4 cm). The Estate of David Smith, New York.

her surroundings. She is also open to the camera’s eroticizing gaze. The narrow framing suggests that the scene of intimacy continues beyond the photograph’s four edges. This casual, domestic shot resembles the postwar photographs of Harry Callahan and Lee Friedlander, who were similarly staging a materialized encounter with the female body at a moment that the category of the nude was undergoing revision. Callahan’s portraits of his wife, Eleanor, in the 1950s, for instance, present the nude in close encounters in domestic interiors. In one sequence, she lies on a rumpled bed in a relaxed pose.23 Clothing, dolls, and a radiator suggest that the body should be viewed in the context of everyday life. This evocative domesticity—​t his framed intimacy—​is also at work in photographs Friedlander took in the 1960s and 1970s. A 1978 photograph depicts a nude in a chair (fig. 83); one bent knee juts out to the viewer, and her body telescopes back, a formal play that is also evoked by the nude’s withdrawn and absorptive pose. Unlike Smith’s nude, which suggests a more open encounter, Friedlander stages a body that is self-contained and remote, warding off the beholder. The photograph takes to an extreme the interiority of Smith’s nude: the self-possession and nonchalance of Friedlander’s seated nude read as psychically distant.

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Figure 83. Lee Friedlander, Nude, Phoenix, 1978. Gelatin silver print, 12 × 715⁄16 in. Cleveland Museum of Art. © Lee Friedlander, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco. Figure 84. David Smith, Untitled (Nude), Bolton Landing, NY, c. 1963–​64. Gelatin silver print, 8 × 915⁄16 in. (20.3 × 25.2 cm). The Estate of David Smith, New York.

Figure 85. Edward Weston, Nude, 1925. Gelatin silver print, 17.9 × 21.7 cm. Edward Weston Archive, Center for Creative Photography, Tucson. © 2013 Center for Creative Photography, Arizona Board of Regents/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Smith’s photographs of domestic nudes frame an encounter with the body’s physicality. In other photographs taken indoors, the artist sought a formalized image that pushed to an extreme the association of body and object. In one photograph, the model lies on a couch with one leg stretched in the air (fig. 84). A soft light falls across the body to emphasize its curves and bulges, its protrusions and indentations. Here, Smith composes the body into a series of fleshy shapes and fragmented part objects. He defamiliarizes it through a formalist rhetoric of light and shadow, framing and cropping. The body is presented as a composite of material shapes. Compare Smith’s softly lit reclining nude with one of Edward Weston’s 1920s formalist studies (fig. 85). Weston framed a torso in a visual field that is similar to Smith’s. Cropped and bathed in a soft light, the torso is construed as a part object detached from the rest of the body. Yet Weston’s photograph goes further than Smith’s to transform the body into an object of desire. Weston presents the nude as a highly sensuous surface made into an image of a phallus.24 Smith’s photograph parcels the body into shapes, but these shapes do not make the nude a polished object of consumption. Compared to Weston’s phantasmic body, Smith’s model looks weighed down and material. The body is uneven and bulky, failing to adhere fully to the formalist rhetoric of the nude. Smith’s photographs fragment the body by putting it on display. However, they resist a model of representation that would make the body an object to be possessed, as do the dominant images of surrealism. Man Ray’s Anatomies of 1929, for instance, structures a fragment of the body as a polished sign (fig. 86). Cropping the figure at the neck, Man Ray abstracted the jaw and neckline; using soft lighting, he heightened the curves of the neck to present it as a part object of desire. Using the camera’s frame, Man Ray delivers

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Figure 86. Man Ray, Anatomies, 1929. Gelatin silver print, 8⅞ × 6¾ in. Museum of Modern Art, New York. © 2013 Man Ray Trust/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY/ADAGP, Paris.

the body as a smooth, erotic sign, a silhouetted phallus. In the photograph, the neck is envisioned as an image for consumption. Smith’s indoor studies of nudes, by contrast, manage the body as a set of gravity-bound volumes and shapes that are asymmetrical, uneven, and individualized. Even though his photographs participate in the workings of heterosexual desire by putting a body on display, they stall, even frustrate, that desire by shedding light on the material contingency of the body. In her book Terminal Iron Works, Krauss explored Smith’s relationship to surrealism by arguing that his sculptures reject a viewer’s possessive drives. Although Smith had pursued a surrealist imagery of sexual violence and possession in the 1930s and 1940s, by the mid-1940s he had made a “critical assessment” of surrealism and set about “mustering [his] entire sculptural power against possession.”25 For Krauss, Smith’s sculptures reject possession by refusing to give viewers an illusion of the sculptures’ core or spine—​t hat is, their totality. Smith engineers the opacity of the works—​t heir repulsion of a totalizing, complete, and therefore possessive, knowledge—​by fracturing their surfaces. She notes that his sculptures promote a visual encounter of giveand-take. They offer a reciprocal freedom that is “unequivocably tied to the recognition of the autonomy and freedom of others. Because it is fundamentally tied to this deep sense of reciprocity, freedom itself depends on admitting that the willful realization of one’s desires is an illusion of freedom, not, as surrealism preached, the means to achieve it. This was, then, the deepest level on which the fundamental opposition between the graspable, incorporable object of Surrealism and the formally distanced object created by Smith rested.”26 Smith’s sculptures use formal and visual means to

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thwart viewers’ expectations of intellectual or psychological mastery. They mobilize desire but block it, showing it to be an illusion of freedom. By forcing viewers to recognize the object as separate from themselves, Krauss argues, Smith’s sculptures contain a deep reciprocity. Smith’s nude photographs also test definitions of his work as a recognition of autonomy. In the photograph of the seated nude indoors, Smith makes the body available in a way that risks undermining her self-sufficiency (see fig. 82). Viewers are invited to intrude—​almost conspiratorially—​on a private space, as the model sits unself-consciously in a chair eating. Here the nude is offered up for intimate inspection, thanks to the higher vantage point that allows the viewer to survey her body, and the frame, which dislocates the body from its surroundings. But other photographs also resist the camera’s control. They put the body on display—​on a table or a bench—​but route the body through a series of social codes, as in the exterior shots on the terrace (see figs. 69–​74), where the nude inhabits conventions of heterosexual desire. Viewers are asked to read the nude in these images as a set of insubstantial projections as the body puts on and discards clichéd poses. Or the photographs construe the body as mere material, a set of uneven, dimpled shapes that fail to cohere as a polished sign of desire (see fig. 81). The nude is seen as a set of material shapes that are subtly askew. These different modes present a body moving through the terrain of the vulgar, through aesthetic codes of grace, stereotypes of femininity, and a presentation of the body’s materiality. In Smith’s photographs, the means of visualization—​the workings of photography’s colonizing powers—​are put on view. In a pair of images that Smith took inside the Bennington Pottery Works after it had closed for the day, the artist used photography to explore the terrain of the vulgar in a way that we have not seen before. Once again, the photographs ask what it would look like to make the body a literal object of desire (figs. 87 and 88). The model lies flat on a table that was meant for rolling ceramic tiles but which is here covered over in white butcher paper for the display of plates and body.27 The headless body seems at odds with the ceramic objects that flank it. In the first photograph, the model’s arms rest on the table—​she is mere material awaiting the artist’s molding. In the second, the body rises up, anchored in an oddly configured pose with arms outstretched and head thrust back. Smith captures the body as it rises up and stalls, the model’s straightened limbs support her awkwardly. The camera has moved closer to the body for this shot, a tactic that encourages a formal juxtaposition of the body and the plate. The camera’s vantage point could be read as sexually provocative, aimed just above the legs at the crotch, as if the camera were meant to stage her sexual submission. But the vantage point and display have the effect of controlling the body another way—​it is split into a series of incongruous parts, cut into fragments. Flesh lying on white butcher paper becomes a composite of geometric shapes: cylinders for thighs, triangle for hair, cones for breasts, elliptical arcs for the torso. Smith uses light to emphasize these individual parts. Rather than presenting the body as a

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seamless totality, he organizes its volumetric materiality, its curves and contours. The photographs structure an analogy between a body divided into parts and the shapes of plates at the edges of the frame: both are meant to be read as the fragments of spatial forms. The body’s corporeality is envisioned as geometric; its sexual availability is managed in its disassemblage, in its dispersal as a set of material shapes that do not amount to a whole.

GIRL SCULP TURES

By suggesting a correlation between a body and objects—​ceramic plates as well as works in the Menand series—​Smith’s photographs return to the role of anthropomorphism in his work and the relationships between figuration and abstraction in modern sculpture. Smith’s photographs echo Brancusi’s shots of Florence Meyer Homolka brushing her hair and dancing in his studio in 1932 or 1933 (fig. 89). In these film stills, the artist structured analogies between the shapes of a body cloaked in a black swimsuit and his sculpture.28 In one frame, Homolka’s stretched-out arms and curving torso mimic the parts of Endless Column, pictured at her right. According to an anecdote Brancusi repeated frequently, he asked Homolka to pose in a movement that she had performed for him before, when she submerged herself in water at the seashore (or in a lake or river) and emerged from the water transformed, suddenly healed from her grief.29 The sculptor created The Miracle (Seal I) as a metaphor for her cathartic transformation. Here the body becomes a sculpture; in his photograph, Brancusi construes the body as a unified shape or whole, as having become a sculpture. Like Brancusi’s shots in the studio, Smith’s nudes explore questions central to sculptural viewing. Photographing a model outside his house, Smith connected the body and works from his Menand series, a group of sculptures that contain bodily qualities, as Clement Greenberg noted, describing Menand III (plates 43 and 44). The sculpture was both architectural and corporeal, he noted: “The frontal view brings out its anthropomorphic aspect; this is diminished when the sculpture is seen from either side; then two relatively massive flanking buttresses come into view, to confer an effect on the whole that is more architectural than figurative. The three-dimensionality has an emphasis here that is not often seen in Smith’s art.”30

Figure 87. David Smith, Untitled (Nude), Bennington Pottery Works, c. 1963–​64. Gelatin silver print, 8 × 915⁄16 in. (20.3 × 25.2 cm). The Estate of David Smith, New York. Figure 88. David Smith, Untitled (Nude), Bennington Pottery Works, c. 1963–​64. Gelatin silver print, 8 × 10 in. (20.3 × 25.4 cm). The Estate of David Smith, New York.

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Figure 89. Constantin Brancusi, Florence Meyer Homolka Posing in the Artist’s Studio, c. 1932–​33. Gelatin silver print, 29.8 × 39.8 cm. Centre Pompidou, Paris (MNAM-CCI [PH 975 A]). © 2013 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.

Describing the different associations elicited by Menand III’s sides, Greenberg observes a sculpture that is both figural and structural, a dichotomy that the photographs of nudes also repeat. In one frame, the sculptor presents the model in midturn, as if she were made up of awkwardly joined shapes, echoing the volumetric triangles and rectangles of Menand V (see fig. 71). Not a figure now but a set of sculptural shapes, the body seems composed of blocky, incongruous parts, each angled in different directions. Another frame, however, presents a different view of the form (see fig. 73). Now the model echoes the silhouette of Menand II. The contours of the nude cut a shape against the sky, miming the round form of the sculpture in the distance. These comparisons, these animations of body as sculpture, hinge on Smith’s presentation of movements in a sequence of isolated units. What did it mean for Smith to stage a correspondence between a female body and a sculpture? Do his photographs ask us to read his sculptures as gendered female, a reading Smith himself seemed to suggest in November 1964, in an interview by Frank O’Hara filmed for broadcast on WNET-TV in New York? The interview, titled “Sculpting Master of Bolton Landing,” also presented footage of the sculptor’s installation of his

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work in the fields outside his studio in upstate New York, which serves as the basis for one of O’Hara’s questions: O ’HARA: . . . But do you feel like they’re people around your house? Are they aesthetic things? What are they? I mean, you must feel that they’re all these strange objects surrounding your whole studio and on the lawn. SMITH: Well, they’re all girls, Frank. O ’HARA:  . . . they’re all girls? SMITH: Yeah, they’re all female sculptures. . . . O ’HARA: [Laughs] Oh, they are . . . SMITH:  . . . I’m sure. O ’HARA:  . . . very angular . . . SMITH: I don’t make boy sculptures. [Laughter] But they become kind of personages. And sometimes they point out to me that I should have been better or bigger. And, mostly, they tell me that I should have done that ten years before—​or twenty years before.31

Read at face value, these statements seem to assign a female gender to Smith’s sculpture. Indeed, this is how Krauss took these claims when she cited the interview in her discussion of gender in his work.32 Yet in the context of the taped interview, these statements are directed at O’Hara as jokes meant to provoke. Smith’s claim that his works are female—​“I don’t make boy sculptures,” he said, laughing—​seems meant to proclaim his heterosexuality to the homosexual critic. Later on, he asserts his sexuality again as O’Hara concludes the interview. The sculptor provocatively declares that he has had fun on his visit to New York: “I’ve heard some nice music, and seen dancing girls, and things like that, you know.”33 These statements supply the context for the artist’s claims. To take Smith at his word, to read his sculptures as female, would entail dismissing the absurdity embedded in his claims, launched rhetorically as assertions of the artist’s straight-male bravado. In the interview, the declaration about girl sculptures is a joke, one that concludes with a more serious answer that is bracketed off from the humorous to-and-fro: Smith ultimately says that his works are “personages,” neither male nor female, but objects with a singular presence. All these nuances are missed in Krauss’s reading of gender in Smith’s sculpture. Identifying his sculptures as female, she focuses on their totemic qualities: In totem-worshipping societies the totem is the most tabooed object because, in Freud’s view, it stood for the things most desired by the male members of the clan. A clansman’s relation to the totem is ambivalent, for the totem is not just the external object of a clan’s elaborate set of prohibitions against touching, killing, or eating; the totem is internalized in that its name refers to the clansmen as well. For the Australian tribesman the kanga-

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roo is both an external object—​t he taboo animal—​and his identity as a member of the clan. He is a Kangaroo; and this identification, which makes outbreeding obligatory, fixes the distance between him and the females of the same name.34

Drawing from Sigmund Freud’s Totem and Taboo, Krauss notes that the totem is both desired and barred. It is an object of identification, fixing the distance between male and female, both defining and forbidding incestuous relationships. She argues that this psychic structure of identity is built into Smith’s sculptures’ engagement with viewers. In The Hero (1951–​52; see plate 2), for instance, Krauss reads the sculpture’s “two protrusions from the central shaft . . . as incipient breasts.”35 The sculpture’s height; its upright, linear frame; and its lozenge-shaped head define the work as a figure. Its breasts identify it as female. Viewing The Hero, for Krauss, means understanding the object as both like and unlike the spectator, who is presumed to be male. She concludes that many of Smith’s sculptures were female, which allowed them to refuse a viewer’s identification: “Not only is the Hero a female figure, but the Tanktotems—​t he series whose title most openly proclaims Smith’s preoccupations with the notion of totemism—​also assert their identity as females. In those sculptures Smith constantly uses the circular, convex form of the boiler heads that give the series its name to locate the pelvic region of the figures. Smith was later to comment that he never made ‘boy sculptures.’ ”36 Krauss’s identification of the sculpture’s femininity relies on comments Smith made provocatively, in jest. She misses the bottom line, however, which is that the artist finally settled on the ambiguous term personage. The Hero gains its power by confusing gender identity, not by resolving into a concrete vision of feminine identity. An upright, “heroic” stance and a linear torso are marked by tiny protrusions of breasts, and the relationship of male to female is ambiguous. As Potts has argued, Smith’s chosen term, personage, suspends conclusions about gender, even as it disrupts figuration itself: “With a figure-like sculpture, . . . though one might immediately recognize in it the image of a personage standing there or engaged in an action, one is distanced enough from it to be blocked from appropriating it as a projection of oneself. This is its abstraction. It does not embody or reify a living human figure. It is not even quite a figure, often seeming more like a cipher or a motif seen from afar. Yet at times it appears close and oddly familiar.”37 Just as Smith’s sculptures postpone succinct identifications of figuration—​to insist instead on a vague notion of the figure as abstract cipher—​so, too, is gender rarely identified in his objects. Consider sculptures like Personage Seeking Australia (1952) or Construction with Forged Neck (1955; see fig. 66). Uprightness and verticality are specified in these works, but it is impossible to locate human designations of gender as defining features. Steel is made to curve in some places, suggesting a female body; in others, it seems bulky, or resembles a phallic protrusion. Like the found objects and tools that Smith incorporated into his sculptures, gender, too, is obscured in his sculpture and cannot be pinned to a stable identification.

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Where sex is specified, in works such as Voltri-Bolton V (1962), which contains two outsized round forms as breasts, sculpture becomes almost a caricature of gender. Photographed on the same terrace as the nudes, the sculpture takes on a busty appearance. It parodies a body in its buxom roundels and circular rear. Even in this work, Smith distances viewers from reading in too much. Smith’s sculptures suggest the impersonal element inherent in the term personage, a term that he used in the interview with O’Hara to suggest his works’ imposing, remote qualities. “They become kind of personages,” the sculptor said, “And sometimes they point out to me that I should have been better or bigger. And, mostly, they tell me that I should have done that ten years before—​or twenty years before.”38 Smith imagines his sculptures as powerful, selfsufficient presences. Both figures and objects, both male and female, Smith’s sculptures suggest the stereotypes of gender—​a phallic protrusion, buxom breasts—​w ithout cohering into a stable identity. In fact, it is by stirring up and canceling out gender identifications that the artist keeps his works suspended between abstraction and figuration. Several of Smith’s nude photographs propose a similar definition of the body as an individual thing by unsettling stereotypes of femininity. In images of the model outdoors turning on a plinth, or in interior shots of a model seated in a chair, the sculptor stages an encounter with the nude that moves in and out of cultural conventions of gender. Outdoors, he manages the body’s movements from awkwardness to a graceful silhouette, from clichés of naturalized bodies to a melodramatic pose. In these images, Smith stages a dialogue between body and sculpture that goes beyond a formal comparison. Here the body enacts the sculpture, to activate a mode of viewing. The Cubis, for instance, another series that Smith was working on in the early 1960s, elicit a similarly destabilizing encounter between material solidity and luminous intangibility, poles that Potts has located in his work as a whole: “The eloquence of [Smith’s] work resides rather in some awkward conflation of precariousness and power. His strangely compelling constructions, with their ludicrous clumsiness and odd hints of violence as well as their intermittent suggestions of calm and vivid refinement, seem strongly poised and yet also on the verge of disarticulation and collapse.”39 In Potts’s analysis, Smith’s sculpture oscillates between a projective, modernist mode of viewing, in which form is dematerialized and flat, and a literal, protominimalist mode of viewing that highlights the sculpture’s material density. On the one hand, the sculptures are flat, linear forms projected against the sky; on the other, they are human-scale, heavy, three-dimensional things. Seeing Smith’s sculptures elicits tensions between “precariousness and power,” corporeality and flatness, monstrosity and grace—​tensions that, as Potts argues, carry with them a mode of aesthetic resistance. As he writes, feminine gracefulness would, for Smith, have to be “shot through with monstrousness, awkwardness, or ‘vulgarity,’ ” aspects that will, in turn, launch their own forms of beauty.40 In Smith’s series of nudes photographed outside, these sculptural dialectics of vulgarity are pursued photographically.

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S C U L P T U R E A S B O DY

In October 1964, the Marlborough-Gerson Gallery launched an exhibition that presented an assortment of Smith’s recent works; it would be his last. Ten of his largescale Cubi sculptures were on view alongside three painted Zigs from 1961. Smaller sculptures were also on display: there were several Bronze Planes, as well as the full range of the Menand series, eight works that Smith made from thick blocks of steel and treated with acid to create a milky white surface. The exhibition introduced his new emphasis on corporeal volume in sculpture. Working in a monumental scale, the artist constructed bulky objects that were spatially dense. His new vocabulary included hollow boxes, interleaving concave and convex parts, and solid geometric shapes. Smith’s paintings, which were also exhibited, presented teeming outsized nudes that seemed to extend beyond the frame.41 The canvases staged a monumental encounter with bodily form on the same massive scale as the Cubis. Although the nude photographs were not exhibited, they were an unspoken yet integral part of Smith’s turn to corporeality across media and his turn to an involvement with cubic space.42 By tracking a body as it moves from being a contingent, material thing to being a projective image or cliché, the photographs set out an aesthetic of material volume. In the late 1950s, Smith began to experiment more frequently with volumetric forms and hollow shapes—​in the Zigs and other works. This new lexicon moved away from the open linear structures that he made earlier in the decade. For evidence of that new sculptural vocabulary and what it entailed, consider Cubi VII (1963), included in the Marlborough-Gerson show (fig. 90). Completed in March 1963, it was one of twentyeight works in the series, which the artist began in 1961, and it had the series’ signature parts: hollow boxes of stainless steel arranged in an upright geometric form. Smith had used hollow forms before to make sculptures: Suspended Cube (1938), 5 Units Equal (1956), and Untitled (1961) are three examples of sculptures that he composed from geometrical shapes. In the Cubi sculptures, however, as we have seen, he embraced volumetric sculpture on a large scale, making upright quasi-figural forms or arrangements of shapes that spread out in space.43 In the Cubis, he also used an electric disk grinder to burnish the surfaces in a network of shimmering, irregular lines that shift and change as a viewer walks around the sculpture. In a sketch of Cubi III (see fig. 14), Smith described his ambitions for these objects as entailing a paradox: they were “polished—​like I feel if I make square clouds.” 4 4 In Cubi VII, small square boxes are appended to a central square shape in a way that registers as structurally imbalanced, as if the weight of the far cube will be enough to pull the sculpture to the ground. The surface of the work seems precarious, as well, shifting and changing as a viewer circles it. The sculpture sets up a dialectic between solidity and immateriality, between the durable material of steel and its luminous surface. Writing about Cubi VII in a review of the Marlborough-Gerson exhibition, Donald Judd found much to praise, describing how its “volumes, hollow spaces, are used as

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Figure 90. David Smith, Photograph of Cubi VII (1963), with Study in Arcs (1959; Partial View, Far Left), Bolton Landing, NY, c. 1963. Gelatin silver print, 10 × 8 in. (25.4 × 20.3 cm). The Estate of David Smith, New York.

planes and lines.” 45 He found in them a sea change in Smith’s sculpture: unlike the sculptor’s “figurative and semiabstract sculpture,” the Cubis were closer to the “newer unsculptural three-dimensional work and [are] especially related to the best painting, that of Newman, Rothko and Noland. The sculptures have the wholeness that these paintings have and simple and undescriptive parts, great scale, and a format that is not imagistic.” 4 6 Pushing to the side the Cubis’ figural qualities, Judd found compelling their use of simple geometric shapes to create balanced wholes on an ambitious scale, qualities that would come to define the primary structure. In 1969, Sheldon Nodelman repeated this refrain, noting how Smith’s new engagement with space entailed an abandonment of pictorial ideas for “an absolute literalness and directness of physical presence in space which nevertheless asserts the ultimate ambiguity and immateriality of optical perception.” 47 But if Smith’s new objects emphasized physical volume, their persistent link to modernist qualities of opticality was not in doubt. As Nodelman observed, the Cubis’ literalness—​their weighted-down presence—​was balanced by their surfaces, which complicate the predictable shape of the cube with the intangible effects of burnishing (see plates 39 and 40). In the months following the 1964 exhibition, Smith would begin to push these vocabularies to an extreme by creating sculptures that jettisoned the base. Cubi XXIII (1964) is composed of two upside-down V shapes and a column placed directly on the ground—​a work that is in dialogue with Anthony Caro’s 1960s sculptures, which emphasize the horizontal ground plane.48 Cubi XXIV (1964) organizes a gate from geometric volumes—​squares, spheres, and rectangles—​in a sculpture that is architectural and monumental. Smith would construct three additional Cubis in 1965 that explored these idioms by interacting with the ground as well as with an imaginary wall. In all these works, Smith opens a dialogue with the space of the beholder, leaving the pedestal far behind. Like Smith’s grouping of his Tanktotems on the dock in 1953, the Cubis relate spatially to their setting.49 Smith’s late sculptures pursue some of the terms of minimalism by examining the situation of sculpture and by using hollow cubes. His sculptures engage bodily corporeality and space in new ways. Yet they still hold on to the terms of a modernist, pictorial sculpture by emphasizing surface. The Cubis’ changing surfaces set up a destabilizing encounter with space in a way that counteracts the predictable shapes of the cube, a shape whose symmetry and balance make it an a priori form. Krauss’s definition of sculptural perception argues that the Cubis resist a viewer’s possession: As in the case of the earlier sculpture, Smith raises again the question of possession, for both the added sensuousness of the burnished material and the order and rationality of the shapes themselves, pointing as they do to the idea of an underlying geometric logic, tantalizingly hold out the promise of a comprehensible form. But here, as before, Smith interposes between the sculptural object and the viewer a sense of the work’s elusiveness. Never so blatant as here, Smith’s structural arbitrariness deprives the Cubis of the logic of

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weight and support, of skeletal cohesiveness or a coherent center of gravity, of the sense of completeness that adheres to the depiction of familiar things.50

In these works, Smith highlights the physical experience of looking, inciting the viewer to engage with the ineffable, arbitrary surfaces. Photographing these sculptures, Smith emphasized their luminous contingency by depicting them in bright sunlight. Some erupt into vibrant, washed-out planes, reflections of light. In Smith’s shot of Cubi VII the sculpture’s burnished surface shines vibrantly and unpredictably: the object seems both two- and three-dimensional—​both an immaterial, glowing flat surface and a weighted form (see fig. 90). Smith’s photograph arrests these effects of viewing in an image. The nude photographs, situated alongside these sculptural productions of 1963 and 1964, tell a story about Smith’s engagement with space in the 1960s. Not solely instruments of vision or compositional tools—​t hough surely they were these, too, as images vital to a larger series of paintings—​t he photographs raise broader questions about the intersections between the corporeal body and sculptural space. In his photographs, Smith charts a body in motion while also emphasizing the plane of the image. By routing the nude into and out of conventions of gender, Smith makes visible the optics of desire—​t he mechanisms of spectacularization that go hand in hand with nude photography. Viewers are invited into the image but are also distanced, forcing a recognition of its constructed surface. Positioning the nude outdoors, Smith stages an investigation of surface projections of femininity—​t he nude moves through cultural fantasies of desire. It is both body and image, both a material thing that inhabits space and a projection, a flattened figure. In the shots taken of a model in a chair or lying on a table, the artist presents an intimate encounter with the body as spatial and material: the nude is envisioned as a series of fragmentary shapes and parts, like a sculpture. Using unexpected cropping techniques, framing devices, and vantage points, the sculptor manages an erotics of spatial looking. This erotics is tied to the artist’s use of the camera as a mechanism of distance and detachment, a tool to organize and frame a female body in space. When Frank O’Hara visited the sculptor’s Adirondack studio in 1961, he saw, among other works on view, the monumental Zigs, composed of convex and concave parts. He summed up his visit with a phrase that can be applied to the artist’s 1960s works across media: “The best of the current sculptures didn’t make me feel I wanted to have one, they made me feel I wanted to be one.”51 Having a sculpture versus being one: the difference is between a sculpture as decorative object, which can be possessed, and a sculpture as individual thing—​something O’Hara identifies as separate from himself and capable of soliciting his empathetic desires. In Smith’s nudes, that difference between having and being is put on view.

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CONCLUSION Framed and Unframed Space

In 1936, Walter Benjamin outlined the risks of mechanical reproduction for art in the twentieth century. “To an ever-increasing degree,” he wrote, “the work reproduced becomes the reproduction of a work designed for reproducibility.”1 Sculpture was the medium most at risk in this wholesale assimilation to the photograph: “In the age of the assembled artwork, the decline of sculpture is inevitable.”2 This claim, on which Benjamin does not elaborate, predicts sculpture’s demise owing to the pervasiveness of photography as a form of mediation and display. Sculpture would have to adapt to the miniaturized, portable schemes of reproductions, refiguring itself to the photographic image. Its connections to time and space, its location in the here and now, would be redesigned for two dimensions. Benjamin indicated a melancholic future for objects in the twentieth century, striking a desolate tone. While this book does not go so far as to sound a death knell for sculpture—​sculpture remains an abiding, even urgent, medium in Smith’s project—​it has suggested that the medium of photography transformed Smith’s conception of what an object was and how it would be encountered. The photographic reproduction shaped his definition of sculpture; the two media went hand in hand in his work. For Smith, a photograph could be many different things—​different materials and sizes—​so long as it structured a pictorial encounter with sculpture, suspending and reinventing its spatial materiality in an image. His documentary photographs of his sculpture were diverse, even contradictory: the artist used his camera to show sculpture to be both in and radically displaced from its environment; to flatten sculpture into a

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silhouette or contour; to organize and situate the contingent and ineffable effects of color; and to position sculpture alongside a body, eliciting comparisons between the volumes of flesh and steel. This range of images suggests that, for Smith, there was no single photograph that could stand in for his sculpture. The different sites and frameworks in which sculpture appeared were part of the point. By photographing and rephotographing his objects, Smith could show them to be contingent things, subject to the conditional factors of display—​such as lighting, backdrop, and setting—​and to the shifting meanings associated with different points of view and croppings. Through this heterogeneity, Smith could register the “structural vacancy” of modern sculpture, to return to Stephen Melville and Margaret Iversen’s term. By insisting that there was no one stable image or vantage point, he could refuse the idea of a center or totality. Like his sculptures themselves, the photographs, in Melville and Iversen’s words, “make our individuality and separateness a distinct feature of an experience that we nonetheless take as essentially shared, personal but not private.”3 Smith’s photographs, that is to say, make individualized contingency a part of sculpture’s public identity and display. They also resist expectations for a monumental public sculpture by using an alternative channel—​photographic reproduction—​to present and destabilize the sculptural object. Increasingly, as the sculptor turned down commissions in the 1950s and reversed his earlier ambition to collaborate with architects, he relied on photography to replace the lost public role of sculpture. The photograph—​and not the public square, niche, plinth, or other supporting structure—​was his sculpture’s point of entry into the public sphere. Rather than presenting a monolithic image, however, he fractured the photograph’s commemorative powers, its fixity. His photographs unsettle encounters with objects by suspending, remonumentalizing, or enlivening sculpture, and by multiplying the situations, vantage points, and settings in which they appeared. If sculpture was to be made public in an image, it would be in a way that recognized the experience of fragmentation that his sculptures also produced. Smith’s photographs—​from his first images of shells to his last photographs of nudes and the Cubi and Menand sculptures, which announced a new engagement with volume—​are integral to our understanding of his sculpture. The camera was tied to his “adventure viewed,” or how the artist structured an encounter with objects that moved between embodied and formally distant vantage points. We cannot read Smith’s sculpture without attending to the latter, to his abstract photographic displays, which reimagine sculpture’s relationships to body, space, picture, and site. This reorientation has important ramifications for how scholars might reappraise Smith’s sculpture. Consider, for instance, Smith’s photograph of Hudson River Landscape (1951), which was published frequently in the artist’s lifetime and has remained in the public imaginary (fig. 91). The placement of the sculpture in the foreground, from edge to edge of the frame, upends its connections to the ground. In the photograph, Smith invites viewers to compare this steel image of an abstract landscape—​a sculpture he made from

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Figure 91. David Smith, Photograph of Hudson River Landscape (1951), Bolton Landing, NY, c. 1951. Gelatin silver print, 8 × 915⁄16 in. (20.3 × 25.2 cm). The Estate of David Smith, New York.

amalgamated images composed while he was on a moving train—​to the out-of-focus landscape in the distance. Hudson River Landscape is positioned above the softened landscape of fields, woods, and hills, proposing that sculpture be seen in a resonant human-scaled space. But the work is also abstracted from its pastoral setting. Using a low vantage point and abrupt cropping, Smith’s photograph detaches the sculpture from its surroundings, emphasizing that its fabricated planes and lines are both related to and separate from the environment. The image conveys a relationship to the landscape different from that of Henry Moore’s photographs, which rescaled sculpture to harmonize with its surroundings, conjuring sculpture as a primordial or eternal form. For Smith, the relationship between sculpture and landscape was one of push and pull. The dichotomy between abstraction and familiar setting would unmoor his objects, presenting them as open or elusive. Hudson River Landscape is both situated in the human landscape and distanced from it. This photograph dramatizes and demarcates the autonomy of an object, heightening its elusiveness. Smith used a pictorial mode to enliven an encounter with a sculpture that might be experienced in the round as materially complex or spatially awkward. Seen photographically, however,

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Figure 92. David Smith, Photograph of (Left to Right) Personage of August (1956), Sentinel I (1956), Running Daughter (1956–​60; Unfinished State), Tanktotem VI (1957), Sentinel II (1957), Pilgrim (1957), and The Five Spring (1956), Bolton Landing, NY, c. 1957. Gelatin silver print, 713⁄16 × 9¾ in. The Estate of David Smith, New York.

the sculpture is flat and incomplete; viewers are asked to glimpse only a portion, a limited and transformed surface, of the whole. The photograph unsettles Hudson River Landscape. Photographing his objects in groups, Smith also suspended their material qualities. In 1958, the artist placed an unexpected group of sculptures, including works from the Sentinel series, on the gravel driveway outside his studio, where snow partially covered the ground (fig. 92). This photograph, which was published in Art News in 1957 with the caption “Steel sculptures gather outside the artist’s studio,” also destabilizes objects in the landscape.4 The sculptures form an inverted V shape that projects into deep space. Staged in this structured formation, and pictured from a low point of view, the works seem threatening, even menacing. Smith’s photograph amplifies the formal differences between the objects—​each one is individual, uniquely made—​and it also presents an odd conglomerate, or “gathering,” of related and quasi-animate forms. The sculptor pictures a curious alternative world for objects that both belong and do not belong,

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similar to Brancusi’s group shots in the studio. Here the driveway is the setting for a dramatization of sculpture’s separateness. As images that use the camera to reinvent or transform sculpture, Smith’s photographs call for a new understanding of mechanical reproduction’s role in modern sculpture’s identity and display. For Smith, Medardo Rosso, Constantin Brancusi, Henry Moore, and other sculptors, the camera was yet another tool to shape and define the modernist object. If sculpture in modernism retreated from expectations for monumentality, wholeness, solidity, and permanence, it also became bound up in the photograph, tied to another discursive site altogether. Using the instantaneous, flexible, and relatively cheap medium of photography, sculptors could imagine their objects in unexpected settings, construe relationships between them and other objects and bodies, and use light to animate or dissolve their surfaces. They could direct and redirect a visual encounter with sculpture, activating its contingency in an image. Photographs by Smith and other modern sculptors suggest how sculptural autonomy—​t hat defining trope of modernism—​was imagined photographically. Sculpture’s nomadic or homeless quality was built into the plane of the image, part of the sculptors’ envisioning and reenvisioning of their objects as dislocated from the here and now. In addition to reframing sculpture’s sitelessness, these photographs also unsettle expectations of medium specificity or purity. Suspended in a photograph; construed in relationship to a landscape, a studio, or a fabricated ruin; situated in dialogue with other objects: what we think of when we think of sculpture cannot be neatly defined as a pure form, in the way many modernists, Smith included, would have it. “A sculpture is a thing, an object. A painting is an illusion,” he wrote decisively in 1952, naming the spatial differences between media: “There is a difference in degree in actual space and the absolute difference in gravity.”5 Yet a viewer encountering Smith’s sculpture in his photographs—​or Brancusi’s in his, and so on—​must come to terms with the artist’s use of multiple media to define his work. Photography is a representational container for a range of ideas about sculpture; it is no less important for conceiving and encountering sculpture than the medium’s material properties, which Smith defined as space and gravity.6 These material qualities are shot through with other modes of encountering the sculptural object that are amorphous, imaginary, bodily, and time bound. In a photograph, a modern sculpture is both a physical thing and, more elusively, a set of situations and identities, settings and vantage points. It is conceived both as base and frame, as a three-dimensional object and its projection in an image. This duality became a central concern for artists working after the 1960s. Smith took up the camera to mediate his objects well ahead of sculptors like Robert Smithson, Bruce Nauman, and Dennis Oppenheim, and his photographs reshape narratives of sculpture in the second half of the twentieth century. Those artists, working a generation after Smith, frequently used the camera to represent and display their work, which resisted the frameworks of the gallery and museum as much as they resisted the traditional categories of sculpture. Sculpture by 1970 was increasingly conceived in

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relation to a particular site or place; fabricated on an architectural scale; placed in remote settings; created as a short-lived assemblage; construed as a participatory happening or performance using the body as a medium; fabricated as an artist’s book or multiple; or composed of detritus or everyday objects, sometimes in abundance. This inventory lists a new vocabulary for objects and spaces, which often left behind the very term sculpture.7 Yet this redefinition of the modernist object also relied on photography—​both as a tool to document ephemeral and remote installations and as a specter of that haunted sculpture’s very redefinition. Robert Morris observed this paradox in 1978, when he noted that these projects often defined sculpture as what exceeded the photograph, because they were too large in scale or too fleeting or long-lasting to be represented photographically. Morris’s essay “The Present Tense of Space” maps a tension between the photographic frame and the conception of sculpture as unframed space. Illustrating works by Mary Miss, Vito Acconci, Robert Irwin, Richard Serra, Alice Aycock, and Smithson, he describes how these artists defined 1960s and 1970s projects in opposition to the consumable photographic image: Space, however, has avoided its cyclopean evil eye. It could be said that the work under discussion not only resists photography as its representation, it takes a position absolutely opposed to the meaning of photography. There is probably no defense against the malevolent powers of the photograph to convert every visible aspect of the world into a static, consumable image. If the work under discussion is opposed to photography, it doesn’t escape it. How can I denounce photography and use it to illustrate this text with images I claim are irrelevant to the work proper? A further irony is that some of this kind of work is temporary and situational, made for a time and place and later dismantled. Its future existence in the culture will be strictly photographic.8

The situation Morris describes is inherently contradictory: the new work simultaneously resisted photography and deployed it to display work in the public realm. Smithson, for instance, an artist whose work Morris explores in his essay, claimed that photography was antithetical to his sculpture even as he used it to publicize his projects. “There is something abominable about cameras,” he wrote in 1971, “because they possess the power to invent many worlds. . . . What we believed to be most solid and tangible becomes in the process slides and prints.”9 Smithson was reacting to the photograph’s presentation of three-dimensional space in a fixed, two-dimensional, colonizing frame. His sentiments echoed those of modern sculptors who also viewed the photograph with skepticism. They, too, took up the camera to present their objects in public, making images that resisted photography’s claims to likeness and resemblance. What is different about Smithson’s take on photography is that his definition of sculpture has changed. In his 1969 Yucatan Mirror Displacement series, a work Morris illustrates in his essay, Smithson arranged mirrors in the Mexican landscape, photographed them, and then

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Figure 93. Robert Smithson, Yucatan Mirror Displacement (5), Yucatan, Mexico, 1969. Reproduced from an original 126-mm-format chromogenicdevelopment transparency. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. © Estate of Robert Smithson/ Licensed by VAGA, NY. Courtesy James Cohan Gallery, NY/Shanghai.

rearranged them at another site nearby (fig. 93). He had envisioned the project as transitory because it did not mark the landscape in any enduring way, an idea that Smithson carried into his use of photography as a seemingly straightforward documentation of the work.10 In the series of photographs, Smithson abandons the idea of sculpture as an object, instead pursuing one that envisions sculpture conceptually and photographically—​through its reproduction in Artforum alongside a text that described the materiality of the site.11 Yucatan Mirror Displacements exists only as a document, leaving behind the idea of sculpture as a permanent object. In recent years, artists have similarly used the camera to capture short-lived sculptural installations or events that endure exclusively in an image. In Turista maluco (1991), Gabriel Orozco placed oranges on the tables of an outdoor market after it had closed for the day (fig. 94). He arranged the oranges in the setting, photographed them, and then, we assume, took them away or left them to decompose. Speaking about works like these, Orozco has said, “The point is to make something present, which, inevitably, can only be seen through the photograph.”12 With this phrase, Orozco describes a sculpture that relies entirely on the photograph. Indeed, the difficulty of categorizing these works as sculptures or photographs or both underscores their hybridity. A deep skepticism runs through Orozco’s photographs—​they convey doubts about the object as a medium for organizing experience, which, the artist suggests, is always mediated photographically. As Benjamin H. D. Buchloh has observed, Orozco’s sculpture is

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Figure 94. Gabriel Orozco, Crazy Tourist (Turista maluco), 1991. Chromogenic color print, 16 × 20 in. (40.6 × 50.8 cm). Courtesy of Gabriel Orozco and Marian Goodman Gallery, NY.

suspended between two modes: his work is “a project of sculpture in production and in simultaneous negation.”13 In his photographs, Orozco destabilizes sculpture to the point of its destruction. Solidity, materiality, space: these matter only as qualities the camera can relay. For Orozco and other contemporary artists who use the medium of photography to invent an idea of sculpture, the promise of sculpture’s vitality has faded. What is left is its mediation. For Smith and other modernists, a different use of photography was in play. Even though Smith deployed his camera to animate his objects or to see them in unsettling ways, his photographs still hold on to the promise of sculpture. The sculptural object and its projection in an image were two sides of the same coin: both mattered for the object’s public display and identity.

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NOTES

INTRODUC TION

Epigraphs: Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” (3rd version, 1939), in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings Volume 4: 1938–​1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott et al. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), 255–​56; Susan Sontag, “In Plato’s Cave,” in On Photography (New York: Picador, 1977), 4. 1. Joan Pachner described the title of the work as referring to Smith’s “general disdain and anger for a perceived type of woman artist” and notes how its imagery invokes Alberto Giacometti’s Woman with Her Throat Cut (1931). Joan Pachner, “David Smith, Portrait of a Lady Painter, 1954/1956–​7,” unpublished notes in curatorial file, Storm King Art Center, Mountainville, New York. Pachner cites a letter in which Smith characterizes a girlfriend in 1958 as “very feminine and quiet—​cute, not like lady painters and other steam rollers.” David Smith, postcard to Herman Cherry, October 15, 1958, in Herman Cherry, letters from David Smith, 1950–​1964, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. 2. Smith, letter to Marian Willard (January 31, 1947), Willard Gallery Records, 1917–​73, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. This comment was followed a month later with a letter complaining of too few photographs reproduced. 3. On Smith’s death in 1965, his photographic archive was estimated by Garnett McCoy to include around three thousand photographs. This archive was part of the David Smith Papers, which was cataloged and microfilmed by the Archives of American Art. As McCoy notes, the photographic archive at that time included black-and-white photographs of

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his sculptures “taken outside and pasted on the outside of envelopes with matching negatives,” both one-on-one and group shots; black-and-white photographs Smith had taken in the 1930s in New York, Bolton Landing, the Virgin Islands, Europe, Greece, and the Soviet Union; three to four hundred color slides; and a miscellaneous number of photographs by professional photographers. See “The David Smith Papers,” Archives of American Art Journal 8, no. 2 (April 1968): 9. Since 1965, when the papers were initially cataloged and microfilmed, the David Smith Papers has expanded. The Estate of David Smith, which holds the original papers, maintains an ongoing practice of adding to the archives, and the David Smith Papers now exceeds the original microfilmed archive. 4. According to Dorothy Dehner, Smith used her Brownie camera before 1931. Just before their trip to the Virgin Islands in October 1931, Smith purchased a large-format press camera. Smith and Dehner also owned a small camera that she referred to as “one of the first of the miniature cameras.” Smith and Dehner brought the large-format camera and a tripod to the Virgin Islands and on their trip to Europe, from October 1935 to July 1936. (Joan Pachner, interview with Dorothy Dehner, New York, August 20, 1986. This is an unpublished transcript in the author’s possession.) It is possible that Smith sold these two cameras in exchange for a Busch Pressman camera and other photographic equipment on August 29, 1950. An invoice from Peerless Camera, New York, lists Smith’s purchase of a 4-by-5-inch Busch Pressman camera and Rapax shutter and his exchange of a 9-by-12-inch Graflex box camera, 5-by-7-inch BL Tessar Lens no. 315380, and Argus C-3 box camera, broken. (See also Joan Pachner, “David Smith’s Photographs,” in David Smith: Photographs 1931–​1965, exh. cat. [New York: Matthew Marks Gallery, 1998], 119n16.) According to additional invoices, Smith returned Kodak Sunshades and purchased a Rolleiflex Xenar camera, a Quick-Set elevator tripod, six rolls of 4-by-5-inch Plus-X Kodak film, and six rolls of Ektachrome 120 film on November 10, 1950. On November 20, 1950, he purchased a Weston exposure meter. On November 27, 1950, the artist purchased an insurance floater policy for the following items, totaling $477: a Busch Pressman 4-by-5-inch S-D106484 with Wollensak lens, a Rolleiflex 2-¼-by-2¼-inch S-2253100 lens S no. 113394, a Weston exposure meter, model 735 no. 8888233, a Quick-Set Tripod Senior, “one set of 3 close-up lenses,” and “miscellaneous assorted hoods and filters.” On December 14, 1950, he purchased a box of fifty Davidson Star D 2-¾-by-2-¾-inch metal slide binders. See dated invoices, David Smith Papers (NDSmith1-NDSmith6), owned by the Estate of David Smith, New York, microfilmed by the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, and since expanded by the Estate of David Smith (hereafter David Smith Papers, which refers to both the microfilmed version and the papers in the estate). When applying for a renewal of his Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 1951, Smith summarized his substantial purchases of a Rolleiflex camera, a 4-by-5-inch Busch Pressman camera, a tripod, and a color exposure meter, noting, “Due to my isolation it seemed necessary to purchase the camera, for shop record and for publicity.” Smith, “Progress Report on Guggenheim Fellowship, 1950–​1951, and Application for Renewal, February 1951,” in David Smith: 1906-1965, ed. Garnett McCoy (New York: Praeger, 1973), 70. In the 1960s, Smith also used a 35-mm camera to take color slide transparencies of works in the Cubi series for the Portable Gallery. The lens on Dan Budnik’s 35-mm Pentax camera that Smith holds

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in a portrait by Budnik is a Carl Zeiss Olympia Sonnar 180 mm, manufactured for the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Meredith Potts, studio manager, Dan Budnik Studio, email to the author, November 7, 2013. 5. In the 1940s, Marian Willard hired a number of photographers to document Smith’s sculpture. See the “Documentary Models” section of chapter 1. Photographers Ugo Mulas, Alexander Liberman, and Dan Budnik documented Smith’s sculptures and Bolton Landing studio in the 1960s. After Smith’s death, the Archives of American Art and the Estate of David Smith hired professional photographer Ugo Mulas to document Smith’s studio and sculptures. 6. In 1953, Smith described this turn: “After my student period in painting, finishing my study with the abstract painter, Jan Matulka, my painting had turned to constructions which had risen from the canvas so high that a base was required where the canvas should be. I now was a sculptor. But there was no change in concept. I had seen the Picasso-Gonzalez iron constructions of 1931 in the magazine Cahiers d’Art. This was the liberating factor which permitted me to start with steel, which before had been my trade, and had until now only meant labor and earning power for the study of painting.” Smith, lecture, Portland Museum of Art, Portland, Oregon (March 23, 1953), David Smith Papers, Estate of David Smith, New York. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid. 9. Rosalind Krauss, Terminal Iron Works: The Sculpture of David Smith (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), 16. 10. Smith, “The Language Is Image” (February 1952), in David Smith, ed. Garnett McCoy (New York: Praeger, 1973), 80. 11. Ibid. 12. Clement Greenberg, “Review of Exhibitions of Hyman Bloom, David Smith, and Robert Motherwell” (The Nation, January 26, 1946), in Clement Greenberg, Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 2:53. 13. See, in particular, the following works by Clement Greenberg, “Review of Exhibitions of David Smith, David Hare, and Mirko” (The Nation, April 19, 1947), in Greenberg, Clement Greenberg, 2:140; “Present Prospects of American Painting and Sculpture” (Horizon, October 1947), in Greenberg, Clement Greenberg, 2:160; “David Smith” (Art in America, 1956–​57), in Greenberg, Clement Greenberg, 3:275; and “Sculpture in Our Time” (Arts magazine, June 1958), in Greenberg, Clement Greenberg, 4:55. 14. Anne M. Wagner, “David Smith: Heavy Metal,” in A House Divided: American Art since 1955 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 103. 15. Ibid. 16. For accounts of the relationship between Smith and minimalism that focus on the issue of industry, see Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Michael Asher and the Conclusion of Modern Sculpture,” Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies 10 (1983), 276–​95; Hal Foster, “The Un/making of Sculpture” (1998), in Richard Serra, ed. Hal Foster with Gordon Hughes (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 175–​200; and Julia Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009).

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17. See, for instance, Krauss, Terminal Iron Works; E. A. Carmean Jr., David Smith (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1982); Stanley Marcus, David Smith: The Sculptor and His Work (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983); Karen Wilkin, David Smith (New York: Abbeville Press, 1984); and Alex Potts, “Modernist Sculpture,” in The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 145–​77. 18. Rosalind Krauss noted two additional examples of early drawings over photographs; see The Sculpture of David Smith: A Catalogue Raisonné (New York: Garland, 1977), figs. 786 and 787. 19. The material of these sculptures is incorrectly identified as steel in Rosalind Krauss’s catalogue raisonné. 20. Smith’s Untitled sculptures raise questions about replication and originality that are also central to Robert Rauschenberg’s 1957 canvases Factum I and Factum II, and to discourses of sculpture in the 1950s and early 1960s. The intersections between Smith’s use of reproductive sculptural processes and found objects in his work, and that of Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Robert Morris, are underexplored. 21. Wölfflin was particularly critical of reproductions taken from an oblique vantage point, which generated “criminal carelessness.” Heinrich Wölfflin, “Wie Man Skulpturen Aufnehmen Soll” [How one should photograph sculpture], pt. 1, Zeitschrift für Bildende Kunst 7, no. 10 (July 1896): 224–​28, and pt. 2, Zeitschrift für Bildende Kunst 8, no. 12 (September 1897): 294–​97. The translation by Geraldine A. Johnson: Heinrich Wölfflin, “How One Should Photograph Sculpture,” Art History 36, no. 1 (February 2013): 53–​71, quote is in pt. 2, p. 57. 22. Adolf von Hildebrand, The Problem of Form in the Fine Arts, in Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873–​1893, trans. H. F. Mallgrave and E. Ikonomou (Santa Monica, CA: Getty Center, 1994), 252. 23. For a discussion of Wölfflin’s text, see Megan Luke, “The Photographic Reproduction of Space: Wölfflin, Panofsky, Kracauer,” Res, no. 57–​58 (Spring–​Autumn 2010): 341; and Geraldine A. Johnson. “ ‘(Un)richtige Aufnahme’: Renaissance Sculpture and the Visual Historiography of Art History,” Art History 36, no. 1 (February 2013): 12–​51. 24. Siegfried Kracauer, “Photography,” trans. Thomas Y. Levin, Critical Inquiry 19, no. 3 (Spring 1993): 432. 25. Ibid. 26. This was a critique shared by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer: “The fusion of culture and entertainment is brought about today not only by the debasement of culture but equally by the compulsory intellectualization of amusement. This is already evident in the fact that amusement is now experienced only, in facsimile, in the form of cinema photography or the radio recording.” Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 114. 27. Walter Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 2, 1927–​1934, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott et al. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 519. 28. Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” 253.

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29. See Richard Wolin, Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 238. 30. See Hélène Pinet, “Montrer est la question vitale: Rodin and Photography,” in Sculpture and Photography: Envisioning the Third Dimension, ed. Geraldine Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 68–​85; and Kirk Varnedoe, “Rodin and Photography,” in Rodin Rediscovered, ed. Albert Elsen, exh. cat. (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1981), 203–​47. 31. See Friedrich Teja Bach, “Brancusi and Photography,” in Constantin Brancusi: 1876–​1957, ed. Friedrich Teja Bach, Margit Rowell, and Ann Temkin, exh. cat. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 316; and Anna Chave, Constantin Brancusi: Shifting the Bases of Art (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 279. 32. For a history of sculptural representations in the early modern print, see Sarah Cree, “Translating Stone into Paper: Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Prints after Antique Sculpture,” in Paper Museums: The Reproductive Print in Europe, 1500–​1800, ed. Rebecca Zorach and Elizabeth Rodini, exh. cat. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). See also Bruce Redford, “Specimens of Antient Sculpture (1809): The Climax of Antique Dilettantism,” in Dilettanti: The Antic and the Antique in Eighteenth-Century England (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2008). 33. See Joel Snyder, “Nineteenth-Century Photography of Sculpture and the Rhetoric of Substitution,” in Sculpture and Photography: Envisioning the Third Dimension, ed. Geraldine A. Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 29. 34. Frederick N. Bohrer, “Photographic Perspectives: Photography and the Institutional Formation of Art History,” in Art History and Its Institutions: Foundations of a Discipline, ed. E. Mansfield (London: Routledge, 2002), 250. See also Horst Bredekamp, “A Neglected Tradition? Art History as Bildwissenschaft,” Critical Inquiry 29, no. 3 (Spring 2003): 418–​ 28; and Donald Preziosi, “The Panoptic Gaze and the Anamorphic Archive,” Rethinking Art History: Meditations on a Coy Science (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 54–​79. 35. Walter Benjamin championed the portability of the reproduction. See “Little History of Photography,” 507–​29. 36. See Henri Zerner, “Malraux and the Power of Photography,” in Sculpture and Photography: Envisioning the Third Dimension, ed. Geraldine A. Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 116–​31; Rosalind Krauss, “1959, 9 January: The Ministry of Fate,” in A New History of French Literature, ed. Dennis Hollier (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 1000–​1006; and Rosalind Krauss, “Postmodernism’s Museum without Walls,” in Thinking about Exhibitions, ed. Reesa Greenberg et al. (London: Routledge, 1996), 341–​48. 37. For a discussion of these photographs as addressing questions of beholding, see Harry Cooper, “Ecce Rosso!” in Medardo Rosso: Second Impressions, ed. Harry Cooper and Sharon Hecker, exh. cat. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 1–​21. In that same volume, Sharon Hecker situates Rosso’s photographs in relation to the role of repetition in his work, in “Reflections on Repetition in Rosso’s Art,” 23–​67. See also Paola Mola, “The Transient Form,” in Rosso: The Transient Form, exh. cat. (Milan: Skira; Venice: Peggy Guggenheim Collection, 2007), 17–​26.

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38. See Metropolitan Museum of Art, www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/33.43.36; Edward Steichen, A Life in Photography (New York: Doubleday, 1963), 45. 39. See Marielle Tabart and Isabelle Monod-Fontaine, Brancusi Photographer, trans. Kim Sichel, exh. cat. (New York: Agrinde Publications, 1979); Elizabeth Brown, Brancusi Photographs Brancusi, exh. cat. (London: Thames and Hudson, 1995); Bach, “Brancusi and Photography,” 312–​21; and Paul Paret, “Sculpture and Its Negative: The Photographs of Constantin Brancusi,” in Sculpture and Photography: Envisioning the Third Dimension, ed. Geraldine Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 101–​15. 40. See Anne Baldassari, Picasso Working on Paper (New York: Saint Martin’s Press, 2000), 65; Anne Baldassari, Picasso and Photography: The Dark Mirror, exh. cat. (Paris: Flammarion, 1997), 116; and Werner Spies, Picasso: The Sculptures; Catalogue Raisonné of the Sculptures in Collaboration with Christine Piot (Ostfilden: Hatjie Cantz, 2000), 78. 41. Beginning around 1934, Moore photographed his objects himself and continued to do so with the help of a studio assistant. Moore’s photographic archive numbers in the hundreds of thousands, but the question of their authorship remains open. After the sculptor’s initial explorations, Moore frequently ceded the task of documenting his work to assistants or to professional photographers such as David Finn and Errol Jackson; but even then, the sculptor remained deeply involved in the photographic process, if not in the click of the shutter. According to accounts by Jackson and by Moore’s assistants, the sculptor directed the photographer’s frame and aperture, deciding the outcome of the images produced. While the archive remains an uncharted terrain of ambiguous authorship—​with the exception of images attributed to professional ­photographers—​here I read these images as tied to the artist’s aim to structure a point of view for his sculpture. This view of the photographs—​neither attributable to Moore until more research is completed, nor separate from his project—​is supported by the Henry Moore Foundation. For accounts of Moore’s directorial role in Jackson’s or his assistants’ images, see the Errol Jackson Archives, Henry Moore Foundation, Perry Green, England; and Michael Phipps, “Moore and Photography,” unpublished, unpaginated manuscript, Henry Moore Foundation. Errol Jackson described Moore’s repeated involvement in Jackson’s own photographic processes: “Moore directed the shots which he wished taken and insisted on waiting for the clouds to get correctly behind the sculpture, so as to achieve the effect of making it stand out from the sky, not like a cut-out against a flat background.” October 2, 1964, HM76/1–​9 October 2, 1964, Errol Jackson Archives, Henry Moore Foundation. 42. For a discussion of Moore’s use of scale, see Elizabeth Brown, “Moore Looking: Photography and the Presentation of Sculpture,” in Henry Moore: Sculpting the 20th Century, ed. Dorothy Kosinski, exh. cat. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 289. For a discussion of Moore’s vantage points, see Anne M. Wagner, “Moore’s Mother,” in Mother Stone: The Vitality of Modern British Sculpture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 131–​32. 43. Potts, The Sculptural Imagination, 103. 44. Michael Baxandall, “Art, Society, and the Bouguer Principle,” Representations, no. 12 (Autumn 1985): 33. 45. Ibid.

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46. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1981), 87. 47. First published in 1893, Hildebrand’s text went through nine editions by 1914 and was translated into English in 1907. See H. F. Mallgrave and E. Ikonomou, “Translators’ Note,” in The Problem of Form in the Fine Arts, in Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873–​1893, trans. H. F. Mallgrave and E. Ikonomou (Santa Monica, CA: Getty Center, 1994), 278n1. Hildebrand’s treatise was read widely by artists in the 1930s and espoused by instructors at the Art Students League, where Smith studied, including Hans Hoffmann and others. See Michael Schreyach, “Hans Hofmann’s Theory of Pictorial Creation,” chap. 3 of “Towards Pragmatic Painting: Jackson Pollock’s Reflexive Potential” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2005), 112. 48. According to David Smith’s daughter, Rebecca Smith, the drawings and marginalia are in Smith’s hand. The exception is a passage written half by Smith, half by Dorothy Dehner, Smith’s first wife, who accompanied Smith to Europe in 1935–​36. Rebecca Smith, in discussion with the author, March 2006. 49. Joan Pachner, “Interview with Ralph and Ethel Paiewonsky, October 14, 1986” (unpublished manuscript). See also Pachner, “David Smith’s Photographs,” 109–​10. Smith received his only training in photography in the Virgin Islands. 50. Pachner, “David Smith’s Photographs,” 109. 51. As Rosalind Krauss has pointed out, Smith’s 1931–​32 experiments with the camera were influenced by European avant-gardist practices, by photographs by László Moholy-Nagy and Man Ray, which he had seen in publications such as Cahiers d’Art in 1929 and 1930. Rosalind Krauss, “David Smith’s ‘New Vision,’ ” in David Smith: Photographs 1931–​1965, exh. cat. (New York: Matthew Marks Gallery, 1998), 7–​8. Smith continued to take photographs in these modes through the mid-1930s, documenting his Brooklyn surroundings, creating assemblages, and making photomontages. In 1939, he sent several of his photographs to Moholy-Nagy, who had recently opened the School of Design in Chicago. Although it is not known which photographs Smith sent, Moholy-Nagy’s response survives. “I shall use them as teaching materials in my classes,” the New Vision photographer wrote, a response that likely thrilled the young artist. Letter to David Smith, November 8, 1939, David Smith Papers. Smith’s correspondence and the photographs he sent were likely discarded along with Moholy-Nagy’s other business correspondence after his death. In 1944, Moholy-Nagy invited Smith to apply for a teaching position at Skidmore College. 52. Smith would continue to use this idiom in the series of documentary photographs he took in Brooklyn from 1933 to 1935, and in England and Greece in 1935 and 1936. 53. Smith also made a brief film in this vein; the photography archives at the Estate of David Smith includes a short filmstrip. 54. Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” October 8 (Spring 1979): 34. 55. Smith got the name from a Brooklyn welder’s workshop, where he made sculptures alongside commercial blacksmiths in the 1930s. After moving to Bolton Landing, New York, he used it as his professional identity when placing orders with suppliers. See Wilkin, David Smith, 20. 56. Smith, note to Sam Hunter, undated, David Smith Papers. Smith also mentioned in

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the same note that although the camera was his, Belle Krasne, Elaine de Kooning, and Dorothy Dehner had also snapped the picture. “My camera—​guest shutter shooter /  These are all old / One interior used in art news with elaines [sic] article / I think belle krasne / Snapped button on my camera for Hudson river / Elaine de kooning on shutter for the head / Dorothy dehner snapped on fish -.” Smith likely wrote the note to Sam Hunter regarding his upcoming Museum of Modern Art exhibition in 1957. See Sam Hunter, David Smith: Recent Sculpture, exh. cat. (New York: Otto Gerson Gallery, 1961), also published as the Museum of Modern Art Bulletin 25, no. 1 (1957), which included numerous photographs by Smith. 57. Krauss also used Smith’s photographs to illustrate her two-part article “The Essential David Smith,” in Artforum 7, no. 6 (February 1969), and Artforum 7, no. 8 (April 1969). 58. See Rosalind Krauss, “A Photo a Day: Recording the Work of David Smith,” in David Smith: A Centennial, exh. cat. (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2006), 14. According to a letter in the materials at the Museum of Modern Art archives concerning a retrospective of Smith’s work, Greenberg reluctantly gave permission to Krauss to use Smith’s photographs. See Helen M. Franc, letter to Mrs. Krauss (August 2, 1966), Department of Publications Collection on Proposed David Smith Monograph, Museum of Modern Art Archives, series 1-4: 1. The letter reads, “[Greenberg] did not seem sympathetic to our idea of having the photographs from BL [Bolton Landing] transferred down here; he said that eventually you should identify and put all those photographs in order, by going to BL, and at that time you could investigate what the negative situation is. . . . Mr. Greenberg was not altogether happy to have us use those rather than the Mulas photographs, but I explained that this was part of Mr. Gray’s original idea, that we thought it of particular interest, and even planned to have Mr. Szarkowski write a note on the theme of ‘the artist as photographer of his own work.’” See also “Memorandum of Meeting with Clement Greenberg” (undated), David Smith Files, Museum Archives, Box 1, Folder A, “David Smith Monograph: 1967,” Museum of Modern Art. When it was reprinted in

Art in America in 1963, Greenberg’s 1956 article “David Smith” included a photoessay of Smith’s photographs captioned “Sculptures photographed by the artist at his home, Terminal Iron Works, Bolton Landing, N.Y.” In the body of his text, Greenberg did not discuss the photographs as Smith’s own. It is likely that the caption was added by the magazine’s editors. 5 9. Krauss, “David Smith’s ‘New Vision,’ ” 9–​10. 60. Andrew Carnduff Ritchie, Sculpture of the Twentieth Century (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1952), 37, as cited in Sarah B. Kianovsky, “Annotated Checklist of Sculpture (General Commentary),” in David Smith: A Centennial, exh. cat. (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2006), 356. 61. Selected exhibition catalogs that have addressed sculptor’s photographs include Dorothy Kosinski, ed., The Artist and the Camera (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999); Jon Wood, ed., Close Encounters: The Sculptor’s Studio in the Age of the Camera (Leeds, England: Henry Moore Institute, 2001); Baldassari, Picasso and Photography; Brown, Brancusi Photographs Brancusi; and Mola, Rosso: The Transient Form. Scholarly essays include Alex Potts, “The Minimalist Object and the Photographic Image,” published in Geraldine Johnson’s pivotal edited volume Sculpture and Photography; Brown, “Moore Looking”;

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Wagner, “Moore’s Mother”; and Jon Wood, “Magie Blanche: Boisgeloup et la presentation des sculptures de Picasso vers 1930–​1935,” Revue de L’art, no. 154 (2006). 62. See, for instance, Carol Armstrong, Scenes in a Library (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998); Geoffrey Batchen, Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002); and Michael Fried, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008). Joel Snyder’s writing on documentary photographs as mediating images is also key to my argument; see, for instance, “Picturing Vision,” Critical Inquiry 6, no. 3 (Spring 1980): 499–​526; “Documentary without Ontology,” Studies in Visual Communication 10, no. 1 (Winter 1984): 78–​95; and “Nineteenth-Century Photography of Sculpture and the Rhetoric of Substitution,” in Sculpture and Photography: Envisioning the Third Dimension, ed. Geraldine Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 21–​34. 63. Other titles in this broader group are, for instance, Potts, The Sculptural Imagination; Malcolm Baker, Figured in Marble: The Making and Viewing of Eighteenth-Century Sculpture (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2000); Wagner, Mother Stone; and Richard Neer, The Emergence of the Classical Style in Greek Sculpture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).

1. T OWA R D M A S S R E P R O D U C T I O N A S A P U B L I C D I S P L AY

Epigraph: Martin Heidegger, “The Thing” (1950), in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 163. 1. Clement Greenberg, “Review of Exhibitions of Hyman Bloom, David Smith, and Robert Motherwell” (The Nation, January 26, 1946), in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 2:53. 2. Robert Coates, “The Art Galleries: Past and Present,” New Yorker, January 12, 1946, 49. 3. Ibid. 4. Greenberg, “Review of Exhibitions of Hyman Bloom, David Smith, and Robert Motherwell,” 2:54. 5. W. R. Valentiner, “David Smith,” in The Sculpture of David Smith: January 2–​26, 1946, exh. cat. (New York: Buchholz Gallery, 1946), unpaginated. Reprinted in David Smith, David Smith: 1906–​1965, ed. Garnett McCoy (New York: Praeger, 1973), 216–​18. 6. The theme of reconstruction appears in Stanley Meltzoff’s essay of March 1946: “Smith’s work raises the further problem of a work of art which makes a biting and embittered social comment, intended to help in the reconstruction of the world, but does so in a way comprehensible only to a minute, if highly cultured, audience.” “David Smith and Social Surrealism,” Magazine of Art 39, no. 3 (March 1946): 101. 7. Harold Clurman, “Night Life and Day Light,” Tomorrow (April 1946): 63. 8. The exhibition traveled in 1946–​47 to Dallas, Texas (American Association of University Women National Convention), Fort Wayne, Indiana (City Theater Gallery) and Gary, Indiana (schools); in 1947–​48, to Ada, Oklahoma (East Central State College), Logan, Indiana (State A & M College), and Provo, Utah (Brigham Young University); in 1948–​ 49, to Chicago, Illinois (Roosevelt College), Terre Haute, Indiana (State Teachers Col-

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lege), East Lansing, Michigan (State College), and Youngstown, Ohio (Butler Institute of Art). Lura Beam, letter to David Smith (February 16, 1950), David Smith Papers. Beam stressed that the “exhibitions are really meant for small branches without local museums.” Lura Beam, letter to Mrs. William Melchio (January 29, 1947), David Smith Exhibition Archives, American Association of University Women (AAUW) Records, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC (hereafter AAA); and Lura Beam, letter to David Smith (May 29, 1946), David Smith Papers. 9. Beam, letter to David Smith (May 29, 1946). 10. Such rhetoric was part of the correspondence surrounding the show. With a New York retrospective simultaneously under way, “the artist could not afford to have many original pieces tied up in an indefinite circuit, especially as the AAUW is not a likely source of purchaser interest.” Unidentified author, letter to Mrs. Karl Young, AAUW Records, AAA. 11. Lura Beam, “[David Smith Exhibition] Memorandum to the Branches,” n.d., AAUW Records, AAA; Lura Beam, letter to Mrs. Frank Greenwald (May 24, 1947), AAUW Records, AAA. 12. See Lura Beam, “[David Smith Exhibition] Memorandum to the Branches.” Beam also wrote pointed requests to organizers. In one letter to the Utah coordinator, she pleaded, “Since you have already native steel workers, who can presumably see the medium and method with facility equal to Smith’s, there is nothing to stop them producing pleasanter things on the stories of early Utah history in steel if they are so minded.” Lura Beam, letter to Mrs. L. S. Morris (March 29, 1948), AAUW Records, AAA. For a recent appraisal of this exhibition, see David McCarthy, “David Smith’s Spectres of War and Peace,” Art Journal 69 (Fall 2010): 21–​39. 13. In January 1947, Smith wrote to Marian Willard about the AAUW show in Dallas: “Dallas idea is OK—​I don’t see any great help but OK.” David Smith, letter to Marian Willard (January 31, 1947), Willard Gallery Records, AAA. 14. AAUW exhibition materials with Smith’s comments, David Smith Papers. Italics and underlining in the original. 15. Smith would have seen these photographs in, among other publications, the Cahiers d’Art. 16. Smith, letter to Marian Willard (January 31, 1947), Willard Gallery Records, AAA. 17. In February 1947, Smith wrote, “I am disappointed that there are only three pictures. I don’t like to pull in now.” Smith, letter to Marian Willard (February 23, 1947), David Smith Papers. 18. See, for instance, letter from Clement Greenberg, August 22, 1948, David Smith Papers. 19. For a list of Smith’s purchases, see the introduction, n. 4. 20. David Smith, “A Sculptor’s Point of View,” lecture given at the Southwestern Art Conference, University of Oklahoma, Norman (May 1, 1953), David Smith Papers. 21. Smith, “The Language Is Image” (February 1952), in McCoy, David Smith: 1906–​1965, 80. 22. Maude Riley, “Sewer Pipe Sculpture: Fabricated Steel Makes Sculpture for a ForwardLooking Modern Artist,” Cue 9, no. 12 (March 16, 1940): 17–​18. 23. David Smith, “Interview with David Sylvester,” in McCoy, David Smith, 174. Smith tar-

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geted casting as a moneymaking scheme, telling Sylvester, “I don’t make and produce copies for the sake of making money.” 24. Peter Stevens, director of the Estate of David Smith, interview by author, April 2011. 25. Smith owned both books. 26. In addition to acquiring many of the works for Frank Crowninshield, John Graham also transferred his own collection to Crowninshield. Smith selected the wood for the bases, choosing darker tones. Smith and his wife, Dorothy Dehner, also purchased several African sculptures while visiting Graham, on a buying mission for Crowninshield, in Europe in 1935. See Christa Clarke, “John Graham and the Crowninshield Collection of African Art,” Winterthur Portfolio 30, no. 1 (Spring 1995): 23–​39. 27. For discussions of the photographic representation of African sculpture, see, for instance, Sebastian Zeidler, “Totality against a Subject: Carl Einstein’s Negerplastik,” October 107 (Winter 2004): 45–​46; Wendy A. Grossman, Man Ray, African Art, and the Modernist Lens, exh. cat. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009); Wendy A. Grossman, “From Ethnographic Object to Modernist Icon: Photographs of African and Oceanic Sculpture and the Rhetoric of the Image” Visual Resources 23, no. 4 (December 2007): 291–​336; and Virginia-Lee Webb, Perfect Documents: Walker Evans and African Art, 1935, exh. cat. (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000). 28. Eliot Elisofon, later a Life magazine photographer, was listed as photographer in the catalog of Smith’s 1938 exhibition, titled David Smith: Steel Sculpture. Two photographs of Smith’s sculptures (Construction with Points and Torso) and a portrait of Smith were displayed in Elisofon’s solo exhibit at the New School for Social Research in 1938, titled Eliot Elisofon: 35 Photographs. Elisofon also documented Smith’s Medals for Dishonor series in 1940. Andreas Feininger’s photographs were exhibited alongside Smith’s sculpture in Smith’s March 1940 exhibition at the Neumann-Willard Gallery. In addition to documenting Smith’s sculpture in the late 1930s and early 1940s, Leo Lances, who studied with Jan Matulka at the Art Students League with Smith, also documented, along with Smith, Frank Crowninshield’s collection of African sculpture for John Graham’s book African Art. Pinchos Horn photographed Smith’s sculptures of 1937 and 1938. Soichi Sunami, a Museum of Modern Art photographer, photographed Smith’s sculpture before 1943. Smith’s archives also contain prints by Rudolph Burckhardt. 29. In one shot, Smith balanced one end of the sculpture’s base on a rod or stick to animate it as an upright form. The photograph echoes Brassaï’s photographs of Picasso’s Woman in Garden (1929–​30) that were published in Minotaure in 1933 (in André Breton, “Picasso dans son element,” Minotaure 1, no. 1 [1933]: 10–​22). For an analysis of Brassaï’s photographs, see Jon Wood, “Magie Blanche: Boisgeloup et la presentation des sculptures de Picasso vers 1930–​1935,” Revue de L’art, no. 154 (2006): 49–​56. 30. Smith wrote, “I photographed most of my sculpture but it doesn’t appear any too well in the rustic setting. I’ll bring the photos down[,] which will be in a couple weeks—​then I’ll have to make a trip back after we get a place—​to get the sculp [sic] etc. Two loads this time.” Letter to Edgar Levy (November 1936), Edgar Levy and Lucille Corcos Levy Papers, AAA. 31. See Stuart Alexander, “Andreas Feininger: Early Work,” The Archive (University of Arizona, Tucson), no. 17 (March 1983): 4–​14. His father, Lyonel Feininger, taught photography at the Bauhaus beginning in 1919.

NOTES TO PAGES 29–39

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32. Ibid., 8. 33. See University of Arizona Center for Creative Photography, http://ccp.uair.arizona.edu/ images/59770/passion-flower-ca-1935. 34. Feininger’s photographs of Smith’s sculptures—​which appeared in the catalog for the 1941 Outdoor Sculpture Exhibition, organized through the Sculptors’ Guild in New York—​ were the only images that positioned sculpture in a landscape setting. David Smith Papers. 35. Andreas Feininger, Advanced Photography—​Methods and Conclusions (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1952), 194. 36. In July 1946, Smith wrote to Beam, “The Gallery has several Apeda type enlargements which would show you the quality, especially of the Feininger shots. I have one negative showing three large sculptures on the beach which is very dramatic.” Smith, letter to Lura Beam (July 8, 1946), David Smith Papers. Clement Greenberg praised Feininger’s photographs of sculpture in a 1964 review: “Except when they appear as art, Feininger’s photographs of sculpture are among the best such photographs I have seen. All the sculpture Feininger illustrates in this book happens to be of the female nude, and his photographs of living nudes are disastrous by comparison.” Clement Greenberg, “Four Photographers,” in Greenberg, Clement Greenberg, 4:186. 37. Greenberg, “Present Prospects of American Painting and Sculpture,” (Horizon, October 1947), in Greenberg, Clement Greenberg, 2:167. 38. Greenberg, “Sculpture in Our Time” (Arts magazine, 1958), in Greenberg, Clement Greenberg, 4:58. For a discussion of this essay as recasting Greenberg’s previous definition of sculpture and its relationship to the optical formalism of high modernist painting, see Alex Potts, The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 179–​81. 39. For discussions of Greenberg’s definition of optical sculpture, see Hope Mauzerall, “What’s the Matter with Matter: Problems in the Criticism of Greenberg, Fried, and Krauss,” Art Criticism 13, no. 3 (1998): 81–​96; and David Getsy, “Tactility or Opticality, Henry Moore or David Smith: Herbert Read and Clement Greenberg on the Art of Sculpture, 1956,” Sculpture Journal 17, no. 2 (December 2008): 73–​86. 40. Greenberg, “Sculpture in Our Time,” 59. 41. Ibid., 60. 42. Alex Potts takes a different view, arguing that Greenberg’s approach to Smith is more balanced in its approach to materiality and opticality. See The Sculptural Imagination, 175–​76. 43. See Smith, letter to Lura Beam (July 8, 1946), David Smith Papers. 44. Lura Beam, letter to Marian Willard (June 6, 1947), AAUW Records, AAA. 45. Beam wrote in a 1948 letter: “Our two sculptors, Rood and Smith, were deliberately chosen to represent sharply divergent tendencies. . . . Rood still uses wood, the older medium, and he began by showing the folk heart in old stories like Johnny Appleseed; is easy to understand and loveable. We thought we would take next this quite opposing temperament and medium, comprehension of which requires a lot of thought.” Lura Beam, letter to Mrs. L. S. Morris (March 29, 1948), AAUW Records, AAA. 46. Consider, for instance, the statistics surrounding other AAUW sculpture exhibitions.

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TO PAGES 39–43

When Beam circulated Rood’s “easy to understand” sculpture, the exhibition consisted of “sculpture in wood, 10, and oil paintings, 7.” (See John Rood Sculpture and Painting, 1948–​1949, AAUW exhibition catalog, AAUW Records, AAA.) By contrast, the “hard [material]” of the African Negro sculpture exhibition, begun in 1942 and circulated for four years, included more photographs than original masks and objects: thirty photographs were circulated, and so were contextual materials: eight maps, and “postcards and snapshots taken by a traveler in Africa in 1939 and 1940.” (See Lura Beam, “African Negro Sculpture; an AAUW Exhibition: Memorandum to the Branches,” AAUW Records, AAA.) While Rood’s carved pastoral figures could be sent on their own, without photographs, the “strangeness” of African sculpture was supplemented with an array of two-dimensional media. When Beam noted that AAUW exhibitions circulating “strange art” required “different methods of presentation,” then, she was most likely referring to the two-dimensional media—​forms of display that could pictorialize the difficulties and uncertainties of spatial sculpture. 47. Beam’s anxiety about the difficulty of Smith’s sculptures was not hers alone. Critic Stanley Meltzoff hinted at charges of Smith’s elitism in March 1946, arguing that his work was “comprehensible only to a minute, if highly cultured audience.” “David Smith and Social Surrealism,” 101. 48. Lura Beam, letter to Marian Willard (June 6, 1947), AAUW Records, AAA. 49. Ibid. 50. Anne Wagner argued that Beam’s rhetoric here is “steeped in an aggressive amnesia.” “Home and Away: David Smith’s Domestic Vision” (lecture given at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, April 2006), 18. 51. Lura Beam, “[David Smith Exhibition] Memorandum to the Branches,” AAUW Records, AAA. 52. Mrs. Frank Greenwald, letter to Lura Beam (May 15 1947), AAUW Records, AAA. 53. Lura Beam, “[David Smith Exhibition] Memorandum to the Branches,” AAUW records, AAA. 54. Lura Beam, letter to George Miller, Plantin Press (November 30, 1946), AAUW Records, AAA. 55. Beam’s publicity was popular with the local organizers. In a letter to Marian Willard, she quoted two voices commenting on the Dallas version of the show: “The big flyers are very essential to the show, to my way of thinking.” “The entire printing job looked beautiful. . . . It is my bedrock opinion that the printed flyers gave the exhibition the finished touch and arrested attention.” Lura Beam, letter to Marian Willard (undated), AAUW Records, AAA. 56. AAUW exhibition materials with Smith’s comments, David Smith Papers. 57. R. R. Brown, Fallsfoto Finishers, letter to David Smith (undated, likely December 1946 or January 1947), David Smith Papers. 58. Marian Willard, letter to David Smith (January 23, 1948), David Smith Papers. 59. See, for instance, a December 1948 letter by Jean Lipman, editor of Art in America, to Marian Willard (December 19, 1948), Willard Gallery Records, AAA. 60. Edward Alden Jewell, “New Year Melange,” New York Times, January 6, 1946, as published in Sarah B. Kianovsky, “Annotated Checklist of Sculpture (General Commentary)” in

NOTES TO PAGES 43–48

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David Smith: A Centennial, exh. cat. (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2006), 353. 61. Harry Cooper, “Ecce Rosso!” in Medardo Rosso: Second Impressions, ed. Harry Cooper and Sharon Hecker, exh. cat. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 10. 62. According to Danila Marsure Rosso, Rosso produced postcards as gallery publicity for his exhibitions in Venice in 1914 and Rome in the 1920s. Rosso’s photographs were published in Julius Meier-Graefe, Entwicklungsgeschichte der Modernen Kunst (Stuttgart: Verlag von Julius Hoffmann, 1904); “Le Sculpture de Lumière: Un Précurseur: Medardo Rosso,” Comoedia, no. 1920 (January 3, 1913): 1; and Nino Barbantini, Medardo Rosso, exh. cat. (Milan: Edizioni Bottega di Poesia, 1923), among other venues during his lifetime. 63. As Sharon Hecker has discussed, Rosso exhibited his photographs at the 1904 Salon d’Automne in Paris. He also photographed them with his sculptures and exhibited photographs of Rodin’s sculpture. See “Reflections on Repetition in Rosso’s Art,” in Medardo Rosso: Second Impressions, ed. Harry Cooper and Sharon Hecker, exh. cat. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 65–​67. 64. Medardo Rosso, letter to Carla Carrà (November 1926), in Medardo Rosso, ed. Gloria Moure, exh. cat. (Santiago de Compostela, Spain: Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea; Barcelona: Ediciones Polígrafa, 1997), 299. See also Carlo Carrà, “Medardo Rosso,” L’Ambrosiano (April 2, 1928): 2. 65. Brassaï complained, “Brancusi would not allow me to photograph his works; he did it himself, in my opinion not very well.” Brassaï, as cited by Friedrich Teja Bach, “Brancusi and Photography,” in Constantin Brancusi: 1876–​1957, ed. Friedrich Teja Bach, Margit Rowell, and Ann Temkin, exh. cat. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 316. 66. See Anna Chave, Constantin Brancusi: Shifting the Bases of Art (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 279. 67. Hecker writes, “Photography always provided Rosso a space to reflect on and amplify his material processes.” “Reflections on Repetition in Rosso’s Art,” 62. See also Paola Mola, “The Transient Form,” in Rosso: The Transient Form, exh. cat. (Milan: Skira; Venice: Peggy Guggenheim Collection, 2007). 68. For a discussion of Rosso’s use of vantage point as it relates to the maternal figure, see Cooper, Ecce Rosso! 8–​9; and Hecker, “Reflections on Repetition in Rosso’s Art,” 36. Cooper and Hecker identify different readings of the mother’s absence; my interest lies in the use of vantage point and frame to activate a contingent encounter. 69. For a discussion of Moore’s use of his camera’s frame to animate an encounter, see Anne M. Wagner, Mother Stone: The Vitality of Modern British Sculpture (New Haven: CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 123–​33. Moore’s photographs were included in, among other venues, two publications in Smith’s library at the time of his death: Sculpture, no. 1 (1939), which contained his 1938–​39 photograph of Reclining Figure alongside several photographs Brancusi took of his sculpture; and W. R. Valentiner’s Origins of Modern Sculpture (New York: Wittenborn, 1946), which included several of Moore’s 1938–​39 photographs. 70. Elizabeth Brown, “Moore Looking: Photography and the Presentation of Sculpture,” in Henry Moore: Sculpting the 20th Century, ed. Dorothy Kosinski (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 289.

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TO PAGES 49–52

71. In 1984, Moore would make this fiction a reality by reproducing Reclining Figure in monumental dimensions and installing the work atop a constructed mound in his fields at Perry Green, a placement that only reinforced the sculpture’s sheer enormity. For a discussion of scale in Moore’s photography, see ibid. 72. Moore, as quoted in Warren Forma, Five British Sculptors: Work and Talk (1964), in Henry Moore: Writings and Conversations, ed. Alan Wilkinson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 207. 73. See Barbara Rose, “Blowup: The Problem of Scale in Sculpture,” Art in America 56, no. 4 (July–​August 1968): 80–​91. 74. Adolf von Hildebrand, The Problem of Form in the Fine Arts, in Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873–​1893, trans. H. F. Mallgrave and E. Ikonomou (Santa Monica, CA: Getty Center, 1994), 258. 75. Sebastian Zeidler, “Totality against a Subject: Carl Einstein’s Negerplastik,” October 107 (Winter 2004): 21. 76. Hildebrand, The Problem of Form in the Fine Arts, 252. 77. Heinrich Wölfflin, “Wie Man Skulpturen Aufnehmen Soll” [How one should photograph sculpture], pt. 1, Zeitschrift für Bildende Kunst 7, no. 10 (July 1896): 224–​28, and pt. 2, Zeitschrift für Bildende Kunst 8, no. 12 (September 1897): 294–​97. Translation by Geraldine A. Johnson: Heinrich Wölfflin, “How One Should Photograph Sculpture,” Art History 36, no. 1 (February 2013): 53–​54. 78. Wölfflin, “How One Should Photograph Sculpture,” trans. Johnson, pt. 1, p. 55. Wölfflin did not know whether the photograph was taken by the Brogi or Alinari firm. As Johnson points out, the photograph is by the Alinari firm (70n4). 79. Ibid. 80. Ibid, pt. 2, p. 59. 81. Ibid. 82. Smith’s copy print is published in Sarah Hamill, “Picturing Autonomy: David Smith, Photography, and Sculpture,” Art History 37, no. 3 (June 2014): fig. 3. 83. Marian Willard, letter to David Smith (January 1948), David Smith Papers. 84. David Smith, letter to Marian Willard (February 1948), David Smith Papers. 85. Smith’s photographs might also be read as reinvesting their sculptures with the qualities of originality and uniqueness—​the “aura”—​that Benjamin describes as the antithesis of modern photography. See “Little History of Photography,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 2, 1927–​34, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 519.

2. AERIAL VISION, PHOTOGR APHIC ABS TR AC TION, A N D T H E S U R FA C E O F S C U L P T U R E

Epigraph: Rainer Maria Rilke, Auguste Rodin, trans. Daniel Slager (New York: Archipelago Books, 2004), 70. 1. John Macarthur, “From the Air: Collage City, Aerial Photography, and the Picturesque,” in Re-framing Architecture: Theory, Science and Myth, ed. R. J. Moore (Sydney: Archadia

NOTES TO PAGES 52–59

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Press, 2000), 119. For a discussion of the conventions of aerial photography, see also Jason Weems, “ ‘Wings over the Andes’: Aerial Photography and the Dematerialization of Archaeology circa 1931,” in Past Presented: Archaeological Illustration and the Ancient Americas, ed. J. Pillsbury (Cambridge, MA: Dumbarton Oaks and Harvard University Press, 2012), 319–​55. 2. Smith, transcript of radio broadcast, WNYC–​New York, October 30, 1952, David Smith Papers. In this passage, Smith also described how the airplane made possible a mode of seeing that was already part of impressionist painting: “The impressionist painter Pissarro might have liked this three mile view in space, for from his ground position he once said: ‘Do not fix your eye on any one point, but take in everything, observing how colors reflect their surroundings . . . work at the same time sky, water, branches, and ground, keeping everything going on an equal basis.’ What was a poetic working principle for Pissarro has become an actual view in space today, to be accented differently.” 3. Dore Ashton, “David Smith in Protest,” in David Smith: Medals for Dishonor, exh. cat., ed. Matthew Marks and Peter Stevens (New York: Independent Curators, 1996), 17. 4. The sculptor also used avian flight to signal an antiwar politics in several freestanding sculptures in the 1940s. As David McCarthy has noted, False Peace Spectre (1944) resembles an airplane, a bird of prey, and a phallus simultaneously, collapsing a range of imagery in its attack on fascist and American war planes. This was common imagery in artists’ responses to war, McCarthy observes, drawn in part from propaganda posters, in which birds serve as protectors of the “nation’s skies.” “David Smith’s Spectres of War and Peace,” Art Journal 69 (Fall 2010): 33. See also Rosalind Krauss, Terminal Iron Works: The Sculpture of David Smith (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), 126. 5. Alex Potts writes, “Abandoning his earlier hopes that a socialist society was in the making where the sculptor could collaborate with the architect in creating a new, truly public environment, Smith was forced to conclude that the only viable destiny for a modern sculpture was as an individual creation that would address the viewer on a one-to-one basis, and would thus have to be siteless or homeless.” The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 162. 6. Smith, transcript of radio broadcast, WNYC–​New York, October 30, 1952, David Smith Papers. 7. Smith, as cited by Belle Krasne, “A David Smith Profile,” Art Digest, April 1, 1952, 26. 8. Rilke, Auguste Rodin, 70. 9. Krauss used two of Smith’s photographs of Blackburn, Song of an Irish Blacksmith, to illustrate her argument in “The Essential David Smith,” pt. 2, Artforum 7, no. 8 (April 1969): 37. 10. Rosalind Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977), 157. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid., 158. 13. Krauss, Terminal Iron Works, 12–​16. For a discussion of Krauss’s analysis of sculptural opacity, see Yve-Alain Bois, “The Sculptural Opaque,” Sub-Stance 10, no. 2, issue 31 (1981): 23–​48. 14. Smith, transcript of lecture, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine, August 13, 1954, 10, David Smith Papers.

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1 5. Ibid., 1. 16. Ibid., 2. 17. Ibid., 3. 18. Ibid., 4. 19. Ibid., 10. 20. Smith photographed the Lachaise sculpture in the Museum of Modern Art Sculpture Garden. 21. Smith, transcript of lecture, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine, August 13, 1954, 4. 22. Ibid., 5. 23. Ibid. 24. See Metropolitan Museum of Art, www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/49.55.29. 25. Rosalind Krauss, “Stieglitz/’Equivalents,’ ” October 11 (Winter 1979): 135. 26. For a discussion of Siskind’s abstraction, see Christine Mehring, “Siskind’s Challenge: Action Painting and a Newer Laocoon, Photographically Speaking,” Yale University Art Gallery Bulletin (2006): 86–​107. 27. Indeed as Rosalind Krauss has described Smith’s photographs of the 1930s, the artist “could not have been unaffected” by the “revolution photography was bringing into the field of the visual.” She cites “Germaine Krull’s radical visions from below,” and Aleksandr Rodchenko’s “dizzying views from above,” taken from the balconies of apartment buildings and other modern structures. “David Smith’s ‘New Vision,’ ” in David Smith: Photographs 1931–​1965, exh. cat. (New York: Matthew Marks Gallery, 1998), 7. 28. Abigail Solomon-Godeau, “The Armed Vision Disarmed: Radical Formalism from Weapon to Style,” in The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography, ed. Richard Bolton (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 82–​107. 29. See introduction, n. 51. 30. Rosalind Krauss, “Reading Photographs as Texts,” in Pollock Painting, ed. B. Rose (New York: Agrinde, 1978), n.p. 31. Leo Steinberg, “Other Criteria,” in Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 84. For a discussion of the many ways flatness was called on as a metaphor for experience—​rather than a value in its own right—​see T. J. Clark, “Clement Greenberg’s Theory of Art,” Critical Inquiry 9, no. 1 (September 1982): 152. 32. Leo Steinberg, “Other Criteria,” 84. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid., 88. For discussions of horizontality, see Rosalind Krauss, in The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), chap. 6; and Yve-Alain Bois, “Piet Mondrian, New York City,” in Painting as Model (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 178–​83. 35. Susan Cooke, “David Smith: Drawing Space,” in David Smith: Drawing Space, exh. cat. (Los Angeles: Margo Leavin Gallery, 2011), 6. 36. According to Hilton Kramer, these objects included “rectangles of cardboard, crescents of watermelon rind, [and] metal rods.” “David Smith: Stencils for Sculpture,” Art in America 50, no. 4 (Winter 1962): 41–​42. Will Ameringer lists “discarded tools, nuts and bolts, and die-cut forms to natural elements and the leftovers on his luncheon table” as

NOTES TO PAGES 63–68

   •   197

the materials for the sprays. “After Image,” in David Smith: Sprays from Bolton Landing, exh. cat. (London: Anthony d’Offay Gallery, 1985), unpaginated. Barbara Davenport, one of Smith’s models, recalls him placing cut pieces of vegetables on the surfaces. Barbara Davenport, interview by author, April 2004. 37. See Peter Stevens, “Sprays: The Absent Object,” in Sprays, exh. cat. (New York: Gagosian Gallery, 2008). 38. Smith’s slide show anticipated Robert Smithson’s subversion of the slide show format, which he performed in 1972 at the University of Utah, in a work now known as Hotel Palenque, which is composed of thirty-one slides and a tape recording of the artist’s voice. Adopting the identity of a professor of archaeology, Smithson presented slides he had taken in the Yucatan, narrating them to an audience of architecture students. See Darsie M. Alexander, “Slideshow,” in Slide Show: Projected Images in Contemporary Art (Baltimore: Baltimore Museum of Art, 2005), 11–​12. 39. Smith, “The Language Is Image” (February 1952), in David Smith: 1906–​1965, ed. Garnett McCoy (New York: Praeger, 1973), 80. 40. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York: Macmillan, 2007), 195. See also Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, and the Archive (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 173–​75. 41. See n. 7. 42. In an article published in 1968, Garnett McCoy described visiting Terminal Iron Works with Ugo Mulas: “On the last day of June in 1965, five weeks after Smith died, the Milanese photographer Ugo Mulas and I drove from New York to the Terminal Iron Works. . . . The next day we began the work we had come to do. Through an arrangement made between Howard Lipman, a Trustee of the Archives of American Art, and the executors of the David Smith Estate, Mulas photographed the sculpture at the Terminal Iron Works and the setting in which it had been produced; I searched for and assembled Smith’s papers.” See “The David Smith Papers,” Archives of American Art Journal 8, no. 2 (April 1968): 1. Rosalind Krauss’s own photographs, too, were included in her catalogue raisonné. Rosalind Krauss, email to the author, April 29, 2014. In the preface to her dissertation, Krauss remarked that she and her husband, Richard Krauss, had photographed sculptures at Bolton Landing. See “The Sculpture of David Smith” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 1969), iii. 43. Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture, 157. 44. Ibid., 154. 45. Krauss, Terminal Iron Works, 152. 46. Krauss, “David Smith’s ‘New Vision,’ ” 9. Krauss also addressed the issue of Smith’s photography in 2006. See Rosalind Krauss, “A Photo a Day: Recording the Work of David Smith,” in David Smith: A Centennial exh. cat. (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2006), 11–​15. 47. Krauss, “David Smith’s ‘New Vision,’ ” 10. 48. Ibid. 49. The photograph appeared in, among other publications, E. C. Goosen, “David Smith,” Arts magazine 30, no. 3 (March 1956): 23; and Sheldon Nodelman, “David Smith,” Art News 27, no. 10 (February 1969): 28.

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50. See Rosalind Krauss, The Sculpture of David Smith: A Catalogue Raisonné (New York: Garland, 1977), 49. 51. This photograph was published in Fairfield Porter, “David Smith: Steel into Sculpture,” Art News 56, no. 5 (September 1957): 42, alongside a photograph of Smith’s Structure of Arches (1939) taken by Andreas Feininger. 52. See “Australia,” MoMA, www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/david-smith-­australia-1951; accessed September 22, 2013. 53. My reading of Australia builds from Alex Potts’s description of the work as an interplay between seeing “an open expansive form projected in space and becoming aware of its actual size and the material density of its structural elements, as well as of the insistent deviations from perfect flatness.” The Sculptural Imagination, 167. 54. Paul Paret, “Sculpture and Its Negative: The Photographs of Constantin Brancusi,” in Sculpture and Photography: Envisioning the Third Dimension, ed. Geraldine A. Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 106. 55. Friedrich Teja Bach, “Brancusi and Photography,” in Constantin Brancusi: 1876–​1957, ed. Friedrich Teja Bach, Margit Rowell, and Ann Temkin, exh. cat. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 314. 56. Many of these effects were explained to me by Danila Marsure Rosso, Archivio Medardo Rosso, Milan. See also Paola Mola, Rosso: Trasferimenti (Milan: Skira, 2006); Paola Mola, “The Transient Form,” in Rosso: The Transient Form, exh. cat. (Milan: Skira; Venice: Peggy Guggenheim Collection, 2007); and Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci, Medardo Rosso: Catalogo Ragionato della Sculptura (Milan: Skira, 2009). 57. For a discussion of the photograph of the plaster version of Yvette Guilbert, see Mola, Rosso: The Transient Form, 90. 58. Mola and Vittucci, Medardo Rosso, 146–​48. 59. Dan Budnik, “Visits with David Smith,” in Seeing David Smith: Photographs by Dan Budnik, exh. cat. (New York: Knoedler and Company, 2006), unpaginated. Budnik’s italics. 60. Smith, “The New Sculpture,” in McCoy, David Smith, 82–​83. In a draft version, however, Smith wrote, “My position for vision in my works aims to be in it, but not of it, and not as an identified physical participant with its subject. I only wish to comment on the travel. It is an adventure viewed. [Italic text added by another hand.] I do not enter its order as lover, brother or associate, I seem to view it as from the traveling height of a plane two miles up, or from my mountain workshop viewing a cloud-like procession. When in my shop I see the clouds. When I am in the clouds I am there to look at my work. From there importances [sic] become pattern—​depth, bulk are not so evident.” Smith, lecture titled “The New Sculpture,” Museum of Modern Art, New York, February 21, 1950, David Smith Papers. 61. The cloud is a term used in welding, according to E. A. Carmean Jr. The clouds are “the leftovers that result from rolling steel plate, which is spread out and rolled like cookie dough. When the steel is cut or cropped into a rectangular plate, odd, usually curved shapes are left over at the end, just as they are in rolled dough. Smith made extensive use of these leftover clouds in the Voltri sculpture.” David Smith, exh. cat. (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1982), 183. Carmean cited Smith’s “Report on Voltri,” in which the sculptor used the term to discuss Voltri VI: “Voltri VI is a tong with wheels and two end clouds. One cloud rests in the spoon—​each cloud end goes up from the tong unsupported.” Smith,

NOTES TO PAGES 75–84

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“Report on Voltri” (1962), in McCoy, David Smith, 162. However, Smith’s use of the cloud in the passage from “The New Sculpture” likely referred to its atmospheric meaning. The sculptor also wrote on a drawing of Cubi III, dated “11-10-1961”: “polished—​like I feel if I make square clouds.” Undated notebook, David Smith Papers. See fig. 14. 62. Smith, lecture titled “The New Sculpture,” Museum of Modern Art, New York, February 21, 1950, David Smith Papers. 63. Ibid. 64. Ann Reynolds, Robert Smithson: Learning from New Jersey and Elsewhere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 138. See also Suzaan Boettger, “The Stimulus of Aerial Art,” in Earthworks: Art and the Landscape of the Sixties (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 71–​101. 65. Robert Smithson, “Aerial Art,” in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 117. 66. Ibid., 116. “The rational structures of buildings disappear into irrational disguises and are pitched into optical illusions. The world seen from the air is abstract and illusive. From the window of an airplane, one can see drastic changes of scale, as one ascends and descends. The effect takes one from the dazzling to the monotonous in a short space of time—​from the shrinking terminal to the obstructing clouds.” 67. A record of Greenberg’s take on the photographs is part of the Museum of Modern Art archives pertaining to an exhibition that was to commemorate Smith’s work. Organized by Cleve Gray, the project ultimately fell apart, but the accompanying book was to contain an essay by John Szarkowski on the theme of “the artist as photographer of his own work.” Greenberg himself did not have a high opinion of Smith’s photographs and preferred to use Ugo Mulas’s in the publication. He thought selecting them in order to illustrate a work was sheer romanticism. “[Greenberg] approves in principle of RK [Rosalind Krauss] projected essay on Smith’s sculpture. . . . [Greenberg] delighted that we will select best available photos for illustration, or have made if necessary, rather than limiting ourselves to Smith’s own for ‘romantic’ reasons.” See “Memorandum of Meeting with Clement Greenberg” (undated), Department of Publications Collection on Proposed David Smith Monograph, Museum of Modern Art Archives, series 1-4: 1. 68. Clement Greenberg, “Four Photographers: Review of A Vision of Paris, by EugèneAuguste Atget; A Life in Photography by Edward Steichen; The World Through My Eyes by Andreas Feininger; and Photographs by Cartier-Bresson, introduced by Lincoln Kirstein” (New York Review of Books, January 23, 1964), in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 4:183–​87. For a discussion of Greenberg’s writings on photography, see Mike Weaver, “Clement Greenberg and Walker Evans: Transparency and Transcendence,” History of Photography 15 (Summer 1991): 128–​30; and Mehring, “Siskind’s Challenge,” 86–​107.

3. I M AG E S O F N O N B E L O N G I N G

Epigraph: Søren Kierkegaard, Stages on Life’s Way (1845), as quoted in Walter Benjamin, “Convolute I,” in The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 218.

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1. Smith described the anthropomorphism of his photographs in a letter to art historian Friedrich L. Bayerthal: “In one sense all my work is anthropomorphic since its scale is measured and perceived by man (me) and in another sense, it is abstract. I shall let you tell me whether it fits your interpretation and which [photographs] you prefer.” David Smith, letter to F. L. Bayerthal, July 30, 1961, David Smith Papers. 2. Alex Potts reads the dock itself as a pedestal in these images. See “Giacometti and the Basis of Sculpture,” in Giacometti: Critical Essays, ed. P. Read and J. Kelly (Surrey, En­gland: Ashgate, 2009), 147n6. 3. Robert Motherwell, “For David Smith, 1950,” in David Smith, exh. cat. (New York: Willard Gallery, 1950), unpaginated. 4. Barbara Davenport, in conversation with the author, April 2005. According to Cleve Gray, Smith himself referred to his fields as a “sculpture farm.” See “David Smith: Last Visit,” Art in America 54, no. 1 (January–​February 1966): 23. 5. Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” October 8 (Spring 1979): 34. 6. Alex Potts, “Installation and Sculpture,” Oxford Art Journal 24, no. 2 (2001): 11. 7. Rosalind Krauss, writing in 1998, described how the artist’s photographs shape the totemic qualities that she identified in his sculpture in her 1970s accounts. Citing Smith’s photograph of Cubi III—​with its low vantage point and landscape backdrop—​she noted how the photographer’s point of view exaggerated both the work’s “figurative quality” and “its menacing attitude,” or how the sculpture seemed, on the one hand, approachable and human, and, on the other, threatening and remote. “David Smith’s ‘New Vision,’ ” in David Smith: Photographs 1931–​1965, exh. cat. (New York: Matthew Marks Gallery, 1998), 9. See chapter 2 for a fuller discussion of Krauss’s essay. 8. David Smith, letter to Marian Willard (February 1948), David Smith Papers. See chapter 1 for a full discussion of this passage. 9. For a discussion of how Smith’s totemic sculptures relate to this broader group, see Alex Potts, “Personages: Imperfect and Persistent,” in David Smith: Personage, exh. cat. (New York: Gagosian Gallery, 2006). 10. Hilton Kramer connected Smith to a broader group of modern sculptors who staged sculptural environments, writing, “There are artists—​one thinks of Giacometti in Paris and Henry Moore in Herefordshire—​who are as much authors of their milieux as of their work; and Smith is one of these.” “The Sculpture of David Smith” (1960), in The Age of the Avant-Garde, 1956–​1972 (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2009), 323. Kramer reads Smith’s own milieu as staging a relationship between factory labor and the landscape, which he reads as “ideals of freedom out of the American past.” 11. Frank O’Hara, “David Smith: The Color of Steel,” Art News 60 (December 1961): 32–​34. 12. As Alex Potts has observed, Smith’s sculptures related to their surroundings through a radical separation from it, unlike the sculpture of some later land artists, who pursued a project of marking a landscape, staging an encounter with it. See The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 165. 13. O’Hara, “David Smith: The Color of Steel,” 32. 14. Ernst Scheidegger photographed Giacometti’s sculpture in the 1950s and 1960s and published two compilations of his photographs in those years: Alberto Giacometti: Schriften, Fotos, Zeichnungen (1958), and L’atelier d’Alberto Giacometti (1963), the latter of which

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included Scheidegger’s photograph of L’Homme au Doigt (see fig. 52). In a 2001 catalog, Scheidegger wrote, “On Alberto’s suggestion, I had begun to photograph his sculptures. . . . I loved to position the sculpture in a space in such a way that the space itself also affected the photograph. Alberto valued this type of shot. Very few of my photographs therefore have a neutral background. . . . Giacometti most liked to see his sculptures in nature, or in a street. This was not always easy to do. I loaded the large figures on a truck and the smaller ones in my car, in search of the fitting surroundings.” Traces of a Friendship: Alberto Giacometti (Zurich: Verlag Scheidegger and Spiess, 2001), 107. Several of Scheidegger’s photographs were published in Carola Giedion-Welcker, Contemporary Sculpture: An Evolution in Volume and Space (New York: George Wittenborn, 1955), 92–​95. Hélène Pinet offers a different perspective on Giacometti’s relationship with Scheidegger, writing of his photographs that “Giacometti ultimately felt imprisoned by these images.” See “The Studio of Alberto Giacometti in the Photographer’s Eye: Coming Full Circle,” in The Studio of Alberto Giacometti, exh. cat. (Paris: Centre Pompidou and Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti, 2007), 60. For a discussion of Giacometti’s sculpture, its photographic reception in the United States, and the postwar myth of the solitary individual, see Michael Brenson, “1934–​1965: Giacometti’s Critical Reception in the United States,” in The Studio of Alberto Giacometti, exh. cat. (Paris: Centre Pompidou and Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti, 2007), 309–​28. 15. Smith, “The Landscape,” in David Smith (New York: Willard Gallery, 1947), David Smith Papers. Republished in David Smith by David Smith, ed. Cleve Gray (London: Thames and Hudson, 1968), 155. Misspellings are the artist’s own and likely were intended as wordplay. 16. Smith’s prose thus recalls Georg Lukács’s opening lines of Theory of the Novel (1916), in which Lukács imagines homelessness as the modern condition: “Happy are those ages when the starry sky is the map of all possible paths—​ages whose paths are illuminated by the light of the stars. Everything in such ages is new and yet familiar, full of adventure and yet their own. The world is wide and yet it is like a home, for the fire that burns in the soul is of the same essential nature as the stars; the world and the self, the light and the fire, are sharply distinct, yet they never become permanent strangers to one another, for fire is the soul of all light and all fire clothes itself in light.” The Theory of the Novel, trans. A. Bostock (London: Merlin Press, 1971), 29. 17. Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 6. 18. Emily Genauer, “Sculpture by Moderns on Display,” New York Herald Tribune, February 1, 1953, as cited in Sarah B. Kianovsky, “Annotated Checklist of Sculpture (General Commentary),” in David Smith: A Centennial, exh. cat. (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2006), 356; and Genauer, “A Shahn Miracle,” New York Herald Tribune, October 15, 1961, as cited in Kianovsky, “Annotated Checklist of Sculpture (General Commentary),” 367. 19. Ibid., 356. 20. Sam Hunter, “David Smith’s New Sculpture,” in David Smith: Recent Sculpture, exh. cat. (New York: Otto Gerson Gallery, 1961), unpaginated. 21. Anne M. Wagner, “David Smith: Heavy Metal,” in A House Divided: American Art since 1955 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 114.

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22. Kenneth Noland, cited in Candida N. Smith, ed., The Fields of David Smith, exh. cat. (Mountainville, NY: Storm King Art Center, 1999), 53. 23. For more on Smith’s Spoleto residency, see Rosalind Krauss, Terminal Iron Works: The Sculpture of David Smith (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), 34–​37; E. A. Carmean Jr., David Smith, exh. cat. (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1982), 151–​53; and Stanley Marcus, David Smith: The Sculptor and His Work (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), 137–​45. 24. David Smith, “Report on Voltri,” in David Smith: 1906–​1965, ed. Garnett McCoy (New York: Praeger, 1973), 162. 25. Ibid., 161. 26. Ibid. 27. According to Krauss, “Because the railroad tunnels along the west coast of Italy were too low to accommodate the projected work, the flatcar sculpture was never built.” See Terminal Iron Works, 35. 28. Blake Stimson, The Pivot of the World (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 58. 29. They appeared in Cahiers d’Art in 1929 and Minotaure in 1933, in addition to other journals and catalogs. 30. Potts, The Sculptural Imagination, 133. 31. For a discussion of concepts of timelessness in Brancusi’s sculpture, see Margit Rowell, “Brancusi: Timelessness in a Modern Mode,” in Constantin Brancusi: 1876–​1957, ed. Friedrich Teja Bach, Margit Rowell, and Ann Temkin, exh. cat. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 38–​49. 32. The studio contained, as one contemporaneous observer noted, “great blocks of building stone, beams, trunks of trees, boulders and rocks, and here and there the highlight of a polished bronze.” Paul Morand, Constantin Brancusi, as cited by Ann Temkin, “Brancusi and His American Collectors,” in Bach, Rowell, and Temkin, Constantin Brancusi: 1876–​ 1957, 60. 33. Jon Wood, Close Encounters: The Sculptor’s Studio in the Age of the Camera, exh. cat. (Leeds, England: Henry Moore Institute, 2001), 20–​23. See also Marielle Tabart and Isabelle Monod-Fontaine, Brancusi Photographer, trans. Kim Sichel, exh. cat. (New York: Agrinde, 1979), 11. 34. Jon Wood discusses the trope of timelessness in the photographic stagings of Brancusi and Moore. See “A Household Name: Henry Moore’s Studio-Homes and Their Bearings, 1926–​46,” in Henry Moore: Critical Essays, ed. Jane Beckett and Fiona Russell (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2003), 30 and 34. 35. Rainer Maria Rilke, “Notes (2 December 1900),” in Rodin and Other Prose Pieces (London: Quartet Books, 1986), 74, emphasis in the original. 36. Ibid. 37. For a discussion of Rilke’s solitary individualism, see Kaja Silverman, Flesh of My Flesh (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009). 38. See Balzac, the Silhouette—​4.a.m., in “Heilbrunne Timeline of Art History,” Metropolitan Museum of Art, n.d., www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/33.43.36, accessed September 16, 2013. 39. Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” 34.

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40. Ibid. 41. Moore described his installation of the stones in 1968: “I went to the stone quarries in Derbyshire and bought a lot of random blocks of Hopton Wood stone. I had room and space enough at Burcroft to let the stones stand around in the landscape[,] and seeing them daily gave me fresh ideas for sculpture. Some of the stones were six or seven feet long and very odd shapes.” “Henry Spencer Moore” (1968), ed. John Hedgecoe, in Henry Moore: Writings and Conversations, ed. Alan Wilkinson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 222. For a discussion of Moore’s staging of his sculpture to resemble Stonehenge, see Sam Smiles, “Equivalents for the Megaliths: Prehistory and English Culture, 1920–​1950,” in The Geographies of Englishness: Landscape and the National Past, 1880–​1940, ed. D. Peters Corbett, Y. Holt, and F. Russell (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 199–​223. 42. W.  R. Valentiner, Origins of Modern Sculpture (New York: Wittenborn, 1946), 140. Valentiner names the sources of the photographs of Chinese tombs in his list of illustrations; they are taken from Osvald Síren, Chinese Sculpture from the Fifth to the Fourteenth Century (London: Ernest Benn, 1925), vol. 3, plate 554A; and Victor Segalen, Gilbert de Voisins, and Jean Lartigue, Mission Archéologique en Chine (1914 et 1917): Atlas, Vol. 1, La Sculpture et les Monuments Funéraires (Paris: Librairie Orientaliste Paul Geuthner, 1923), plate 7. 43. Penelope Curtis and Fiona Russell, “Henry Moore and the Post-war British Landscape: Monuments Ancient and Modern,” in Henry Moore: Critical Essays, ed. Jane Beckett and Fiona Russell (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2003), 140. 44. See Smith, letter to Lucille and Edgar Levy (November 1950), Edgar Levy and Lucille Corcos Levy Papers, AAA. 45. “The figures are placed in the ground the way people would place themselves in the street to talk to each other.” Bourgeois, “An Artist’s Words” (1954), in Destruction of the Father/ Reconstruction of the Father: Writings and Interviews, 1923–​1997, ed. Marie-Laure Bernadac and Hans-Ulrich Obrist (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 66. Originally published in Design Quarterly (Walker Art Center), no. 30 (1954): 18. 46. Susi Bloch, “An Interview with Louise Bourgeois,” Art Journal 35, no. 4 (Summer 1976): 372. 47. Ibid., 373. 48. Bourgeois, “An Artist’s Words,” 66. 49. Bloch, “An Interview with Louise Bourgeois,” 373. Mignon Nixon has described the Personage displays—​and attendant sculptures like Quarantania I—​as works of mourning. She writes, “It is not that all the figures are memorials, or even that all are figures from the past, but that all stand for emotional adversity and the work of overcoming it, the ‘mental work’ of living itself that is, for [Melanie] Klein, similar to mourning.” Fantastic Reality: Louise Bourgeois and a Story of Modern Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 156. 50. Bourgeois, “An Artist’s Words,” 66. 51. Alex Potts has situated Bourgeois’s Personage installations within a history of postwar and contemporary sculpture; he argues that their focus on “the psychic arena of encounter between viewer and work” emphasizes the “situation” of sculpture, placing her work

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closer to minimalism. “Louise Bourgeois: Sculptural Confrontations,” Oxford Art Journal 22, no. 2 (1999): 40. See also Alex Potts, “Hybrid Sculpture,” in Louise Bourgeois, exh. cat. (New York: Rizzoli; London: Tate Publishing, 2007). This chapter suggests a reading of these installations alongside others by modern sculptors to underscore how these scenes communicate proposals of autonomy and nonbelonging. 52. Elyse Speaks has argued that the displays “created a sense of place the characteristics of which were broad and contradictory.” In this chapter, rather than identifying these displays as shaping a place, I emphasize instead the provisional and open status of sculpture created by Bourgeois’s displays. “Space, Gender, Sculpture: Bourgeois, Nevelson, and the Changing Conditions of Sculpture in the 1950s,” Women’s Studies 40, no. 8 (2011): 1060, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00497878.2011.609416. 53. Smith made the Forgings when he was a visiting artist in residence at the University of Indiana, Bloomington. Hal Foster describes the process: “With a power forge operated by LeRoy Borton of Seward and Company in Bloomington, Smith shaped the Forgings from tall bars of thin steel, notching them in here, flattening them out there, cutting them open and plugging them again to create different textures and slight extrusions, pinching them a little, bending them a bit, but never to the point where the upward thrust of the given form is not the predominant effect. More than any of his prior pieces, the Forgings committed sculpture to an industrial mode of production.” “To Forge,” in David Smith: The Forgings, exh. cat. (New York: Gagosian Gallery, 2013), 11. 54. Stephen Melville and Margaret Iversen, “Plasticity: The Hegelian Writing of Art,” in Writing Art History: Disciplinary Departures (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 170. 55. Ibid. 56. Smith, “Sculpture: Art Forms in Architecture—​New Techniques Affect Both” (October 1940), in McCoy, David Smith, 44. 57. Ibid., 46. 58. Smith, lecture titled “Problems of the Contemporary Sculptor,” Metropolitan Art Association meeting, Detroit Institute of Art, January 23, 1952, David Smith Papers. In an undated note probably written in the 1950s, Smith wrote, “Sculpture has divorced itself from architecture. It is not dependent upon a setting or continuity for its impact. Since its origins were a picture it has now returned to its first state. Architecture is strictly a commercial art. It must represent other than the opinion of the creator. It keeps somebody’s head dry. Sculpture being in total contradiction serves no function for dry heads. The function of sculpture making—​is not to a practical end—​[sic].” Smith, untitled note (c. 1950), David Smith Papers. 59. Smith, untitled notes (c. 1950). 60. Smith, “The Artist and the Architect” (November 1957), in McCoy, David Smith, 145. 61. Ibid., 143. 62. David Smith, “Sculpture and Architecture,” Arts magazine 31, no. 8 (May 1957): 20. Smith gave a lecture at Pratt Institute on November 7, 1963, that drew heavily on this text. 63. David Smith, “Interview,” by David Sylvester, June 1961, in McCoy, David Smith, 168. 64. David Smith, “The Secret Letter” (interview with Thomas Hess, June 1964), in McCoy, David Smith, 178. 65. See Potts, The Sculptural Imagination, 162. According to Andrew Mitchell, Martin Hei-

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degger expressed doubts about the possibilities of public sculpture in the postwar realm; it was “complicit with the planned order of industrial society,” Mitchell writes, citing its prevalence in the design of public and corporate spaces. Yet, as Mitchell notes, for Heidegger, “all sculpture is ‘public’ sculpture,” since it is capable of thematizing art’s role in a place beyond itself. See Heidegger among the Sculptors: Body, Space, and the Art of Dwelling (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 36–​39. 66. Melville and Iversen, “Plasticity,” 170. 67. It is a paradox voiced by Theodor Adorno in Aesthetic Theory, trans. R. Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), as described by Alex Potts: “According to Adorno, the condition of any significant work of modern art is radically split between the promise of autonomy and its existence as social fact. A significant work of art work simultaneously resists incorporation within the fabric of the culture from which it emerges, and itself is part of that fabric.” “Autonomy in Post-war Art, Quasi-Heroic and Casual,” Oxford Art Journal 27, no. 1 (2004): 45. 68. Photographs taken by Ernst Scheidegger of Alberto Giacometti’s figures in the Swiss landscape repeat these terms by presenting sculpture staged in the familiar space of a walking path. 69. Frank O’Hara, letter to David Smith (August 17, 1961), David Smith Papers. 70. David Smith, letter to Lois Orswell (July 1961), as cited in Michael Brenson, “The Fields,” in David Smith: A Centennial, exh. cat. (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2006), 45. Smith moved his works “home” from his gallery in 1956, having severed all connection with the Willard Gallery and refused bids from other galleries. Writing to a friend, he said, “If any dealer wants my work, they can buy.” Letter to “GDT” (June 3, 1956), David Smith Papers. 71. As Alex Potts has observed, Smith’s sculptures related to their surroundings through a radical separation from it, unlike the sculpture of some later land artists, who pursued a project of marking landscape. See The Sculptural Imagination, 165.

4 . P I C T U R I N G C O L O R I N S PA C E

Epigraphs: Wallace Stevens, “The Auroras of Autumn,” Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose (New York: Library of America, 1997), 355–​56; Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind” (1961), in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, ed. Galen A. Johnson (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 133. 1. For a recent assessment of this shift in Smith’s practice, see Susan Behrends Frank, “David Smith Invents,” in David Smith Invents (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 12–​65. 2. David Smith, “Notes on My Work,” Arts magazine 34, no. 1 (February 1960): 44. 3. See Paula Wisotzki, “Artist and Worker: The Labour of David Smith,” Oxford Art Journal 28, no. 3 (2005): 356. 4. On his trip to Greece in 1930, Smith photographed sculptures in the National Archaeological Museum of Athens and noted their surface colors, writing in one instance: “unusually bright blue  / . . . shows light meander on yellow ground / decoration at feet

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in green.” See David Smith Photographic Archives, Estate of David Smith. Smith also secured paint samples of polychromed works from the National Archaeological Museum of Athens. In a January 1936 letter to friends Edgar Levy and Lucille Corcos, Smith wrote from Greece: “It is easy to understand the patine [sic] on the greek and roman statues. The romans got it all from the greeks. I’ve been reading Pliny and Vitruvius and Theophrastus and learning their methods. I intend to take color specimens from the colored statues in the museums for micro slides etc.” David Smith, letter to Edgar Levy and Lucille Corcos” (undated, c. January 1936), Edgar Levy and Lucille Corcos Levy Papers, AAA. 5. Smith, “Sculpture: Art Forms in Architecture—​New Techniques Affect Both” (Architec­ tural Record, October 1940), in David Smith: 1906–​1965, ed. Garnett McCoy (New York: Praeger, 1973), 46. 6. Ibid., 46, 47. 7. Ibid., 46 8. Ibid., 47. 9. Smith’s research of pigments and coatings was advanced enough to be cited in an extensive 1940 technical study of color by Ralph Mayer, The Artist’s Handbook of Materials and Techniques (New York: Viking, 1940). 10. Elizabeth McCausland, “David Smith’s Abstract Sculpture in Metals” (Springfield Republi­ can, March 31, 1940), reprinted in McCoy, David Smith, 216. 11. Anne Truitt, Daybook: The Journal of an Artist (1974–​79) (New York: Pantheon / Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1982), 81–​82, as cited in David Batchelor, ed., Colour: Documents in Contemporary Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 166. For Smith’s influence on Truitt, see Kristen Hileman, Anne Truitt: Perception and Reflection, exh. cat. (Washington, DC: Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, 2009), 154. 12. Anne M. Wagner, “The Threshold: Language and Vision in the Art of Anne Truitt,” in Anne Truitt Threshold: Works from the 1970s, exh. cat. (New York: Matthew Marks Gallery, 2013), 19. See also Wagner, “Disarming Time: The Art of Anne Truitt,” Artforum 48, no. 5 (January 2010). 13. Emily Genauer, “A Shahn Miracle,” New York Herald Tribune, October 15, 1961, as cited in Kianovsky, “Annotated Checklist of Sculpture (General Commentary),” in David Smith: A Centennial, exh. cat. (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2006), 367. 14. On the concept of the boundlessness of the color grid, see Briony Fer, “Color Manual,” in Color Chart: Reinventing Color, 1950 to Today, ed. Ann Temkin, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2008), 33. 15. Marion Horosko, “Interview with David Smith, New York October 25, 1964” (conducted for the program Profiles, radio station WNCN, New York), transcript of interview, 8, AAA. 16. Smith, in a note advertising his Portable Gallery Press slides, Giuseppe Panza Papers, 1956–​90, series 7, box 296, Special Collections, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. 17. Ibid. 18. Smith described his priming process in 1965: “First the iron is ground down so that it is raw, and it is primed with about fifteen coats of epoxy primer, and then a few coats of zinc . . . and then a few coats of white—​and then the color is put on—​after that; so it runs about twenty-five or thirty coats. ” Smith, in Gene Baro, “Some Late Words from David

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Smith,” Art International 9, no. 7 (October 1965): 49. Smith used two types of primer in his work: a zinc chromate primer, which ranges in color from yellow to green, and an iron oxide primer, which could come in different colors. For a conservator’s report on the layers of primer and top coats used in Smith’s Zig V (1961), see Albert Marshall, “A Study of the Surfaces of David Smith’s Sculpture,” in Conservation Research (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1995), 97–​99.

19.  Smith, in Baro, “Some Late Words from David Smith,” 50. 20. Ibid., 49. 21. Thierry de Duve’s influential essay “The Readymade and the Tube of Paint,” first published in 1986, described the changes brought to painting by ready-made paint. See “The Readymade and the Tube of Paint,” Kant after Duchamp (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996). 22. Frank Stella, as cited in David Batchelor, Chromophobia (London: Reaktion, 2000), 98. Frank Stella owned one of Smith’s 1937 painted sculptures, Untitled. 23. Fer, “Color Manual,” 33. 24. O’Hara wrote that Smith’s coats of paint included “several of rust-resistant paint of the kind used on battleships.” “David Smith: The Color of Steel,” Art News 60 (December 1961): 32. In his 1965 Bennington lecture, Smith offered a description of his paints: “The paint here is not artist’s paint. It is auto enamel, and I mix it; and it is much better than artist paint for outdoors. . . . It runs about twenty-five or thirty coats, and that’s about three times the paint coat on a Mercedes or about thirty times the paint coat on a Ford or Chevrolet. And if it doesn’t get scratched or hammered, I think the paint coat will last longer than I do. There is nothing better for outside painting than auto enamel, as far as I know.” Smith, in Baro, “Some Late Words from David Smith,” 49. According to Peter Stevens, however, Smith may have overestimated the resistance of layers of paint to weather. Stevens, director of the Estate of David Smith, interview by author, September 27, 2004. 25. Smith, in Baro, “Some Late Words from David Smith,” 50. 26. Smith, as cited in Rosalind Krauss, The Sculpture of David Smith: A Catalogue Raisonné (New York: Garland, 1977), 54–​55. 27. Barnett Newman, conversation with Frank O’Hara (The Continuity of Vision, Channel 13, WNDT-TV), 1964, transcript, 2, as cited in Ann Temkin, “Color Shift,” in Color Chart: Reinventing Color, 1950 to Today, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2008), 19. This exhibition was another instance in which Smith’s painted sculptures were elided from a history of sculpture. 28. Donald Judd, “Some Aspects of Color in General and Red and Black in Particular” (1993), in Donald Judd: Colorist, ed. D. Elger, exh. cat. (Ostfildern-Ruitt: Hatje Cantz, 2000), 112. 29. Of the major exhibitions of Smith’s sculpture in more recent years, a handful have focused on color. A 1998 Gagosian Gallery exhibition foregrounded Smith’s painted sculpture in Painted Steel: The Late Work of David Smith (New York: Gagosian Gallery, 1998). The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s 2006 retrospective of Smith’s sculpture presented a large percentage of works from the 1940s, many of which were painted. However, the show did not display Smith’s 1960s painted sculptures. Recent exhibitions in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., have also focused on Smith’s painted objects, albeit in different ways: David Smith: Cubes and Anarchy (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum

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of Art, 2011) stressed Smith’s surfaces, linking his painted objects to modernist pictorial abstraction. David Smith Invents (at the Phillips Collection, 2011) explored Smith’s color effects across media in his circa 1960 productions. For a conservator’s account of Smith’s paint, see Marshall, “A Study of the Surfaces of David Smith’s Sculpture.” Key scholarly accounts of Smith’s sculpture have left unexamined the role of color in his work. In his chapter on Smith, “Sculpture as Collage, as Monster: David Smith,” Alex Potts did not linger on the issue of paint in Smith’s sculpture. The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 158–​77. 30. Greenberg, “David Smith’s New Sculpture” (1964), in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 4:192. 31. The other executors were Ira Lowe, a lawyer based in Washington, D.C., and Robert Motherwell. 32. See Florence Rubenfeld, “Icarus in the Art World,” in Clement Greenberg: A Life (New York: Scribner, 1997), 19–​30. 33. Greenberg, letter to David Smith (November 4, 1951), in Sketchbook 40, David Smith Papers. 34. The work in question, 17 H’s (1970), was stripped of its cadmium red paint during the course of its sale by the Leo Castelli Gallery to the collector Edward J. Gallagher (who subsequently donated it to the University of Arizona Art Museum). On learning of the alterations, Smith wrote letters to Arts and Art News declaring it without value as a work of art: “Since my sculpture, 17 H’s . . . during the process of sale and resale, has suffered a willful act of vandalism . . . I renounce it as my original work and brand it a ruin. My name cannot be attributed to it, and I shall exercise my legal rights against anyone making this misrepresentation. . . . I declare its value to be only its weight of 60 lbs. of scrap metal.” Letter to Art News (Summer 1960), David Smith Papers, Estate of David Smith. Writing to Leo Castelli, Smith stated that he refused to repaint the sculpture. Letter to Leo Castelli (August 7, 1960), David Smith Papers, Estate of David Smith. 35. Krauss, Terminal Iron Works, 102. Krauss cites Smith’s own statements on color in her footnotes, but she does not address the issue of color in her book. 36. On the concluding page of her book, she wrote, “Although Smith was willing to concede that the color he applied to the surfaces of his earlier work was largely arbitrary and almost never really successful, he was pleased with the burnishing on the Cubis. It is the one place in Smith’s art where surface texture and what I have been calling surfaceness seem to coincide.” Terminal Iron Works: The Sculpture of David Smith (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), 170. 37. William Rubin’s essay “Smith’s Painted Sculptures” is one notable exception. In Painted Steel: The Late Work of David Smith, exh. cat. (New York: Gagosian Gallery, 1998), 7–​12. 38. Sam Hunter, “David Smith’s New Sculpture,” in David Smith: Recent Sculpture, exh. cat. (New York: Otto Gerson Gallery, 1961), unpaginated. 39. Hilton Kramer, “The Latest Thing in Pittsburgh” (Arts magazine 36 [January 1962]: 24–​ 27), as cited in Kianovsky, “Annotated Checklist of Sculpture (General Commentary),” in David Smith: A Centennial, 368. 40. Dore Ashton, “Art USA 1962” (London Studio 163 [March 1962]), 94, as cited in Kianovsky,

NOTES TO PAGES 126–27

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“Annotated Checklist of Sculpture (General Commentary),” in David Smith: A Centennial, 368. 41. David Carrier has argued that Krauss’s break was over a point of detail and not a matter of principle. This chapter underscores Smith’s use of white paint—​erroneously referred to as primer by Carrier—​and emphasizes that the changes made to his work were not incidental. Rosalind Krauss and American Philosophical Art Criticism (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002), 29. 42. According to Rosalind Krauss in “Changing the Work of David Smith,” and the editors’ “Issues and Commentary,” these sculptures were altered as follows: Circle and Box (1963), Untitled (1963), Oval Node I (1963), Lunar Arc (1961), and Primo Piano III (1962) had been sandblasted or ground and their newly rust-colored steel surfaces then covered with a glossy varnish; Rebecca Circle (1961) had been allowed to weather so that its paint deteriorated and uneven streaks of rust took over; and Wagon II (1964) and Voltri XVIII (1962) had been stripped and repainted rust brown. “Changing the Work of David Smith,” Art in America 62, no. 5 (September–​October 1974): 30–​33. As Peter Stevens, director of the Estate of David Smith, has pointed out, however, Wagon II and Voltri XVIII were not stripped, since they had not been painted by Smith. A removable varnish similar to the one used by Smith was put on these works. All five of the white sculptures that had been stripped by Greenberg have subsequently been restored to the painted, white surface they had at the time of Smith’s death. Email to the author, April 28, 2014. 43. “Issues and Commentary,” Art in America 62, no. 5 (September–​October 1974): 30. The essay’s publication coincided with the inclusion of several of Smith’s altered sculptures in an outdoor exhibition in Newport, Rhode Island, titled Monumenta, and an exhibition of Dan Budnik’s photographs at the museum of the State University of New York, Albany. Peter Stevens has observed that Greenberg did not address the issue of conservation. A storage facility for Smith’s work was not built until 1977; it was constructed at the insistence of Candida and Rebecca Smith. Stevens, interview by the author, September 27, 2004. 44. Krauss, “Changing the Work of David Smith,” 32. 45. It is not known when Smith painted Untitled (1955) white; the paint he used was a white oil-based artist’s paint, which was different from the industrial enamel he used on larger sculptures, such as the Primo Piano series. Krauss noted the white color of Untitled (1955) in The Sculpture of David Smith: A Catalogue Raisonné, 68, fig. 351. 46. See n. 18. 47. Critics have offered differing readings of the role of white in Smith’s painting practice since the 1970s. In a 1978 reply to Clement Greenberg, Krauss took white to be a sign of Smith’s sculptural process, a step toward color: “At the time of Smith’s death, eight of his large-scale sculptures were left in a condition that is assumed to be unfinished, since they were covered with a solid coat of white paint. Had the artist lived, this condition might have been modified in some way now impossible to determine. Judging, however, from finished examples of Smith’s sculpture, the options range from one solid color, to black planes contrasted with white ones, to a more elaborate kind of polychromy.” See “Rosalind Krauss Replies,” Art in America 66, no. 2 (March–​April 1978): 5. In the catalogue raisonné, she mistook the white coat on the Primo Piano sculptures for a primer, writing

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TO PAGES 127–28

that they were “all originally painted white. Smith had intended for these sculptures to be polychrome. At the time of his death, they were still in the fields at Bolton Landing near his house, sitting covered with their blank coats of white primer, waiting for Smith to visualize the appropriate colors for them.” The Sculpture of David Smith: A Catalogue Raisonné, 100. (As stated in n. 18, Smith’s primers were not white.) Irving Sandler took an opposite view, identifying the white sculptures as finished. In 1999, he recalled that Smith “pointed to an all-white piece and remarked that he had put seventeen coats of white on it before he got the color right.” “David Smith, a Memoir,” in The Fields of David Smith, ed. Candida Smith, exh. cat. (Mountainville, NY: Storm King Art Center, 1999), 50. It is unclear whether Smith intended to leave the sculptures in the Primo Piano series white, or whether he intended to paint them other colors. In a 1963 letter to Robert Motherwell and Helen Frankenthaler, Smith wrote, “Painting white coats on all the primed sculpture—​before I paint the color. Getting some work done.” Smith, “Letter to Bob and Helen,” July 27, 1963, David Smith Papers, supplement (NDSmithD), owned by Estate of Helen Frankenthaler, Archives of American Art. Just before his death, Smith addressed the role of white in his Primo Piano series in a Bennington College lecture on May 12, 1965: “Here is a sculpture—​this group is called Primo Piano, only because on the first floor nothing happens—​whatever takes place is on the second floor—​and this has been primed and is painted white, and I put it out three years ago, and I should have painted it with colors before this, but I have been doing other things, and I hope to finish it this summer.” Smith, in Baro, “Some Late Words from David Smith,” 49. In Smith’s own estimation, white operated as a blank slate in his painting process in the 1960s—​it was a step toward color. Yet the fact that the artist left the sculptures white for three years begs the following question: is it possible that, at the time of his death, Smith was exploring white as a final color? During the early 1960s, the sculptor was making spray drawings and paintings that examined white forms against a luminous ground (see plate 15). Late sculptures, too, were part of a broader exploration of negative space. Works such as Becca (1965) and Untitled (Candida) (1965) are composed of burnished stainless steel planes that both reflect and cut out the surroundings—​Smith photographed these sculptures in the fields at Bolton Landing, where they were abstracted from their environment like cutout shapes. Both the sprays and the late sculptures examine how two-dimensional planes could be set against densely colored backgrounds, as negative forms seen against a positive space. It is possible that Smith’s use of white paint in the Primo Piano series could have been tied to a broader exploration of empty space in sculptural forms; when seen against the fields in which they were installed, the sculptures would have been viewed as shapes cut out from the landscape around them. 48. Beverly Pepper, letter to the editor, Art in America 63, no. 2 (March–​April 1975): 136. 49. The relevant sentences read: “The arts, then, have been hunted back to their mediums, and there they have been isolated, concentrated and defined. It is by virtue of its medium that each art is unique and strictly itself.” “Towards a Newer Laocoon,” in Greenberg, Clement Greenberg, 1:32. For a recent discussion of Greenberg’s formalism, see Stephen Melville, “What the Formalist Knows,” in Writing Art History: Disciplinary Departures, ed. Stephen Melville and Margaret Iversen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 82–​86.

NOTES TO PAGE 128

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5 0. Greenberg, “David Smith’s New Sculpture,” 4:191. 51. Greenberg, “Sculpture in Our Time” (1958), in Greenberg, Clement Greenberg, 4:59. 52. Ibid. 53. Hope Mauzerall, “What’s the Matter with Matter?: Problems in the Criticism of Greenberg, Fried, and Krauss,” Art Criticism 13, no. 3 (1998): 81–​96. She noted how Greenberg’s modernist aesthetic of form, essence, and abstraction was in line with the larger ambitions of Western metaphysics. See also Yve-Alain Bois, Painting as Model (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), xix. 54. Greenberg, “David Smith: Comments on His Latest Works” (1966) in Greenberg, Clement Greenberg, 4:225. 55. Greenberg, “Sculpture in Our Time,” 4:60. 56. Greenberg wrote of Helmholtzian Landscape: “This is one sculpture of Smith’s in which applied color is completely successful.” “Draft of David Smith Comments 1966,” unpaginated, Clement Greenberg Papers, Special Collections, Getty Research Institute. In an unpublished 1991 interview by Florence Rubenfeld, Greenberg repeated this claim, “Smith did one good color piece, the Helmholtz one. It was always provisional, his color.” See Clement Greenberg, 30. 57. Greenberg, “Draft of David Smith Comments 1966.” 58. Greenberg, “David Smith’s New Sculpture,” 4:191. 59. Ibid. 60. Greenberg, “Contemporary Sculpture: Anthony Caro” (1965), in Greenberg, Clement Greenberg, 4:208. 61. Ibid. 62. Greenberg, “The New Sculpture” (1949), in Greenberg, Clement Greenberg, 2:319. 63. Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” (1939), in Greenberg, Clement Greenberg, 1:12. 64. As William Rubin has pointed out, Krauss herself is similarly responsible for this omission. Her monograph Terminal Iron Works did not address the role of color in Smith’s work. See Rubin, “Smith’s Painted Sculptures,” 8. 65. Krauss, “Changing the Work of David Smith,” 30–​31. 66. See Alex Potts, “Colors of Sculpture,” in The Color of Life: Polychromy in Sculpture from Antiquity to the Present, ed. Roberta Panzanelli, exh. cat. (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2008), 84. In a footnote, Potts argues that Greenberg’s removal of Smith’s paint was not “motivated by any objection he had in principle to Smith’s painted sculpture” (97n47). This chapter departs from that reading. 67. Ibid., 83. 68. Exploring a history of “colour-blindness with regard to sculpture,” Andreas Blühm cites black-and-white photography as playing a key role in formalist preferences for monochrome sculpture by, for instance, Heinrich Wölfflin. Introduction to The Colour of Sculpture: 1840–​1910, ed. Andreas Blühm, exh. cat. (Zwolle: Waanders Uitgevers, 1996), 13–​14. For recent studies of polychrome sculpture, see also Jacqueline Lichtenstein, The Blind Spot: An Essay on the Relations between Painting and Sculpture in the Modern Age, trans. Chris Miller (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2008); and Roberta Panzanelli, ed., The Color of Life: Polychromy in Sculpture from Antiquity to the Present, exh. cat. (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2008).

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TO PAGES 128–31

69. Batchelor, Chromophobia, 22–​23. “It is, I believe, no exaggeration to say that, in the West, since Antiquity, color has been systematically marginalized, reviled, diminished and degraded. Generations of philosophers, artists, art historians and cultural theorists of one stripe or another have kept this prejudice alive, warm, fed and groomed. As with all prejudices, its manifest form, its loathing, masks a fear: fear of contamination and corruption by something that is unknown or appears unknowable. This loathing of color, this fear of corruption through color, needs a name: chromophobia.” 70. Ludwig Wittgenstein describes the linguistic intangibility of color in Remarks on Color, trans. Linda McAlister (Oxford: Blackwell, 1977). These observations—​here and in the rest of the paragraph—​have benefited from John Gage, Color and Culture (Boston: Little, Brown, 1993); and Charles Riley, Color Codes (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1995). 71. Steven Melville, “Color Has Not Yet Been Named: Objectivity in Deconstruction,” in Deconstruction and the Visual Arts: Art, Media, Architecture, ed. Peter Brunette and David Wills (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 45. He writes, “Color can also seem bottomlessly resistant to nomination, attaching itself absolutely to its own specificity and the surfaces on which it has or finds its visibility, even as it also appears subject to endless alteration arising through its juxtaposition with other colors. Subjective and objective, physically fixed and culturally constructed, absolutely proper and endlessly displaced, color can appear as an unthinkable scandal. The story of color and its theory within the history of art is a history of oscillations between its reduction to charm or ornament and its valorizations as the radical truth of painting. From these oscillations other vibrations are repeatedly set in motion that touch and disturb matters as purely art historical as the complex interlocking borders among and within the individual arts and as culturally far reaching as codings of race and gender and images of activity and passivity.” 72. O’Hara, “David Smith: The Color of Steel,” 69. 73. Ibid., 32–​33. 74. Ibid., 69. 75. Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” 141. 76. Horosko, “Interview with David Smith, New York, October 25, 1964,” 4. 77. Smith described how in a bar one evening, “on a piece of cardboard, I made a unity of concaves in orders I had not found in my previous concaves—​they shined—​and the material demanded stainless steel—​which I have now started to put into work.” Cited in Smith, David Smith by David Smith, ed. Cleve Gray (London: Thames and Hudson, 1968), 75. 78. Horosko, “Interview with David Smith, New York, October 25, 1964,” 1. 79. Smith, “Thoughts on Sculpture,” College Art Journal 13, no. 2 (Winter 1954): 98. 80. Smith, “Notes on My Work,” 44. 81. Smith, “Who Is the Artist? How Does He Act?” Everyday Art Quarterly (Walker Art Center), no. 23 (1952): 20. 82. Smith, lecture titled “A Sculptor’s Point of View” (May 1, 1953), Southwestern Art Conference, University of Oklahoma, Norman, David Smith Papers. 83. Smith, transcript of radio broadcast, WNYC–​New York, October 30, 1952, David Smith Papers.

NOTES TO PAGES 131–37

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84. Smith, untitled notes, c. 1957, David Smith Papers. Smith cited the work of Josef Albers in a 1964 interview by Frank O’Hara: “I have just now got some real nice, rough, raw colors once in a while, but not as good as I will get. Now, if you saw Albers’ show, you’ll know that some of the pictures in there are real beauts. You know, raw as can be—​acid green and raspberry—​and that pleases me highly.” Frank O’Hara, “Sculpting Master of Bolton Landing,” dir. Bruce Minnix and Ina Korek for the series Art: New York, produced by Colin Clark, Channel 13/WNET-TV, New York, transcript by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Estate of David Smith, published in Sarah Hamill, ed., David Smith: Works, Writings, Interview (Barcelona: Ediciones Polígrafa, 2011), 148. 85. Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” 141. 86. O’Hara, “David Smith: The Color of Steel,” 33. 87. Smith, “The New Sculpture,” in McCoy, David Smith, 83. 88. Smith, in Baro, “Some Late Words from David Smith,” 49. 89. Ibid. Baro’s edited notes are in parentheses. 90. Ibid. 91. Ibid., 50. 92. O’Hara, “Sculpting Master of Bolton Landing,” 148–​49. 93. Smith, in Baro, “Some Late Words from David Smith,” 49. 94. Ibid. Baro’s edited note is in parentheses. 95. Hilton Kramer, “The Latest Thing in Pittsburgh” (Arts magazine 36 [January 1962]: 24–​ 27), as cited in Kianovsky, “Annotated Checklist of Sculpture (General Commentary),” David Smith: A Centennial, 368. 96. Brian O’Doherty, “Art: Still-Lifes and New Sculpture” (New York Times, October 11, 1961), as cited in Kianovsky, “Annotated Checklist of Sculpture (General Commentary),” David Smith: A Centennial, 367.

5. T H E T E R R A I N O F T H E V U L G A R

Epigraph: Frank O’Hara, “David Smith: The Color of Steel,” Art News 60 (December 1961): 34. 1. Joan Pachner notes the relationship between body and sculpture in the nude photographs in “David Smith’s Photographs,” in David Smith: Photographs 1931–​1965, exh. cat. (New York: Matthew Marks Gallery, 1998), 111. 2. According to one model, Tina Matkovic Spiro, Smith made several of his paintings freehand, without reference to photography. Spiro, a Skidmore college student at the time, worked in Smith’s studio and modeled for Smith’s nude paintings and drawings in late 1963 and early 1964; he directed her to pose as a Greek kore. Tina Matkovic Spiro, email to the author, December 6, 2005. 3. Brooks Adams, “David Smith’s Last Nudes,” in David Smith: The Last Nudes (New York: Gagosian Gallery, 2000), 9. 4. Ibid. 5. Michael Brenson, “David Smith’s Embrace,” in David Smith: To and from the Figure (New York: Knoedler, 1995), unpaginated. 6. Ibid.

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TO PAGES 137– 44

7. Abigail Solomon-Godeau, “Reconsidering Erotic Photography,” in Photography at the Dock: Essays on Photographic History, Institutions, and Practices (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 233. 8. Lowe was one of three executors appointed by Smith to manage his estate on his death. The 1960s nude photographs were not included in the photographic archive that was sent to the Archives of American Art as part of the David Smith Papers in 1965. None of the negatives have been found in the Estate of David Smith or in Lowe’s papers. Since Smith saved his negatives, it is possible that the negatives for the nudes were destroyed after the artist’s death. Peter Stevens, director of the Estate of David Smith, interview by the author, January 3, 2002. 9. Smith, “The Secret Letter” (interview with Thomas Hess, June 1964), in David Smith: 1906–​1965, ed. Garnett McCoy (New York: Praeger, 1973), 180–​81. At least three of Smith’s models were Bennington College students. Gloria Gil, interview by the author, Burlington, Vermont, March 12, 2005. 10. Smith, “Aesthetics, the Artist and the Audience” (September 24, 1952), in McCoy, David Smith, 105. 11. Smith wrote in 1952: “From the aesthetic point of view, at the time of creation, the work of art deals with vulgarization.” “The Sculptor and His Problems” (August 23, 1952), in McCoy, David Smith, 87. 12. Smith considered the transition from crudity (the aesthetic of the new) to beauty (the aesthetic of the traditional) to be part of a historical process. In 1954, Smith discussed the impact of the 1913 Armory show: “Everybody now accepts those 1914 crudities as beauties, but there is always a hangover group which holds that beauty ended back there and that present advance art is not beauty but crudity. Beauty is not a word the artist likes to use unless it can be meant to represent his particular canons. Too often the limitation of verbal reference holds beauty to a sunset, which is not meant to change.” Smith, lecture, Buffalo, New York (April 1954), David Smith Papers. 13. Smith, “Economic Support of Art in America Today” (October 30, 1953), in McCoy, David Smith, 108. 14. Smith, “Memories to Myself” (May 5, 1960), in McCoy, David Smith, 155. 15. Smith, “On Abstract Art” (February 15, 1940), in McCoy, David Smith, 37. Smith also complained that “bromidic quotations, realistic sex imagery, and acts of pretentious idealism too often serve as standard specifications for sculpture.” “Sculpture: Art Forms in Architecture—​New Techniques Affect Both” (October 1940), in McCoy, David Smith, 44. 16. Smith, “Sculpture: Art Forms in Architecture—​New Techniques Affect Both,” 44. The full quotation reads: “Too often the architect misses such unity by making (or allowing) the sculpture to function as a mere billboard.” 17. Rosalind Krauss has explored how Smith’s imagery joined the violence of war and rape using the imagery of the cannon as phallus. See Terminal Iron Works: The Sculpture of David Smith (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), 56–​71. 18. Smith also took a small number of color slide transparencies of nudes in the early 1960s; however, the majority of his photographs were black and white. The color slide transparencies are unpublished. The sculptor also continued to make one-on-one and group shots of sculpture in color and black and white during this period.

NOTES TO PAGES 145–52

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19. T. J. Clark, “In Defense of Abstract Expressionism,” in Farewell to an Idea (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 393–​94. 20. Ibid., 384. Ruskin also added, “Disorder in a drawing-room is vulgar, in an antiquary’s study, not.” Here, the distinction turns on differences between domesticity and urbanism, between the home and pursuits of knowledge and history. “Of Vulgarity,” in Modern Painters (London: George Allen, 1897), 5:299. 21. In his posthumously published book Aesthetic Theory (1969), Theodor Adorno argued that the vulgar operated as the return of the repressed. He underscored how the vulgar is the “other” to the art of “the emancipatory bourgeoisie”: “The archetypes of the vulgar that the art of the emancipatory bourgeoisie held in check, sometimes ingeniously—​in its clowns, servants, and Papagenos—​are the grinning advertisement beauties whose praise of toothpaste brands unites the billboards of all lands; those who know they are being cheated by so much feminine splendor blacken out the all too brilliant teeth of these archetypes and in total innocence make the truth visible above the gleam of culture.” Aesthetic Theory, trans. R. Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 240. 22. Cornelia Butler, “The Woman Problem: On the Contemporaneity of de Kooning’s Women,” in Willem de Kooning: Tracing the Figure (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 187. Carol Duncan writes that de Kooning’s Woman I refers to, without actually being, pornography—​the series depends “on the viewer ‘getting’ the reference but must stop there.” “The MoMA’s Hot Momas,” Art Journal 48, no. 2 (Summer 1989): 177–​78. 23. See, for instance, Eleanor, in Museum of Modern Art, www.moma.org/collection/object. php?object_id=124495, accessed September 25, 2013. 24. For a discussion of the gendered constructions of vision in Weston’s nudes, see Carol Armstrong, “This Photography Which Is Not One: In the Gray Zone with Tina Modotti,” October 101 (Summer 2002): 19–​52. 25. Terminal Iron Works, 126. Krauss notes that Smith’s assessment was likely a result of his political commitment to Marxism in the late 1930s and 1940s. See ibid., 130. 26. Krauss, Terminal Iron Works, 140. 27. These photographs were likely made when Smith was working on a series of ceramic plates with nudes for Art and America in 1964. For an exhibition organized by Cleve Gray, sculptors and painters were invited to use pottery to produce low-cost artworks. Smith made more than one hundred of these plates at the Bennington Pottery Works, owned by friends David and Gloria Gil. Londa Weisman, a model for the plates, recalls Smith posing her body inside a wheel. In an interview with Gloria Gil about this series, Weisman described the process: “And the best part of it was that David knew he was gonna [sic] be drawing on something round and so he brought a huge iron wheel that had been off some kind of [illegible]. It was a big enough diameter that I could pose inside of[,] as if that were a plate[,] and that gave him a way to orient his drawing in that shape.” See Gloria Gil, “Bennington Potters Project” (unpublished manuscript, 2001), 10–​11. This document is a compilation of Gloria Gil’s interviews with other sculptors and potters associated with the Bennington Pottery Works. 28. For a brief discussion of these photographs, see Paola Mola, Brancusi: The White Work (Milan: Skira; Venice: Peggy Guggenheim Collection, 2005), 167.

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TO PAGES 155–63

29. See Friedrich Teja Bach, Margit Rowell, and Ann Temkin, Constantin Brancusi: 1876–​ 1957 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 264. 30. Clement Greenberg, “David Smith: Comments on His Latest Works” (Art in America, January–​February 1966), in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 4:224–​25. 31. Frank O’Hara, “Sculpting Master of Bolton Landing,” dir. Bruce Minnix and Ina Korek for the series Art: New York, produced by Colin Clark, Channel 13/WNET-TV, New York, transcript by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Estate of David Smith, published in Sarah Hamill, ed., David Smith: Works, Writings, Interviews (Barcelona: Ediciones Polígrafa, 2011), 150–​51. 32. Krauss cites a condensed version of the interview in a footnote; the absence of laughter notations supports her interpretation. In her text, the interview reads: “Well they’re all girl sculptures. Oh, they’re all girls. . . . I don’t make boy sculptures.” Terminal Iron Works, 93. 33. Ibid., 153. 34. Ibid., 91. 35. Ibid., 93. 36. Ibid. 37. Alex Potts, “Personages: Imperfect and Persistent,” in David Smith: Personage (New York: Gagosian, 2006), 17. 38. O’Hara, “Sculpting Master of Bolton Landing,” 151. 39. Alex Potts, The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 177. 40. Ibid., 176. 41. Although the paintings were not illustrated in the catalogue, according to Brooks Adams, they were included in the show. See “David Smith’s Last Nudes,” 7. 42. The show also excluded a series of ceramic plates depicting nudes that Smith made in 1964. 43. A series of photographs by Dan Budnik show how Smith modeled these massive forms by taping empty liquor boxes together to form small maquettes. 44. Smith, undated note, cited in Rosalind Krauss, The Sculpture of David Smith: A Catalogue Raisonné (New York: Garland, 1977), 116. 45. Donald Judd, “In the Galleries” (Arts magazine, 1964), in Donald Judd: Complete Writings, 1959–​1975 (Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1975), 145. 46. Ibid. 47. Sheldon Nodelman, “David Smith” (February 1969), cited in Sarah B. Kianovsky, “Annotated Checklist of Sculpture (General Commentary),” in David Smith: A Centennial, exh. cat. (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2006), 339. 48. Smith and Caro met while the latter artist was in residence at Bennington College in 1963. Clement Greenberg pointed out the connection between Cubi XXIII and Caro’s sculpture in 1966 and noted that “this was not the first time [Smith] used legs instead of a base or pedestal, but it was the first time he made them the theme of a work.” “David Smith: Comments on His Latest Works,” 4:225. Edward F. Fry also explored the connection between Smith’s and Caro’s use of the horizontal ground plane, focusing on Smith’s

NOTES TO PAGES 163–70

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anthropomorphism. David Smith (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1969), 161. See also Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood” (1967), in Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 161–​62. 49. For a discussion of the modernist pedestal and the turn to a situational sculpture, see Alex Potts, “Giacometti and the Basis of Sculpture,” in Giacometti: Critical Essays, ed. P. Read and J. Kelly (Surrey, England: Ashgate, 2009). 50. Krauss, Terminal Iron Works, 178–​81. 51. O’Hara, “David Smith: The Color of Steel,” 34. In a letter to Smith, O’Hara described these observations more exuberantly: “They make me feel like the world going round and round and not knowing what’s going on, or, in a word, alive. . . . PS What I think I mean by the above is I’d like to be one of those sculptures!” Letter to David Smith (August 17, 1961), David Smith Papers, Estate of David Smith.

CONCLUSION

1. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” (2nd version, 1936), in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938–​1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott et al. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), 106. 2. Ibid., 109. 3. Steven Melville and Margaret Iversen, Writing Art History: Disciplinary Departures (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 170, 167–​68. 4. The photograph, which was enlarged to fill three-quarters of a two-page spread, accompanied Fairfield Porter’s essay “David Smith: Steel into Sculpture,” Art News 56, no. 5 (September 1957): 40–​43. 5. Smith, “The New Sculpture” (1952), in David Smith: 1906–​1965, ed. Garnett McCoy (New York: Praeger, 1973), 82. 6. Smith wrote, “[The sculptor’s] feeling for natural constants such as gravity, space and hard objects are closer to his medium and can flow more freely into realization than in any other medium.” Smith, lecture titled “Problems of the Contemporary Sculptor,” Metropolitan Art Association meeting, Detroit Institute of Art (January 23, 1952), David Smith Papers. 7. See, for instance, Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” October 8 (Spring 1979). 8. Robert Morris, “The Present Tense of Space” (1978), in Continuous Project Altered Daily: The Writings of Robert Morris (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 201–​2. See also David Green, “ ‘An Image of an Image’: Photography and Robert Morris’s Continuous Project Altered Daily,” in Time and Photography, ed. Jan Baetens, Alexander Streitberger, and Hilde Van Gelder (Leuven, Belgium: Leuven University Press, 2010), 165–​83. 9. Robert Smithson, “Art through the Camera’s Eye” (1971), Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 371. Carl Andre also voiced his opposition to photography: “I hate photography; I hate photographs; I hate to take photographs; I hate to be photographed; I hate my works to be photographed. I think it’s an atrocity that the photograph or reproduction of a work of art has replaced the work of art

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10.

11. 12. 13.

in the contemplation of art students and so forth.” “Against Photography” (1972), in Cuts: Texts 1959–​2004, ed. James Meyer (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 180. See Darsie M. Alexander, “Reluctant Witness: Photography and Documentation of 1960s and 1970s Art,” in Work Ethic, ed. Helen H. Molesworth, exh. cat. (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2003), 53–​64; Robert A. Sobieszek, Robert Smithson: Photo Works (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994); and Jeff Wall, “ ‘Marks of Indifference’: Aspects of Photography in, or as, Conceptual Art” (1995), in The Last Picture Show: Artists Using Photography, 1960–​1982, ed. Douglas Fogle, exh. cat. (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2003), 32–​44. See Robert Smithson, “Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan,” Artforum 8, no. 1 (September 1969). Briony Fer, “Crazy about Saturn: Gabriel Orozco Interviewed by Briony Fer,” in Gabriel Orozco, exh. cat. (Mexico City: Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, 2006), 57. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Gabriel Orozco: Sculpture as Recollection,” in Gabriel Orozco, 209.

NOTES TO PAGES 178–79

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

ARCHIVES ARCHIVES OF AMERICAN ART, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, WASHINGTON, DC

American Association of University Women Records, 1935–​55 (unmicrofilmed). David Smith Papers, 1926–​65 (NDSmith1–​NDSmith6). Owned by the Estate of David Smith, New York. Microfilmed by the Archives of American Art. David Smith Papers, supplement (NDSmithD). Helen Frankenthaler and Robert Motherwell material about David Smith, 1953–​65. Owned by Estate of Helen Frankenthaler. Microfilmed by the Archives of American Art. David Smith Papers, supplement (N738). Everett Ellin Gallery records relating to David Smith, 1960–​63. Owned by Everett Ellin. Microfilmed by the Archives of American Art. David Smith Papers, supplement (2300). David Smith sketchbook, 1954–​69. Owned by Adam Mekler. Microfilmed by the Archives of American Art. Dorothy Dehner Oral History Interviews. Conducted by Garnett McCoy, October 1965 and December 1966. Dorothy Dehner Papers, 1920–​87 (D298, 1372). Edgar Levy and Lucille Corcos Levy Papers relating to David Smith (NDSmithE1). Everett Ellin Gallery Records relating to David Smith, 1960–​63 (N738). Herman Cherry, letters from David Smith, 1950–​64 (1037). Horosko, Marian. “Interview with David Smith, New York, October 25, 1964.” Conducted for the program Profiles, radio station WNCN, New York. Jan Matulka Papers, 1923–​60 (D251). John D. Graham Papers, 1799–​88 (4042).

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Kenneth Noland Papers relating to David Smith, c. 1952–​84 (unmicrofilmed). New York Artists’ Equity Association Records, 1944–​2010 (unmicrofilmed). Sculptors’ Guild Records, 1915–​79 (D262A). Willard Gallery Records, 1917–​73 (NDSmithA, 986). ESTATE OF DAVID SMITH, NEW YORK

David Smith Papers. (This archive has been and continues to be updated since being cataloged and microfilmed by the Archives of American Art.) David Smith Personal Library. David Smith Photographic Archives. GETTY RESEARCH INSTITUTE, LOS ANGELES

Alexander Liberman Photographic Archives. Clement Greenberg Papers. Boxes 25, 27, 32, 33, 35. Special Collections. Dan Budnik Photographic Archives. Giuseppe Panza Papers, 1956–​90. Series 7, Box 296. HENRY MOORE FOUNDATION, PERRY GREEN, ENGLAND

Errol Jackson Archives. Henry Moore Photographic Archives. MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, NEW YORK

Department of Publications Collection on Proposed David Smith Monograph. Museum of Modern Art Archives. Series 1-4.

UNPUBLISHED INTERVIEWS

Gil, Gloria. “Bennington Potters Project.” Unpublished manuscript, 2001. Pachner, Joan. “Interview with Dorothy Dehner, New York, August 20, 1986.” ———. “Interview with Ralph and Ethel Paiewonsky, New York, October 14, 1986.”

PUBLISHED BOOKS, ARTICLES, REVIEWS

Adams, Brooks. “David Smith’s Last Nudes.” In David Smith: The Last Nudes. New York: Gagosian Gallery, 2000. Adorno, Theodor. Aesthetic Theory. Translated by R. Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Adorno, Theodor, and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002. Ajac, Bénédicte, and Nat Trotman. “Chronology.” In David Smith: A Centennial. New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2006. Exhibition catalog. Alexander, Darsie M. “Reluctant Witness: Photography and the Documentation of 1960s and 1970s Art.” In Work Ethic, edited by H. Molesworth. University Park: Penn State University Press, 2003. Exhibition catalog.

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———. “Slideshow.” In Slide Show: Projected Images in Contemporary Art. Baltimore: Baltimore Museum of Art, 2005. Exhibition catalog. Alexander, Stuart. “Andreas Feininger: Early Work.” The Archive (University of Arizona, Tucson), no. 17 (March 1983): 4–​14. Ameringer, Will. “After Image.” In David Smith: Sprays from Bolton Landing. London: Anthony d’Offay Gallery, 1985. Exhibition catalog. Andre, Carl. Cuts: Texts 1959–​2004. Edited by James Meyer. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005. Armstrong, Carol. Scenes in a Library: Reading the Photograph in the Book, 1843–​1875. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998. ———. “This Photography Which Is Not One: In the Gray Zone with Tina Modotti.” October 101 (Summer 2002): 19–​52. Arnold, Dana, and Stephen Bending, eds. Tracing Architecture: The Aesthetics of Antiquarianism. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. Ashton, Dore. “David Smith in Protest.” In David Smith: Medals for Dishonor, edited by Matthew Marks and Peter Stevens. New York: Independent Curators, 1996. Bach, Friedrich Teja, Margit Rowell, and Ann Temkin. Constantin Brancusi: 1876–​1957. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995. Exhibition catalog. Baker, Malcolm. Figured in Marble: The Making and Viewing of Eighteenth-Century Sculpture. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2000. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. The Dialogic Imagination. Edited by Michael Holquist. Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. Baldassari, Anne. Picasso and Photography: The Dark Mirror. Paris: Flammarion, 1997. Exhibition catalog. ———. Picasso Working on Paper. New York: Saint Martin’s Press, 2000. Bargellesi-Severi, Guglielmo, ed. Robert Smithson: Slideworks. Milan: Carlo Frua, 1997. Baro, Gene. “Some Late Words from David Smith.” Art International 9, no. 7 (October 1965): 47–​51. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1981. Batchelor, David. Chromophobia. London: Reaktion, 2000. ———. “Everything as Colour.” In Donald Judd, edited by Nicholas Serota. London: Tate Publishing, 2004. ———, ed. Colour: Documents in Contemporary Art. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008. Batchen, Geoffrey. Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002. Baxandall, Michael. “Art, Society, and the Bouguer Principle.” Representations, no. 12 (Autumn 1985): 32–​43. Benjamin, Walter. “Convolute I.” In The Arcades Project, translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999. ———. “Little History of Photography.” In Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings. Vol. 2, 1927–​ 34, edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, translated by Edmund Jephcott et al. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999. ———. “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” (3rd version,

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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1939). In Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings. Vol. 4, 1938– ​1940, edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, translated by Edmund Jephcott et al. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003. Bennett, Anita Feldman. Imaginary Landscapes: Henry Moore Collections and Exhibitions. Perry Green, England: Henry Moore Foundation, 2003. ———. “Henry Moore: Imaginary Landscapes.” In Henry Moore und die Landschaft. Berlin: Haus am Waldsee, 2007. Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. Translated by Arthur Mitchell. New York: Macmillan, 2007. Bergstein, Mary. “Lonely Aphrodites: On the Documentary Photography of Sculpture.” Art Bulletin 74, no. 3 (September 1992). Billeter, Erika, and Christoph Brockhaus. Skulptur im Licht der Fotographie: Von Bayard bis Mapplethorpe. Bern: Benteli Verlag, 1998. Bloch, Susi. “An Interview with Louise Bourgeois.” Art Journal 35, no. 4 (Summer 1976): 370–​73. Blühm, Andreas, ed. The Colour of Sculpture: 1840–​1910. Zwolle: Waanders Uitgevers, 1996. Exhibition catalog. Boettger, Suzaan. Earthworks: Art and the Landscape of the Sixties. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Bohrer, Frederick N. “Photographic Perspectives: Photography and the Institutional Formation of Art History.” In Art History and Its Institutions: Foundations of a Discipline, edited by E. Mansfield. London: Routledge, 2002. ———. “Photography and Archaeology: The Image as Object.” In Envisioning the Past: Archaeology and the Image, edited by Sam Smiles and Stephanie Moser. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. Bois, Yve-Alain. “The Sculptural Opaque.” Sub-Stance 10, no. 2, issue 31 (1981): 23–​48. ———. Painting as Model. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990. ———. “Kobro’s Disjunctive Syntax.” In Inside the Visible, edited by Catherine de Zegher. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996. Bourgeois, Louise. Destruction of the Father/Reconstruction of the Father: Writings and Interviews, 1923– ​1997. Edited by Marie-Laure Bernadac and Hans-Ulrich Obrist. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998. Bredekamp, Horst. “A Neglected Tradition? Art History as Bildwissenschaft.” Critical Inquiry 29, no. 3 (Spring 2003): 418–​28. Brenson, Michael. “David Smith’s Embrace.” In David Smith: To and from the Figure. New York: Knoedler, 1995. ———. “The Fields.” In David Smith: A Centennial. New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2006. Exhibition catalog. ———. “1934–​1965: Giacometti’s Critical Reception in the United States.” In The Studio of Alberto Giacometti. Paris: Centre Pompidou and Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti, 2007. Exhibition catalog. Breton, André. “Picasso dans son element.” Minotaure 1, no. 1 (1933): 10–​22. Brown, Elizabeth. Brancusi Photographs Brancusi. London: Thames and Hudson, 1995. Exhibition catalog.

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———. “Brancusi’s Photographic Insights.” In The Artist and the Camera, edited by Dorothy Kosinski. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999. Exhibition catalog. ———. “Moore Looking: Photography and the Presentation of Sculpture.” In Henry Moore: Sculpting the 20th Century, edited by Dorothy Kosinski. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001. Exhibition catalog. Bruderer-Oswald, Iris. Das Neue Sehen: Carola Giedion-Welcker und die Sprache der Moderne. Bern: Benteli Verlag, 2007. Bryan-Wilson, Julia. Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. Buchloh, Benjamin H. D. “Michael Asher and the Conclusion of Modern Sculpture.” Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies 10 (1983). ———. “Gabriel Orozco: Sculpture as Recollection.” In Gabriel Orozco. Mexico City: Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, 2006. Exhibition catalog. Budnik, Dan. “Visits with David Smith.” In Seeing David Smith: Photographs by Dan Budnik. New York: Knoedler, 2006. Exhibition catalog. Burstow, Robert. “Henry Moore’s ‘Open-Air’ Sculpture: A Modern, Reforming Aesthetic of Sunlight and Air.” In Henry Moore: Critical Essays, edited by Jane Beckett and Fiona Russell. Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2003. Butler, Cornelia. “The Woman Problem: On the Contemporaneity of de Kooning’s Women.” In Willem de Kooning: Tracing the Figure. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002. Caraffa, Costanza, ed. Photo Archives and the Photographic Memory of Art History. Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2011. Carmean, E. A., Jr. David Smith. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1982. Exhibition catalog. Carrier, David. Rosalind Krauss and American Philosophical Art Criticism. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002. Chave, Anna. Constantin Brancusi: Shifting the Bases of Art. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993. Clark, T. J. “Clement Greenberg’s Theory of Art.” Critical Inquiry 9, no. 1 (September 1982): 139–​56. ———. “More on the Differences between Comrade Greenberg and Ourselves” (1983). In Modernism and Modernity: The Vancouver Conference Papers, edited by Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Serge Guilbault, and David Solkin. Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1983. ———. Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History in Modernism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999. Clarke, Christa. “John Graham and the Crowninshield Collection of African Art.” Winterthur Portfolio 30, no. 1 (Spring 1995): 23–​39. Clurman, Harold. “Night Life and Day Light.” Tomorrow (April 1946): 61–​64. Coates, Robert. “The Art Galleries: Past and Present.” New Yorker, January 12, 1946. Conley, Katharine. “Modernist Primitivism in 1933: Brassai’s ‘Involuntary Sculptures’ in Minotaure.” Modernism/Modernity 10, no. 1 (January 2003): 127–​40. Cooke, Susan. “David Smith: Drawing Space.” In David Smith: Drawing Space. Los Angeles: Margo Leavin Gallery, 2011. Exhibition catalog.

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Cooper, Harry. “Ecce Rosso!” In Medardo Rosso: Second Impressions, edited by Harry Cooper and Sharon Hecker, 1–​21. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003. Exhibition catalog. Crary, Jonathan. “Illuminations of the Unforeseen.” In Olafur Eliasson: Your Colour Memory. Glenside, PA: Arcadia University Art Gallery, 2006. Cree, Sarah. “Translating Stone into Paper: Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Prints after Antique Sculpture.” In Paper Museums: The Reproductive Print in Europe, 1500–​1800, edited by Rebecca Zorach and Elizabeth Rodini. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Exhibition catalog. Culler, Jonathan. Structuralist Poetics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975. Cummings, Paul. David Smith: The Drawings. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1979. Curtis, Penelope, and Fiona Russell. “Henry Moore and the Post-war British Landscape: Monuments Ancient and Modern.” In Henry Moore: Critical Essays, edited by Jane Beckett and Fiona Russell. Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2003. David Smith: Cubes and Anarchy. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2011. de Duve, Thierry. “The Readymade and the Tube of Paint.” Kant after Duchamp. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996. Dehner, Dorothy. “Medals for Dishonor—​t he Fifteen Medallions of David Smith.” Art Journal 37, no. 2 (Winter 1977–​78): 144–​50. Doane, Mary Ann. The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, and the Archive. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Duncan, Carol. “The MoMA’s Hot Momas,” Art Journal 48, no. 2 (Summer 1989): 171–​78. Dupin, Jacques. Alberto Giacometti: Éclats d’un portrait. Marseilles: André Dimanche, 2007. Einstein, Carl. Negerplastik. Munich: Kurt Wolff Verlag, 1920. Feininger, Andreas. Advanced Photography—​Methods and Conclusions. New York: PrenticeHall, 1952. Fer, Briony. “Crazy about Saturn: Gabriel Orozco Interviewed by Briony Fer.” In Gabriel Orozco. Mexico City: Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, 2006. Exhibition catalog. ———. “Color Manual.” In Color Chart: Reinventing Color, 1950 to Today, edited by Ann Temkin. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2008. Exhibition catalog. Flam, Jack, ed. Primitivism and Twentieth Century Art: A Documentary History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Foster, Hal. “The Archive without Museums.” October 77 (Summer 1997): 97–​119. ———. “The Un/making of Sculpture” (1998). In Richard Serra, edited by Hal Foster, with Gordon Hughes. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000. ———. “To Forge.” In David Smith: The Forgings. New York: Gagosian Gallery, 2013. Exhibition catalog. Frank, Susan Behrends. “David Smith Invents.” In David Smith Invents. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011. Freitag, Wolfgang M. “Early Uses of Photography in the History of Art.” Art Journal 39, no. 2 (Winter 1979–​80). Fried, Michael. “Art and Objecthood” (1967). In Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.

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Fry, Edward F. David Smith. New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1969. Gage, John. Color and Culture. Boston: Little, Brown, 1993. Gegossenes Licht/Cast Light: Sculpture in Photography, 1845–​1860. Munich: Galerie Daniel Blau, 2008. Getsy, David. “Fallen Women: The Gender of Horizontality and the Abandonment of the Pedestal by Giacometti and Epstein.” In Display and Displacement: Sculpture and the Pedestal from Renaissance to Post-Modern, edited by Alexandra Gerstein. London: Courtauld Institute of Art Research Forum and Paul Holberton Publishing, 2007. ———. “Tactility or Opticality, Henry Moore or David Smith: Herbert Read and Clement Greenberg on the Art of Sculpture, 1956.” Sculpture Journal 17, no. 2 (December 2008). Giedion-Welcker, Carola. Moderne Plastik: Elemente der Wirklichkeit, Masse und Auflockerung. Zurich: H. Girsberger, 1937. ———. Contemporary Sculpture: An Evolution in Volume and Space. New York: George Wittenborn, 1955. Graham, John. Exhibition of Sculptures of Old African Civilization. New York: Jacques Seligmann Gallery, 1936. Gray, Cleve. “David Smith: Last Visit.” Art in America 54, no. 1 (January–​February 1966): 23–​26. Greenberg, Clement. Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism. Vols. 1–​4 . Edited by John O’Brian. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. Grossman, Wendy A. Man Ray, African Art, and the Modernist Lens. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. Exhibition catalog. Hamill, Sarah. David Smith: Works, Writings, Interviews. Barcelona: Ediciones Polígrafa, 2011. ———. “Polychrome in the Sixties: David Smith and Anthony Caro.” In Anglo-American Exchange in Postwar Sculpture, 1945–​1975, edited by Rebecca Peabody. Getty Online Publications, 2011, www.getty.edu/museum/symposia/angloamerican.html. ———.“ ‘What Sculpture Can Never Be’: David Smith’s Photography.” In David Smith Invents. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011. ———. “Against the Age of Grace: David Smith’s 1960s Nudes.” In David Smith: Points of Power, edited by Sally Fisher. Zurich: Galerie Gmurzynska, 2012. ———. “Picturing Autonomy: David Smith, Photography, and Sculpture.” Art History 37, no. 3 (June 2014). Hatfield, Gary C. The Natural and the Normative: Theories of Spatial Perception from Kant to Helmholtz. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991. Hecker, Sharon. “Reflections on Repetition in Rosso’s Art.” In Medardo Rosso: Second Impressions, edited by Harry Cooper and Sharon Hecker. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003. Exhibition catalog. Heidegger, Martin. Poetry, Language, Thought. Translated by Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper and Row, 1971. Hildebrand, Adolf von. The Problem of Form in the Fine Arts. In Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873–​1893, trans. H. F. Mallgrave and E. Ikonomou. Santa Monica, CA: Getty Center, 1994. Hileman, Kristen. Anne Truitt: Perception and Reflection. Washington, DC: Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, 2009. Exhibition catalog.

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Hunter, Sam. “David Smith’s New Sculpture.” In David Smith: Recent Sculpture. New York: Otto Gerson Gallery, 1961. Exhibition catalog. Iversen, Margaret. “The Surrealist Situation of the Photographed Object.” In The Lure of the Object, edited by Stephen Melville. Clark Studies in the Visual Arts. Williamstown, MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Institute, 2005. Johnson, Geraldine A. “The Very Impress of the Object”: Photographing Sculpture from Fox Talbot to the Present Day. Leeds, England: Henry Moore Centre for the Study of Sculpture, 1995. ———. Sculpture and Photography: Envisioning the Third Dimension. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. ———. “ ‘(Un)richtige Aufnahme’: Renaissance Sculpture and the Visual Historiography of Art History.” Art History 36, no. 1 (February 2013): 12–​51. Judd, Donald. Donald Judd: Complete Writings, 1959–​1975. Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1975. ———. “Some Aspects of Color in General and Red and Black in Particular” (1993). In Donald Judd: Colorist, edited by D. Elger. Ostfildern-Ruitt: Hatje Cantz, 2000. Exhibition catalog. Kandinsky, Wassily. Concerning the Spiritual in Art and Painting in Particular. New York: Wittenborn, Schultz, 1947. Kianovsky, Sarah B. “Annotated Checklist of Sculpture (General Commentary).” In David Smith: A Centennial. New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2006. Exhibition catalog. Kosinski, Dorothy, ed. The Artist and the Camera. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999. Exhibition catalog. Kracauer, Siegfried. “Photography,” translated by Thomas Y. Levin. Critical Inquiry 19, no. 3 (Spring 1993): 421–​36. Kramer, Hilton. “David Smith: Stencils for Sculpture.” Art in America 50, no. 4 (1962): 32–​43. ———. Brancusi: The Sculptor as Photographer. London: David Krob, 1979. ———. “The Sculpture of David Smith” (1960). In The Age of the Avant-Garde, 1956–​1972. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2009. Krasne, Belle. “A David Smith Profile.” Art Digest (April 1, 1952). Krauss, Rosalind. “The Essential David Smith, part 1.” Artforum 7, no. 6 (February 1969): 43–​49. ———. “The Essential David Smith, part 2.” Artforum 7, no. 8 (April 1969): 34–​41. ———. “The Sculpture of David Smith.” PhD diss., Harvard University, 1969. ———. Terminal Iron Works: The Sculpture of David Smith. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971. ———. “Changing the Work of David Smith.” Art in America 62, no. 5 (September– ​October 1974): 30–​33. ———. Passages in Modern Sculpture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977. ———. The Sculpture of David Smith: A Catalogue Raisonné. New York: Garland, 1977. ———. “Reading Photographs as Texts.” In Pollock Painting, edited by B. Rose. New York: Agrinde, 1978. ———. “Rosalind Krauss Replies.” Art in America 66, no. 2 (March–​April 1978): 5. ———. “Sculpture in the Expanded Field.” October 8 (Spring 1979): 30–​4 4.

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———. “Stieglitz/‘Equivalents.’ ” October 11 (Winter 1979): 129–​40. ———. “The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism.” October 19 (Winter 1981): 3–​34. ———. “1959, 9 January: The Ministry of Fate.” In A New History of French Literature, edited by Dennis Hollier. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989. ———. The Optical Unconscious. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993. ———. “Postmodernism’s Museum without Walls.” In Thinking about Exhibitions, edited by Reesa Greenberg et al. London: Routledge, 1996. ———. “David Smith’s ‘New Vision.’ ” In David Smith: Photographs 1931–​1965. New York: Matthew Marks Gallery, 1998. Exhibition catalog. ———. “A Photo a Day: Recording the Work of David Smith.” In David Smith: A Centennial. New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2006. Exhibition catalog. Lichtenstein, Jacqueline. The Blind Spot: An Essay on the Relations between Painting and Sculpture in the Modern Age. Translated by Chris Miller. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2008. Lukács, Georg. The Theory of the Novel. Translated by A. Bostock. London: Merlin Press, 1971. Luke, Megan. “The Photographic Reproduction of Space: Wölfflin, Panofsky, Kracauer.” Res, no. 57–​58 (Spring–​Autumn 2010): 339–​43. Lyons, Claire. Antiquity and Photography: Early Views of Ancient Mediterranean Sites. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2005. Macarthur, John. “From the Air: Collage City, Aerial Photography, and the Picturesque.” In Re-framing Architecture: Theory, Science and Myth, edited by R. J. Moore. Sydney: Archadia Press, 2000. Mallgrave, Harry Francis, and Eleftherios Ikonomou. Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873–​1893. Santa Monica: Getty Center, 1994. Malraux, André. Psychologie de l’art: Le musée imaginaire. Geneva: Skira, 1947. ———. Le musée imaginaire de la sculpture mondiale. Paris: Gallimard, 1952. Marcoci, Roxana. The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010. Marcus, Stanley. David Smith: The Sculptor and His Work. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983. Marshall, Albert. “A Study of the Surfaces of David Smith’s Sculpture.” In Conservation Research. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1995. Marx, Karl. “The Commodity.” Capital. Vol. 1 (1867). Translated by Ben Fowkes. New York: Penguin, 1976. Mason, Rainer Michael, et al. Pygmalion Photographe: La sculpture devant le camera, 1844–​ 1936. Geneva: Cabinet des Estampes, Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, 1985. Mauzerall, Hope. “What’s the Matter with Matter?: Problems in the Criticism of Greenberg, Fried, and Krauss.” Art Criticism 13, no. 3 (1998). Mayer, Ralph. The Artist’s Handbook of Materials and Techniques. New York: Viking, 1940. McCarthy, David. “David Smith’s Spectres of War and Peace.” Art Journal 69 (Fall 2010): 21–​39. McCoy, Garnett. “The David Smith Papers.” Archives of American Art Journal 8, no. 2 (April 1968): 1–​11.

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Mehring, Christine. “Siskind’s Challenge: Action Painting and a Newer Laocoon, Photographically Speaking.” Yale University Art Gallery Bulletin (2006): 86–​107. Meltzoff, Stanley. “David Smith and Social Surrealism.” Magazine of Art 39, no. 3 (March 1946): 98–​101. Melville, Steven. “Color Has Not Yet Been Named: Objectivity in Deconstruction.” In Deconstruction and the Visual Arts: Art, Media, Architecture, edited by Peter Brunette and David Wills. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Melville, Steven, and Margaret Iversen. Writing Art History: Disciplinary Departures. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. “Eye and Mind” (1961). In The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, edited by Galen A. Johnson. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993. Mitchell, Andrew. Heidegger among the Sculptors: Body, Space, and the Art of Dwelling. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010. Mola, Paolo. Brancusi: The White Work. Milan: Skira; Venice: Peggy Guggenheim Collection, 2005. ———. Rosso: Trasferimenti. Milan: Skira, 2006. ———. Rosso: The Transient Form. Milan: Skira; Venice: Peggy Guggenheim Collection, 2007. Mola, Paola, and Fabio Vittucci. Medardo Rosso: Catalogo Ragionato della Sculptura. Milan: Skira, 2009. Morris, Robert. “The Present Tense of Space.” In Continuous Project Altered Daily: The Writings of Robert Morris. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994. Motherwell, Robert. “For David Smith, 1950.” In David Smith. New York: Willard Gallery, 1950. Exhibition catalog. Moure, Gloria, ed. Medardo Rosso. Santiago de Compostela, Spain: Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea; Barcelona: Ediciones Polígrafa, 1997. Exhibition catalog. Nash, Steven. “The Importance of Drawing.” In David Smith: Drawing + Sculpture. Dallas: Nasher Sculpture Center, 2005. Neer, Richard. The Emergence of the Classical Style in Greek Sculpture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Nelson, Robert S. “The Slide Lecture, or the Work of Art ‘History’ in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Critical Inquiry 26, no. 3 (Spring 2000). Nixon, Mignon. Fantastic Reality: Louise Bourgeois and a Story of Modern Art. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005. O’Hara, Frank. “David Smith: The Color of Steel.” Art News 60 (December 1961): 32–​34, 69–​70. ———. “Sculpting Master of Bolton Landing” (1964). Directed by Bruce Minnix and Ina Korek for the series Art: New York, produced by Colin Clark, Channel 13/WNET-TV, New York. Transcript by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Estate of David Smith, published in David Smith: Works, Writings, Interviews, edited by Sarah Hamill. Barcelona: Ediciones Polígrafa, 2011. Pachner, Joan. “David Smith’s Photographs.” In David Smith: Photographs 1931–​1965. New York: Matthew Marks Gallery, 1998. Exhibition catalog.

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

P L AT E S following pages 84 and 132

1. David Smith, Photograph of Portrait of a Lady Painter (1957), illustrated on the cover of Arts, October 1957 2. David Smith, Photograph of The Hero (1951–​52), Bolton Landing, New York, c. 1952 3. David Smith, The Hero, 1951–​52 4. Henry Moore, Reclining Figure (1938) in a Mock Up against the Florence Skyline for the Florence Exhibition in 1972, c. 1971–​72 5. Henry Moore, Maquette for Large Torso: Arch (1962) in a Mock Up against the Florence Skyline for the Florence Exhibition in 1972, c. 1971–​72 6. David Smith, Untitled (Aerial View), c. 1952 7. David Smith, Untitled (Aerial View), c. 1952 8. David Smith, Blackburn, Song of an Irish Blacksmith, 1949–​50 9. David Smith, Untitled (Piece of Fluorite), c. 1953–​54 10. David Smith, Untitled (Round Stone), c. 1953–​54 11. David Smith, Untitled (Barn Wall, Maine), 1953 12. David Smith, Untitled (Seaweed, Maine), c. 1953–​54 13. David Smith, Untitled (Muddy Ground), c. 1953–​54 14. David Smith, Untitled (Mud and Detritus), c. 1953–​54 15. David Smith, Untitled, 1963

23 5

16. David Smith, Photograph of (Left to Right) Forging III (1955), Forging X (1956), The Iron Woman (1954–​58; Unfinished State), Forging II (1955), Forging I (1955), and Man and Woman in the Cathedral (1956; Unfinished State), Bolton Landing Dock, Lake George, NY, c. 1956 17. David Smith, Untitled (Terpsichore and Euterpe, in Landscape), 1947 18. David Smith, ∆∑ 9/14/52 (Study for Tanktotems), 1952 19. David Smith, Photograph of Doorway on Wheels (1960), Bolton Landing, NY, c. 1960 20. David Smith, Photograph of Tanktotem VII (1960), Bolton Landing, NY, c. 1960 21. David Smith, Photograph of Tanktotem VII (1960), Bolton Landing, NY, c. 1960 22. David Smith, Photograph of Tanktotem IX (1960), Bolton Landing, NY, c. 1960 23. David Smith, Pillar of Sunday, 1945 24. David Smith, Circle I, 1962 25. David Smith, Photograph of Wagon I (1963–​64) and (in Background, Left to Right) Circle III, Circle II, and Circle I (All 1962), Bolton Landing, New York, c. 1964 26. David Smith, Photographs of Wagon I (Unfinished State; 1963–​64) and (in Background) Lunar Arc (1961), Windtotem (1962), Sentinel (1961), and 2 Circle IV (1962), Bolton Landing, NY, c. 1964 27. Alexander Liberman, David Smith’s Studio, c. 1965 28. David Smith, Helmholtzian Landscape, 1946 29. Anthony Caro, Sculpture Two, 1962 30. David Smith, Photograph of Tanktotem X (1960), Bolton Landing, NY, c. 1960 31. David Smith, Photograph of Tanktotem X (1960) and Tanktotem IX (1960; Partially Visible, in Background), c. 1960 32. David Smith, Photograph of Tanktotem X (1960) and Tanktotem VIII (1960; Background, Right), Bolton Landing, NY, c. 1960 33. David Smith, Photograph of Tanktotem X (1960), Bolton Landing, NY, c. 1960 34. David Smith, Photograph of Tanktotem X (1960) and Tanktotem VIII (1960; Background, Left), Bolton Landing, NY, c. 1960 35. David Smith, Photograph of Tanktotem X (1960), Bolton Landing, NY, c. 1960 36. David Smith, Photograph of Bouquet of Concaves II (1960), Bolton Landing, NY, c. 1960 37. David Smith, Photograph of a Group of Painted Sculptures (Left to Right): Three Planes (1960–61), Tanktotem VIII (1960), Circles Intercepted (1961), Tanktotem IX (1960), Circles and Arcs (1961), August Raven (1960), Hirebecca (1961), Ninety Son (1961), Ninety Father (1961), Bolton Landing (1961), Tanktotem VII (1960), Hi Candida (1961), Rosati Landing (1961), and Tanktotem X (1960), Bolton Landing, New York, 1961 38. David Smith, Photograph of a Group of Painted Sculptures (Left to Right):

23 6   •   l i s t

of Illustrations

Tanktotem VIII (1960), Tanktotem IX (1960), Circles Intercepted (1961), and Circles and Arcs (1961), Bolton Landing, NY, c. 1961 39. David Smith, Photograph of Cubi XIX (1964), Bolton Landing, NY, c. 1964 40. David Smith, Photograph of Cubi XIX (1964), Bolton Landing, NY, c. 1964 41. David Smith, Photograph of Bec-Dida Day (1963) and Volton XX (1963; Background, Right), Bolton Landing, NY, c. 1963 42. David Smith, Photograph of Tanktotem X (1960), Bolton Landing, NY, c. 1960 43. David Smith, Photograph of Menand III (1963), Bolton Landing, NY, c. 1963 44. David Smith, Photograph of Menand III (1963), Bolton Landing, NY, c. 1963

FIGURES

1. Dan Budnik, Portrait of David Smith (Holding Dan Budnik’s Pentax Camera with 180-mm Lens), Bolton Landing, NY, c. 1962–​63  • 2 2. David Smith, Raven IV, March 14, 1957  • 4 3. David Smith, Raven IV, March 14, 1957  • 4 4. David Smith, Untitled (Model for Sculpture), c. 1938  • 6 5. David Smith, Workshop Floor, Sculptures in Process (Left to Right): Albany II (1959), Land Coaster (1960), Untitled (1960), and Doorway on Wheels (1960), Bolton Landing, NY, c. 1959  • 7 6. Ugo Mulas, David Smith’s Studio (illustrating David Smith’s Untitled [1959] and Untitled [1959]), Bolton Landing, NY, 1965  • 8 7. David Smith, Untitled (Drawing on Illustration in Adolf von Hildebrand, The Problem of Form, 1913, Page 73), c. 1935  • 13 8. David Smith, Virgin Islands, St. Thomas, Looking across the Bay at the City of St. Thomas from the West Indian Company (LTD), c. 1931  • 14 9. David Smith, Untitled (Virgin Islands Photomontage), c. 1931  • 16 10. David Smith, Untitled (Photo-Collage), c. 1932–​35  • 17 11. David Smith, Untitled (Virgin Islands Tableau), c. 1931–​32  • 18 12. David Smith, Untitled (Virgin Islands Tableau), c. 1931–​32  • 18 13. David Smith, Untitled (Virgin Islands Tableau), c. 1931–​32  • 19 14. David Smith, Sketchbook Page (Drawing of Cubi III [1963]), c. 1963  • 28 15. David Smith, Photographer Leo Lances Taking a Picture of Reclining Figure, 1937  • 31 16. David Smith, Photograph of African Sculpture in Collection of Frank Crowninshield, c. 1935  • 32 17. David Smith, Photograph of Reclining Construction (1936), 1936  • 34 18. David Smith, Photograph of Head as Still Life II (1942), c. 1943  • 35 19. David Smith, Photograph of Aftermath Figure (1945), c. 1945  • 36

list of Illustrations

   •   23 7

20. David Smith, Photograph of Classic Figure III (1944), c. 1945  • 38 21. David Smith, Photograph of Spectre of War (1944), c. 1944–​45  • 39 22. Andreas Feininger, Photograph of David Smith, Headscrew (1939) and Growing Forms (1939), c. 1939  • 40 23. David Smith, Photograph of Cockfight (1945), c. 1945  • 42 24. David Smith, Photograph of Pillar of Sunday (1945) with Smith’s Directions to His Printer, c. 1945  • 47 25. Ugo Mulas, Photograph of David Smith, Suspended Cube (1938), 1965  • 48 26. Medardo Rosso, Photograph of Aetas Aurea (1887), Photographed from a Photograph, Enlarged and Hand Cut, c. 1887  • 50 27. Medardo Rosso, Photograph of Aetas Aurea (1887), Photographed from an Enlarged Detail of a Stock Photograph Cut at the Corner, after 1910  • 51 28. Henry Moore, Photograph of Reclining Figure (1938) against a Kent Landscape, c. 1938  • 52 29. Henry Moore, Photograph of Reclining Figure (1938) against a Kent Landscape, c. 1938  • 53 30. David Smith, Photograph of Oculus (1947), c. 1947  • 56 31. Unknown photographer, David Smith Photographing Oculus (1947), Bolton Landing Dock, Lake George, NY, c. 1947  • 57 32. David Smith, Bombing Civilian Populations, c. 1938–​40  • 61 33. David Smith, ΔΣ 9/8/52, 1952  • 68 34. David Smith, Photograph of Bouquet of Concaves (1959), Bolton Landing, NY, c. 1959  • 71 35. David Smith, Photograph of Bouquet of Concaves (1959), Bolton Landing, NY, c. 1959  • 71 36. Pages 154 and 155 of Rosalind E. Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977), illustrating David Smith, Blackburn, Song of an Irish Blacksmith (1949–​50)  • 73 37. David Smith, Photograph of Blackburn, Song of an Irish Blacksmith (1949–​50), Bolton Landing, NY, c. 1949–​50  • 74 38. David Smith, Photograph of Blackburn, Song of an Irish Blacksmith (1949–​50), Bolton Landing, NY, c. 1949–​50  • 74 39. David Smith, Photograph of Australia (1951), Bolton Landing, NY, c. 1951  • 76 40. David Smith, Photograph of Australia (1951), Bolton Landing, NY, c. 1951  • 76 41. David Smith, Photograph of a Group of Sculptures from the Voltri–​Bolton Landing Series, Bolton Landing, NY, c. 1963  • 78 42. Constantin Brancusi, Mademoiselle Pogany II, View of the Profile, Polished Bronze (1920), c. 1920  • 78 43. Constantin Brancusi, Architectural Project (1918), c. 1920s  • 79

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of Illustrations

44. Medardo Rosso, Photograph of Enfant Malade (1893–​95), Photograph from a Photograph, Enlarged, with Watercolor and Sepia Stains, an Abrasion in Center and White Stain on Lower Left, c. 1901–​2  • 80 45. Dan Budnik, Photograph of David Smith’s Seven Hours (1961), Bolton Landing, NY, c. 1962–​63  • 82 46. Dan Budnik, Photograph of David Smith’s Seven Hours (1961), Bolton Landing, NY, c. 1962–​63  • 83 47. Dan Budnik, Photograph of David Smith’s Seven Hours (1961), Bolton Landing, NY, c. 1962–​63  • 84 48. David Smith, Photograph of Seven Hours (1961), Bolton Landing, NY, c. 1963  • 85 49. David Smith, Photograph of (Left to Right) 7/9/53, Tanktotem IV, and Tanktotem III (All 1953), Bolton Landing Dock, Lake George, NY, c. 1953  • 90 50. David Smith, Photograph of (Left to Right) Bi-Cycle, 7/9/53, Tanktotem III, and Tanktotem IV (All 1953), Bolton Landing Dock, Lake George, NY, c. 1953  • 91 51. Unknown photographer, Slow Movement, Painted Steel, 1965, by Anthony Caro, c. 1965  • 94 52. Ernst Scheidegger, Photograph of L’Homme au Doigt, Bronze, 1947, by Alberto Giacometti, Photographed on the Street in Front of the Artist’s Studio, c. 1950s  • 95 53. David Smith, Carnegie Group, Sculptures from the Zig and Sentinel Series (Left to Right): Zig III, Two Circle Sentinel, Two Box Structure, March Sentinel (Stainless Steel Planes), and Zig II (All 1961), Bolton Landing, NY, 1961  • 98 54. David Smith, Carnegie Group, Photograph of a Group of Sculptures from the Zig and Sentinel Series (Left to Right): Two Circle Sentinel, Two Box Structure, Zig III, March Sentinel (Stainless Steel Planes), and Zig II (All 1961), Bolton Landing, NY, 1961  • 98 55. David Smith, Carnegie Group, Photograph of a Group of Sculptures from the Zig and Sentinel Series (Left to Right): March Sentinel (Stainless Steel Planes), Two Box Structure, Two Circle Sentinel, Zig II, and Zig III (All 1961), Bolton Landing, NY, 1961  • 99 56. Ugo Mulas, Installation of Sculptures in the Voltri Series by David Smith, Installed in the Anfiteatro Romano, Spoleto, Italy, 1962  • 100 57. David Smith, Photograph of Voltri VI (1962), Installed in the Anfiteatro Romano, Spoleto, Italy, 1962  • 101 58. Ugo Mulas, Photograph of David Smith with Voltri III, Voltri V, Voltri IX, Voltri X, and Voltri IV (All 1962) on a Train Car in Voltri, Italy, 1962  • 103 59. David Smith, Photographs of 7/9/53, Tanktotem III, Tanktotem IV, and Bi-Cycle (All 1953), Bolton Landing Dock, Lake George, NY, c. 1953  • 104 60. Constantin Brancusi, View of the Artist’s Studio at 8 Impasse Ronsin (with The Sorceress [in Progress; 1916–​24], Bird in Space, Plaster [1923–​24], Bird in Space, Yellow Marble [1923–​24], Socrates [1921–​22], Princess X [1915–​16]), c. 1923–​24  • 105

list of Illustrations

   •   23 9

61. Constantin Brancusi, View of the Artist’s Studio at 8 Impasse Ronsin (with Bird in Space, Plaster [1923–​24], The Sorceress [in Progress; 1916–​24], Plato [1919–​20, Dismantled c. 1923–​24], Socrates [1921–​22], Princess X [1915–​16]), c. 1923–​24  • 105 62. Unknown photographer, Photograph of Alberto Giacometti, Three Figures at Maloja (1930–​31), c. 1931  • 109 63. Henry Moore, Photograph of Reclining Figure (1939), at Burcroft, Kent, 1939  • 110 64. Page 121 of W. R. Valentiner, Origins of Modern Sculpture (New York: Wittenborn Press, 1946), illustrating “Men-an-Tol, Cornwall,” “Menec, Brittany,” “Tombs, Ming Dynasty,” and “Tomb, T’ang Kao-tsong” (figures 99–​102)  • 111 65. Aaron Siskind, Installation View of Louise Bourgeois: Sculptures, Peridot Gallery, New York (1950), 1950  • 113 66. David Smith, Photograph of (Left to Right) Forging IV, Forging III, Forging I (Unfinished), Untitled, Forging IX, Forging XI, Construction in Rectangles, Forging II, and Construction with Forged Neck (All 1955), Bolton Landing, NY, c. 1955  • 114 67. David Smith, Photograph of Tanktotem IV (1953), c. 1953  • 117 68. David Smith, Self-Portrait of Smith Painting Tanktotem IX (1960), Bolton Landing, NY, 1960  • 125 69. David Smith, Untitled (Nude with Menand V [1963]), Bolton Landing, NY, c. 1963–​64  • 143 70. David Smith, Untitled (Nude with Menand V [1963]), Bolton Landing, NY, c. 1963–​64  • 144 71. David Smith, Untitled (Nude with Menand V [1963]), Bolton Landing, NY, c. 1963–​64  • 145 72. David Smith, Untitled (Nude with Menand V [1963]), Bolton Landing, NY, c. 1963–​64  • 146 73. David Smith, Untitled (Nude with Menand II [1963]), Bolton Landing, NY, c. 1963–​64  • 147 74. David Smith, Untitled (Nude with Menand V [1963]), Bolton Landing, NY, c. 1963–​64  • 148 75. David Smith, Untitled (Nude), 1964  • 149 76. David Smith, Untitled (Study for Medals for Dishonor), c. 1938  • 152 77. David Smith, Untitled (Nude), Bolton Landing, NY, c. 1963–​64  • 154 78. David Smith, Untitled (Nude with Menand V [1963]), Bolton Landing, NY, c. 1963–​64  • 154 79. David Smith, Untitled (Nude with Menand V [1963]), Bolton Landing, NY, c. 1963–​64  • 154 80. David Smith, Untitled (Nude with Menand V [1963]), Bolton Landing, NY, c. 1963–​64  • 154

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of Illustrations

81. David Smith, Untitled (Nude with Menand V [1963]), Bolton Landing, NY, c. 1963–​64  • 156 82. David Smith, Untitled (Nude), Bolton Landing, NY, c. 1963–​64  • 157 83. Lee Friedlander, Nude, Phoenix, 1978  • 158 84. David Smith, Untitled (Nude), Bolton Landing, NY, c. 1963–​64  • 158 85. Edward Weston, Nude, 1925  • 159 86. Man Ray, Anatomies, 1929  • 160 87. David Smith, Untitled (Nude), Bennington Pottery Works, c. 1963–​64  • 162 88. David Smith, Untitled (Nude), Bennington Pottery Works, c. 1963–​64  • 162 89. Constantin Brancusi, Florence Meyer Homolka Posing in the Artist’s Studio, c. 1932–​33  • 164 90. David Smith, Photograph of Cubi VII (1963), with Study in Arcs (1959; Partial View, Far Left), Bolton Landing, NY, c. 1963  • 169 91. David Smith, Photograph of Hudson River Landscape (1951), Bolton Landing, NY, c. 1951  • 174 92. David Smith, Photograph of (Left to Right) Personage of August (1956), Sentinel I (1956), Running Daughter (1956–​60; Unfinished State), Tanktotem VI (1957), Sentinel II (1957), Pilgrim (1957), and The Five Spring (1956), Bolton Landing, NY, c. 1957  • 175 93. Robert Smithson, Yucatan Mirror Displacement (5), Yucatan, Mexico, 1969  • 178 94. Gabriel Orozco, Crazy Tourist (Turista maluco), 1991  • 179

list of Illustrations

   •   2 41

INDEX

Page numbers in italics indicate illustrations. References to photographs of sculptures taken by the sculptors themselves or by the professional photographers discussed in the book are indicated by “(photograph of).” AAUW (American Association of University Women) African sculpture exhibition organized by, 193n46 Rood exhibition organized by, 43, 192n45, 192–93n46 Smith exhibition organized by, 22, 26–27, 29, 30, 33, 43–44, 46, 58, 189–90n8, 190n10, 190nn12–13, 192n45, 193n47, 193n55 abstract expressionism, 124, 126, 155 abstraction, 39, 43, 62, 63, 70, 94, 107, 108, 110, 112, 163, 183n6, 209n29, 212n53 Smith’s photographs and, 1, 2, 14, 22–23, 31, 33, 37, 41, 59, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 70, 75, 82, 85–86, 88, 89, 93, 97, 134, 138, 173, 174, 201n1, 211n47 Smith’s sculptures and, 2, 3, 43, 44, 48, 57, 63, 69, 81, 84, 85, 89, 94, 96, 97, 99, 102,

108, 118, 119, 135, 140, 143–44, 155, 166, 167, 170, 173 Acconci, Vito, 177 Adams, Brooks, 143–44, 217n41 Adirondacks, New York, Smith’s studio in the, 171 photographs of sculptures taken outside, 20, 75, 94 See also Bolton Landing, New York Adorno, Theodor, 184n26 Aesthetic Theory, 206n67, 216n21 on the vulgar, 216n21 advertising, 151, 216 de Kooning’s Woman series and, 155 Smith’s nude photographs and, 148 aerial photography. See aerial view aerial view, 65–67 in photography (aerial photography), 59, 65–66

2 43

aerial view (continued) Smith and, 59–60, 64, 65, 67, 75, 81, 84, 86, 138 Smithson and (“Aerial Art”), 86–87 African sculpture AAUW exhibition of, 193n46 photographs of Crowninshield’s collection of, 30–31, 32, 37, 191n28 Sheeler’s photographs of, 31 Smith and Dehner’s purchase of, 191n26 Albers, Josef, 214n84 Alexander, Stuart, 39 American Association of University Women. See AAUW (American Association of University Women) Ameringer, Will, 197–98n36 Andre, Carl, 86, 124 opposition of, to photography (“Against Photography”), 218–19n9 anthropomorphism, 99, 163 of Smith’s sculptures, dramatized, in his photographs, 15, 88, 163, 201n1, 217– 18n48 See also figuration antiwar works, 33, 60, 151–52, 196n4 Apollo Belvedere, reproductions of, 55 Architectural Record, essay in, 115, 120–21 Archives of American Art, 72, 181n3, 182n4, 183n5, 198n42, 215n8 Arp, Jean, 110 Art Digest, interview for, 61 Artforum, 62, 178, 188n57, 196n9 Art in America, 21, 127, 128, 210nn42–43 Art International, 138 Art News, 150 Smith’s letter to, 209n34 Smith’s photographs reproduced in, 93, 123, 175, 187–88n56, 198n49, 199n51, 218n4 Arts magazine, Smith’s photography reproduced on the cover and pages of, 1, 19, 151, 198n49, plate 1 Art Students League, New York, 14, 30, 120, 187n47, 191n28 Ashton, Dore, 127, 138 assemblages, 6, 15, 177, 187n51 autonomy, sculptural, 22, 23, 92, 107, 116, 160, 176, 205n51

2 4 4    •   I n d e x

dramatized, in Smith’s photographs, 20, 22, 23, 70, 73, 87, 89, 92, 174, 176 avant-garde, European, 15, 37, 187n51 Aycock, Alice, 177 Barthes, Roland, 12 bases (pedestals, plinths). See cropping, Smith’s use of Batchelor, David, Chromophobia, 131, 213n69 Bauhaus, 39, 191n31 Baxandall, Michael, 12 Bayerthal, Friedrich L., 201n1 Beam, Lura, 26, 43–44, 190n8, 190n12, 192n36, 192n45, 193n50, 193n55, 193nn46–47 Benjamin, Walter, 9–10, 58, 185n35, 195n85 “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” 1, 10, 172 Bennington College Caro’s residency at, 217n48 Smith’s lecture at, 123, 138, 139, 140, 208n24, 211n47 students, as models, 215n9 Bennington Pottery Works ceramic plates made at, 216n27 nude photographs taken at, 161, 162 Bergson, Henri, Creative Evolution, 70 Berlin, 65, 183n4 Blossfeldt, Karl, botanical study by, 39 Blühm, Andreas, 212n68 Bohrer, Frederick, 10 Bolton Landing, New York, 21, 33, 101, 129, 133, 187n55 O’Hara’s visit to Smith’s studio at, 93–94, 118 Smith’s staged sculptural groupings at, 2, 7, 8, 20, 35, 38, 39, 42, 46–47, 47, 56, 57–58, 57, 71, 74, 76, 78, 82, 83, 84, 85, 88–89, 90, 91, 92, 95, 96, 98, 99, 100, 102–4, 104, 114, 117, 118, 125, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 154, 156, 157, 158, 164–65, 169, 170, 174, 175, 182n3, 183n5, 188n58, 198n42, 201n2, 211n47 Bourgeois, Louise Personage series, 112–13, 113, 114, 204n45, 204n49, 204–5n51, 205n52 staged sculptural groupings of, 23, 92–93,

112–13, 113, 114, 204n45, 204n49, 204– 5n51, 205n52 Brancusi, Constantin, 10 as photographer of his own work, 10, 11, 12, 21, 23, 27, 49, 77, 194n65, 194n69 publication of the photography of, 27, 104–6, 108, 194n69 staged sculptural groupings of, 11, 12, 23, 92–93, 104–6, 105, 108, 111, 112, 163, 176, 203n34 studio of, 49, 104, 106, 203n32 Works Architectural Project (photograph of ), 77, 79 Endless Column (photograph of ), 163 Florence Meyer Homolka Posing in the Artist’s Studio, 163, 164 Mademoiselle Pogany II (photograph of ), 77, 78 The Miracle (Seal I), 163 Brassaï, 49, 194n65 photographs of Picasso’s Woman in Garden by, 191n29 Brenson, Michael, 144 Brogi. See photography firms Brooklyn, New York, 187nn51–52, 187n55 Brown, Elizabeth, 51–52 Bruckmann Verlag, 9, 10, 12, 30, 55 Brunelleschi, Filippo, 53 Buchholz Gallery, New York, exhibition at, 25 Buchloh, Benjamin H. D., 178–79 Budnik, Dan as photographer of Smith and his work, 2, 2, 81, 82, 83, 84, 123, 127, 182–83nn4–5, 210n43, 217n43 Burckhardt, Rudolph, 191n28 Butler, Cornelia, 155 Cahiers d’Art Brancusi’s photographs reproduced in, 27, 190n15, 203n29 Moholy-Nagy’s photographs reproduced in, 14, 65, 187n51 Picasso’s and González’s constructions reproduced in, 3, 183n6 Calder, Alexander, 122 Callahan, Eleanor, 157

Callahan, Harry, 157 cameras. See photographic equipment Caradente, Giovanni, 101 Carmean Jr., E. A., 199n61 Carnegie International Exhibition of Contemporary Painting and Sculpture, 98, 99, 138, 141 Caro, Anthony, 94, 122, 170, 217–18n48 Works Sculpture Two, 129–30, plate 29 Slow Movement (photograph of ), 94, 94 Carrà, Carlo, 49 Carrier, David, 210n41 carving, 43, 77, 108, 110, 193n46 Smith and, 3, 5, 14, 61, 64 casting, 11, 29, 30, 50, 54–55, 61, 63, 131 Smith and, 5, 7, 8, 19, 29–30, 73 Cézanne, Paul, 133, 136–37 Chamberlain, John, 124 chance, 124 Clark, T. J., 155 Clurman, Harold, 26 Coates, Robert, 25 color critics’ objections to Smith’s use of, 23, 126– 32, 212n66, 212n68 Merleau-Ponty on, 133, 137 O’Hara’s case for Smith’s use of, 132–33 phenomenology of, 120, 123, 126, 131, 132, 133, 136–37 in Smith’s sculptures (painted sculptures, polychrome sculptures), 3, 20–21, 23, 28, 46, 93, 119–29, 130, 132–41, 209n34, 210nn42–43, 210–11n47, 212n56, 212n64, 212n66 See also Smith, David, painted sculptures connoisseurship, 10 constructions by Picasso and González, 3, 5, 183n6 by Smith, 15, 33, 34, 43, 88, 113–14, 114, 121, 166, 167, 183n6, 191n28 constructivism, 62, 122, 132 consumerism, 114, 124, 126, 151 Cooke, Susan, 67 Cooper, Harry, 49 Corcos, Lucille, 207n4 corporeality, 153, 156, 163, 167, 168, 170, 171

Index

   •   2 45

Courbet, Gustave, 49 critics. See specific critics cropping, 44, 159 Rosso’s use of, 11, 50–51 Smith’s use of, 1, 19, 27, 41, 43, 46, 51, 55, 56, 57, 66, 69, 72, 75, 82, 92, 94, 95, 102, 113, 123, 134, 142, 146, 147, 153, 156, 159, 171, 173, 174 Crowninshield, Frank, collection of, 30, 32, 191n26, 191n28 cubism, 3, 14, 26, 63, 69, 77, 97, 138 Cue magazine, 29 Curtis, Penelope, 110, 111 Davenport, Barbara, 198n36 David Smith: Cubes and Anarchy, 208–9n29 David Smith Invents, 209n29 David Smith Papers, 181–82n3, 182n4, 215n8 de Beauvoir, Simone, The Second Sex, 155 de Chirico, Giorgio, 15 de Duve, Thierry, “The Readymade and the Tube of Paint,” 208n21 Degas, Edgar, 30 Dehner, Dorothy, 13–14, 182n4, 187n48, 187– 88n56, 191n26 de Kooning, Elaine, 188n56 de Kooning, Willem Woman I (Woman series), 147, 155, 216n22 Derbyshire, England, 294n41 drawing(s), Smith and, 6, 7, 25, 67, 187n48, 214n2, 217n27 in his edition of Hildebrand’s Problem of Form in the Fine Arts, 12–13, 13 of a photographer’s studio, 30, 31 on photographs, 15, 184n18 sculptures and/as, 26, 28, 28, 68, 75, 77, 102, 151–52, 200n61 sprays, 67–69, 211n47 Duncan, Carol, 216n22 East River Gallery, New York, exhibition at, 31 Elisofon, Eliot, 191n28 as photographer of Smith’s work, 31, 37, 191n28 England, 11, 187n52 Estate of David Smith, 72, 182nn3–4, 183n5, 210nn42–43, 215n8 estrangement, 66

2 46   •   I n d e x

Europe, 12, 53 Smith and Dehner’s trip to, 182nn3–4, 187n48, 191n26 See also avant-garde, European Everyday Art Quarterly, essay in, 136 exhibitions. See Smith, David, exhibitions factory labor and processes, 5, 100, 121, 201n10 Feininger, Andreas, 37–39, 191n31 Greenberg on, 192n36 as photographer of Smith’s work, 37, 39–41, 40, 43, 191n28, 192n34, 192n36, 199n51 Feininger, Lyonel, 191n31 feminism, 155 feminity, stereotypes (conventions) of, 150–51, 152, 155, 156, 161, 166, 167, 171, 181n1 Fer, Briony, 134 figuration, 11, 20, 46, 60, 67, 73–75, 92, 93, 99, 102, 163, 164, 166, 168, 201n7 and abstraction, 75, 89, 163, 167, 170 Finn, David, 186n41 flatness, pictorial, 66–67 Flavin, Dan, 124 forging, 96, 100, 102, 113–14, 114, 121, 166, 205n53 formalism, 10, 31 Greenbergian, 22, 72, 127, 128, 131, 141, 212n68 Smith’s photography and avant-garde strategies of, 14, 15, 23, 45, 62, 65, 159 Forti di Belvedere, Florence, Moore exhibition at, 52–53, plates 4, 5 Foster, Hal, 205n53 found objects, 6, 8, 14, 19, 29, 73, 122, 126, 138, 166, 184n20 framing, 19, 81, 86, 106, 108, 112 Rosso’s use of, 49–50 Smith’s use of, 12, 14, 31, 44, 46, 64–65, 70, 134, 137, 146, 158, 159, 171 Franco, Francisco, 60 Frankenthaler, Helen, 211n47 Fratelli Alinari, 9, 10, 54, 195n78 French and Company, New York, exhibition at, 92 Freud, Sigmund, 97 Totem and Taboo, 165, 166 Fried, Michael, 49 Friedlander, Lee, 157, 158

Fry, Edward F., 217–18n48 Gabo, Naum, 62 Gage, John, Color and Culture, 213n70 Gagosian Gallery, New York, exhibition at, 208n29 Gallagher, Edward J., 209n34 galleries and museums. See specific galleries and museums Genauer, Emily, 99, 122 gender, 213n71 de Kooning’s Woman series and, 155 Smith and, 5, 20, 24, 151, 153, 155–57, 164, 165, 166–67, 171 See also Smith, David, and the vulgar Giacometti, Alberto, 10, 201n10 Scheidegger’s photographs of the work of, 95, 95–96, 201–2n14, 206n68 staged sculptural groupings of, 23, 92–93, 95, 95–96, 108, 109 Works L’Homme au Doigt (photograph of ), 95, 202n14 Three Figures at Maloja (photograph of ), 109, 208 Woman with Her Throat Cut, 63, 181n1 Giedion-Welcker, Carola Contemporary Sculpture, 202n14 Modern Plastic Art, 108–10 Gil, David, 216n27 Gil, Gloria, 216n27 Godard, Jean-Luc, Contempt, 130 González, Julio constructions of, as influential on Smith, 3, 5, 183n6 Large Maternity, 63 Graham, John, and Crowninshield’s collection of African sculpture, 30, 191n26, 191n28 Gray, Cleve, 200n67, 201n4, 216n27 Greece, 182n3, 187n52, 206–7n4 Greenberg, Clement, 75, 132–33, 188n58, 192n36, 192n42, 200n67, 212n53, 217n48 opposition to, and alteration of, Smith’s painted sculptures by, 23, 126–30, 131– 32, 137, 210nn42–43, 210n47, 212n56, 212n66 writings on Smith by, 5, 21, 23, 25, 41, 72, 87, 126, 163, 164, 183n13, 212n56

Guernica, bombing of, 60 Picasso’s depiction of, 33 Guggenheim Foundation, fellowship from, 27, 182n4 Hecker, Sharon, 50, 185n37, 194n63, 194nn67–68 Heidegger, Martin, 205–6n65 “The Thing,” 25 Helmholtz, Hermann von, 53–54 referenced, in work by Smith, 127, 129, 212n56, plate 28 Henry Moore Foundation, 186n41 Herder, Johann Gottfried, Sculpture, 131 Herefordshire, England, 201n10 Hess, Thomas, interview with, 116, 148–50 Hildebrand, Adolf von, The Problem of Form in the Fine Arts, 187n47 influence of, 9, 54, 187n47 reproductions in, 12–13, 30 sculptural aesthetic espoused in, 9, 53–54, 55, 62 Smith’s drawings in his edition of, 12, 13 Wölfflin and, 9, 54, 55 homelessness (placelessness, sitelessness), of modern sculpture, 20, 23, 89, 107, 116, 196n5 dramatized, in sculptors’ photographs, 23, 92, 107–8 dramatized, in Smith’s photographs, 20, 59–60, 66, 89–92, 107–8, 116, 176 See also autonomy, sculptural Homolka, Florence Meyer, Brancusi’s photographs of, 163, 164 Horkheimer, Max, 184n26 Horn, Pinchos, as photographer of Smith’s work, 31, 191n28 Hunter, Sam, 20, 99, 100, 127, 188n56 impressionism, 196n2 Indiana University, residency at, 205n53 industry, 11, 124, 206n65 and pornography, in the Medals for Dishonor series, 151 Smith’s connections to, emphasized in AAUW exhibition and publicity, 43–44 Smith’s connections to, memorialized in photographs, 64, 100, 101, 102, 103–4, 113–14

Index

   •   2 47

industry (continued) Smith’s use of industrial materials and techniques, 5–6, 43, 44, 64, 100, 113–14, 121, 123, 124, 126, 205n53, 210n45 See also sculpural techniques, welding; Smith, David, and steel Irwin, Robert, 177 Iversen, Margaret, Writing Art History (with Melville), 114–15, 116, 173 Jackson, Errol, 186n41 Jewell, Edward Alden, review by, 48 Johns, Jasper, 184n20 Johnson, Geraldine, 195n78 journals, magazines, and newspapers. See specific publications Joyce, James, 97 Judd, Donald, 5–6 on the Cubis, 168–70 Kant, Immanuel, 53 Kierkegaard, Søren, Stages on Life’s Way, 88 kitsch, 130 Klee, Paul, 133 Klein, Melanie, 204n49 Kracauer, Siegfried, “Photography,” 9 Kramer, Hilton, 1, 21, 127, 138, 141, 197n36, 201n10 Krasne, Belle, 188n56 interview with, 61 Krauss, Richard, 198n42 Krauss, Rosalind, 65–66 writings on modern sculpture by, 20, 21, 61–62, 72, 73, 89, 107 writings on Smith by, 3, 21, 23, 61, 62, 71–75, 89, 127–28, 130, 160–61, 165–66, 170– 71, 184nn18–19, 187n51, 188nn57–58, 196n9, 197n27, 198n42, 198n46, 200n67, 201n7, 203n27, 209n35, 210nn41–42, 210n45, 210–11n47, 212n64, 215n17, 216n25, 217n32 Krull, Germaine, 197n27 Lachaise, Gaston, Standing Woman, Smith’s photograph of, 63, 197n20 Lake George, New York, Smith’s photographs on dock overlooking, 20, 56–58, 56, 57, 88–89, 90, 91, 92, 95, 96, 104, plate 16

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Lances, Leo, 30 drawing of, 30, 31 as photographer of Smith’s work, 31, 37, 191n28 land art, 201n12, 206n71 landscape, staging of sculpture and objects in, 39 Caro and, 94 Giacometti and, 108, 206n68 Moore and, 11, 52, 52, 53, 108, 110–11, 116, 174, 204n41 Smith and, 1, 3, 15, 20, 22, 23, 33, 37, 41, 45, 46, 55, 57, 75, 82, 88–89, 92, 93–94, 95, 96, 97, 100, 102–4, 108, 118, 119–20, 124, 132, 134, 135, 137, 139, 140, 141, 151, 173–75, 176, 192n34, 201n7, 201n10, 201n12, 206n71, 211n47 Smithson and, 177–78 Lassaw, Ibram, 62 Leo Castelli Gallery, New York, alteration of painted sculpture by, 127, 209n34 Levy, Edgar, 33, 207n4 Lewitt, Sol, 86 Liberman, Alexander, as photographer of Smith’s work, 124, 183n5, plate 27 Life magazine, 191n28 Lipman, Howard, 198n42 Lippard, Lucy, 155 Little Review, 27 Lowe, Ira, 128, 209n31 censorship of Smith’s nude photographs by, 148 Lukács, Georg, Theory of the Novel, 202n16 Lurçat, Jean, 15 Macarthur, John, 59 Madrid, bombing of, 60 Maloja, Switzerland, photograph of Giacometti’s work in, 108, 109 Malraux, André, and the Musée Imaginaire, 10–11 Man Ray, 37, 68, 187n51 Anatomies, 159–60, 160 Marlborough-Gerson Gallery, New York, 21 exhibition at, 134–35, 148, 168–70 Marxism, 216n25 Matulka, Jan, 191n28 Smith and, 14, 15, 120, 183n6

Mauzerall, Hope, 129, 212n53 McCarthy, David, 196n4 McCausland, Elizabeth, 121 McCoy, Garnett, 181–82n3, 198n42 mechanical reproduction (mass reproduction, replication), 8, 9, 10, 22, 30, 44, 58, 81, 107, 116–18, 172, 176, 184n20 medium specificity (purity of medium), 22, 120, 127, 176 Meltzoff, Stanley, 189n6, 193n47 Melville, Stephen “Color Has Not Yet Been Named,” 131, 213n71 Writing Art History (with Iversen), 114–15, 116, 173 Mên-an Tol, 110, 111 Ménec, 110, 111 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, “Eye and Mind,” 133, 137 minimalism, 122, 126, 167, 170, 205n51 Smith and, 5–6, 112, 124 Minotaure Brancusi photographs reproduced in, 27, 203n29 Brassaï photographs reproduced in, 191n29 Giacometti photograph reproduced in, 108 misogyny, 150, 151, 153 Miss, Mary, 177 Mitchell, Andrew, 205–6n65 MIT Press, 71 models, 142, 143, 144, 145–46, 147, 148, 153, 155, 156, 159, 161, 163, 164, 167, 171, 198n36, 214n2, 215n9, 216n27 modernism, 9, 22, 65–66, 67, 155 sculpture in, 5, 23, 53, 63, 89, 107, 114, 115, 176 See also modern sculpture modern sculpture photography of, 10–11, 12, 22, 23, 49, 55–56, 58, 63, 92, 104, 106, 108, 163, 176, 177, 178, 186n41, 201n10 qualities of, 11–12, 20, 21, 22, 23, 61–62, 87, 89, 92, 106–7, 121, 163, 173, 176, 205n51 Smith’s vision for, 92, 116, 121, 196n5 writings on, 21, 30, 61, 62, 72, 73, 89, 107, 108–10, 111, 194n69 Moholy-Nagy, László, 14, 37, 39, 65, 68, 187n51 Mola, Paola, 50 Monet, Claude, Nymphéas, 67

monochrome sculpture, 130, 212n68 See also polychrome sculpture “monsters,” Smith’s characterization of his sculptures as, 150–51 Monumenta, 210n43 monumentality modern sculpture’s retreat from, 11–12, 116, 176 use of photography to suggest or dramatize, 1, 11, 12, 48, 53, 55–56, 97, 101, 139, 147, 156, 173 Moore, Henry, 10 as photographer of his own work, 10, 11, 12, 21, 23, 51–53, 55, 56, 58, 108, 110, 111, 174, 186n41, 194n69, 195n71 publication of the photography of, 51, 108, 110, 111, 194n69 staging of sculpture by, 11, 23, 51–53, 93, 108, 110–11, 116, 174, 195n71, 201n10, 203n34, 204n41 use of professional photographers by, 186n41 Works Maquette for Large Torso: Arch (photograph of ), 53, plate 5 Reclining Figure, 195n71 Reclining Figure (photograph of ), 11, 52, 52, 53, 56, 108, 110, 194n69, plate 4 Morris, Robert, 5–6, 86, 184n20 “The Present Tense of Space,” 177–78 Motherwell, Robert, 89, 128, 209n31, 211n47 Mulas, Ugo as photographer of Smith’s work, 7–8, 8, 46–47, 48, 71–72, 100, 101, 102, 103, 108, 183n5, 188n58, 198n42, 200n67 Museum of Modern Art, New York, 191n28, 197n20 exhibition at, 1, 187–88n58 lectures at, 84, 138, 150–51, 176, 188n56, 199n60 planned retrospective at, 200n67 Nation, The, 25 National Archaeological Museum, Athens, 121, 206–7n4 Nauman, Bruce, 176 Neumann-Willard Gallery, New York, exhibition at, 191n28 Newman, Barnett, 126, 140, 170

Index

   •   2 49

New School for Social Research, New York, 191n28 New Vision, 39, 62, 65, 187n51 New York, Smith’s home and studio in upstate, 2, 81, 89, 119, 126, 165 See also Bolton Landing New York City, 25, 26, 27, 33, 48, 57, 60, 112, 164, 165, 190n10, 192n34, 198n42 New Yorker, 25 New York Times, 128 Nixon, Mignon, 204n49 Nodelman, Sheldon, 170 Noland, Kenneth, 100, 170 nudes, 145, 157, 158, 159, 159, 192n36 Smith’s ceramic plates with depictions of, 216n27, 217n42 Smith’s nude paintings, 24, 143, 144–46, 147–50, 149, 168, 171, 214n2, 217n41 Smith’s nude photographs, 6, 23–24, 142–48, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 152–55, 154, 156, 156–57, 157, 158, 159, 159–60, 161– 65, 162, 167, 168, 171, 173, 215n8, 215n18, 216n27 O’Doherty, Brian, 141 O’Hara, Frank, 21 “David Smith: The Color of Steel,” 93–94, 96, 97, 118, 127, 132–33, 134, 138, 140, 142, 171, 208n24 Smith’s interview with, 140, 164–65, 167, 214n84 visit of, to Smith’s studio, 93, 171, 218n51 opacity, sculptural, 61–62, 67, 160–61 Oppenheim, Dennis, 176 opticality, 41, 128, 129, 137, 170, 192n42 Orozco, Gabriel, 178–79 Turista maluco, 179, 179 Outdoor Sculpture Exhibition, 192n34 Pachner, Joan, 21, 181n1, 214n1 Paiewonsky, Ralph, 14 painted sculptures (polychrome sculptures), 20–21, 23, 93, 120–21, 126–29, 132, 134, 140, 141, 209n34, 210nn42–43, 210– 11n47, 212n56, 212n64, 212n66 Painted Steel: The Late Work of David Smith, 208n29 painting, 12, 15–19, 81, 122, 127, 130, 208n21

25 0   •   I n d e x

Smith and, 6, 7, 15–19, 26, 63–64, 67, 97, 120, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 136, 170, 176, 183n6, 196n2, 208n24, 210–11n47, 214n2 Paret, Paul, 77 Paris, 104, 108, 194n63, 201n10 Pepper, Beverly, 128 Peridot Gallery, New York, Bourgeois exhibition at, 112–13, 113 Perry Green, England, 195n71 “personages,” Smith’s characterization of his sculptures as, 165, 166, 167, 175 phenomenology, color and, 120, 123, 126, 131, 132, 133, 136–37 photographers, professional, 10, 93, 94, 186n41 Smith and, 2, 30, 31, 37, 41, 43, 81, 182n3, 183n5 See also Budnik, Dan; Elisofon, Eliot; Feininger, Andreas; Horn, Pinchos; Lances, Leo; Liberman, Alexander; Mulas, Ugo; Sunami, Soichi photographic equipment, 2, 2, 14, 27, 44, 182n4 photographic techniques. See cropping; framing; pictorial contrasts; vantage point photographic types and genres black-and-white photographs, 2, 32, 35, 38, 42, 56, 57, 71, 81, 82, 83, 84, 123, 146, 152, 181–82n3 color slides, 23, 60–61, 62, 63–64, 66, 69, 86, 87, 119–20, 123, 124, 133, 134, 135, 137, 138, 139, 140, 152, 182nn3–4, 198n38, 207n4, 215n18 copy prints, 46, 57, 70, 81–82, 195n82 photo-collages, 15, 17, 37, 66 photomontages, 16, 37, 66, 187n51 photography, Smith’s uses of as documentation, 2, 3, 9, 11, 12, 14, 22, 23, 27, 29, 30, 31, 33, 37, 44, 46–47, 81, 82, 86, 123, 124, 172–73, 183n5, 187nn51–52, 191n28 as independent works, disrupting conventions of photographic documentation, 2–3, 14–15, 37, 44, 63, 81–82 as publicity (mass reproduction), 2, 27, 28– 29, 44, 48, 182n4 for staging encounters with his sculptures, 2–3, 6, 12, 20, 22, 33, 37, 75, 82–86, 88–89, 92, 93, 94, 100, 102, 104, 113,

116, 118, 138, 168, 172–73, 175, 201n10, 201n12 See also Smith, David, lectures and writings photography firms, 9, 10, 12–13, 30, 195n78 Picasso, Pablo, 15 as photographer of his own work, 10, 11, 12 Smith and, 3, 5, 12, 15, 33, 60, 64, 183n6, 191n29 Woman in Garden (photograph of ), 191n29 pictorial contrasts (light and dark, planar), 31, 37, 39–41, 55, 112, 113–14 Smith’s use of, 15, 33, 37, 41, 45, 46, 55, 63, 69, 87, 93, 146, 159 pictorialism, 12 Pinet, Hélène, 202n14 Pissarro, Camille, 137, 196n2 Pollock, Jackson, 126 polychrome sculpture, 130, 207n4 modernist (formalist) objections to, 126–30, 141, 212n66, 212n68 Smith and, 20, 23, 120–21, 134, 141, 207n4, 210–11n47, 212n66 pop art, 124 pornography, 151–52, 216n22 Smith’s nude photographs and, 148, 152, 153 Portable Gallery Press, 123, 182n4 Porter, Fairfield, “David Smith: Steel into Sculpture,” 199n51, 218n4 poststructuralism, 72 Potts, Alex, 89, 92, 131, 166, 201n2, 204–5n51, 206n67, 212n66 The Sculptural Imagination, 11, 22, 104–6, 116, 167, 196n5, 199n53, 201n12, 206n71, 209n29 public sculpture, Smith’s doubts concerning the viability of, in the postwar era, 93, 114, 115, 116, 173 Public Works of Art Project, 120 purity of medium. See medium specificity Raimondi, Marcantonio, 55 Rauschenberg, Robert, 67, 184n20 Read, Herbert, 29 ready-made paint, 124, 140, 208n21 Renger-Patzsch, Albert, 39 Reynolds, Ann, 86 Riley, Charles, Color Codes, 213n70 Riley, Maude, 29

Rilke, Rainer Maria, Auguste Rodin, 59, 61, 106, 107, 137 Rodchenko, Aleksandr, 65, 197n27 Rodin, Auguste, 29, 30, 61, 107, 194n63 Rilke on, 59, 61, 106–7 Steichen’s photographs of Monument to Balzac, 11, 107 use of professional photographers by, 10 Rood, John, 43, 192n45, 193n46 Rosso, Danila Marsure, 194n62 Rosso, Medardo, 22 as photographer of his own work, 10, 11, 49– 51, 53, 55–56, 58, 77, 79–81, 176, 185n37, 194nn62–63, 194n67 Works Aetas Aurea (photograph of ), 49–51, 50, 51, 56, 194n68 Ecce Puer (photograph of ), 79 Enfant au Sein (photograph of ), 79 Enfant Malade (photograph of ), 79–81, 80 Madame X (photograph of ), 79 Yvette Guilbert (photograph of ), 79 Rothko, Mark, 170 Rubin, William, 209n37, 212n64 Ruskin, John, 155, 216n20 Russell, Fiona, 110–11 Saint Thomas, Virgin Islands. See Virgin Islands Salon d’Automne, Paris, 194n63 Sandler, Irving, 211n47 Scheidegger, Ernst, as photographer of Giacometti’s work, 95–96, 95, 201–2n14, 206n68 School of Design, Chicago, 187n51 Sculptors’ Guild, New York, 192n34 sculptural techniques burnishing, 77, 139, 168, 170, 171, 209n36, 211n47 forging, 96, 100, 102, 113–14, 114, 121, 166, 205n53 welding, 2, 3, 5–6, 8, 19, 20, 29, 33, 43, 44, 48, 55, 73, 77, 84, 88, 89, 94, 99–100, 101, 114, 118, 120, 121, 138, 139, 150, 187n55, 199n61 See carving; casting; forging Serra, Richard, 5–6, 61, 177 Sheeler, Charles, 31

Index

   •   25 1

Siskind, Aaron, 65 photograph of Bourgeoiss’s Personage series installation by, 112, 113 sitelessness (homelessness, placelessness), of modern sculpture, 20, 23, 89, 107, 116, 196n5 dramatized, in sculptors’ photographs, 22–23, 92, 107–8 dramatized, in Smith’s photographs, 20, 59–60, 66, 89–92, 107–8, 116, 176 See also autonomy, sculptural Skidmore College, 187n51, 214n2 Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, lecture at, 62–64, 66, 67, 69, 70, 71, 86, 87 Sloan, John, 120 Smith, Candida, 210n43 referenced, in Smith’s works, 120, 139, 211n47, plates 37, 41 Smith, David and abstract expressionism, 124, 126 and aerial photography, 59–60, 64, 65, 67, 75, 81, 84, 86, 87, 138 altered sculptures, 23, 126–28, 209n34, 210nn42–43 antiwar works, 33, 60, 151–52, 196n4 at the Art Students League, 14, 30, 120, 187n47, 191n28 black-and-white photographs, 2, 32, 35, 38, 42, 56, 57, 71, 81, 82, 83, 84, 123, 146, 152, 181–82n3 in Bolton Landing, 2, 7, 8, 20, 21, 33, 35, 38, 39, 42, 46–47, 47, 56, 57–58, 57, 71, 74, 76, 78, 82, 83, 84, 85, 88–89, 90, 91, 92, 93–94, 95, 96, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102–4, 104, 114, 117, 118, 125, 129, 133, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 154, 156, 157, 158, 164–65, 169, 170, 174, 175, 182n3, 183n5, 187n55, 188n58, 198n42, 201n2, 211n47 and Bourgeois, 112, 113 and Brancusi, 12, 23, 27, 49, 77, 92–93, 106, 108, 163, 175–76 in Brooklyn, 187n55, 187nn51–52 and Budnik, 2, 2, 81–82, 82, 83, 84, 123, 127, 182–83nn4–5, 210n43, 217n43 and Caro, 94, 122, 170, 217–18n48 and carving, 43, 77, 108, 110, 193n46 and casting, 5, 7, 8, 19, 29–30, 73

25 2   •   I n d e x

catalogue raisonné of, 21, 71–72, 184n19, 198n42, 210–11n47 ceramic plates, 216n27, 217n42 color slides, 23, 60–61, 62, 63–64, 66, 69, 86, 87, 119–20, 123, 124, 133, 134, 135, 137, 138, 139, 140, 152, 182nn3–4, 198n38, 207n4, 215n18 constructions, 15, 33, 34, 43, 88, 113–14, 114, 121, 166, 167, 183n6, 191n28 copy prints, 46, 57, 70, 81–82, 195n82 and cubism, 3, 14, 26, 63, 69, 77, 97, 138 death of, 6, 7–8, 46–47, 58, 72, 126, 128, 138, 148, 181n3, 183n5, 187n51, 194n69, 210n42, 210–11n47, 215n8 and Dehner, 13–14, 182n4, 187n48, 188n56, 191n26 and drawing, 6, 7, 12–13, 13, 15, 25, 26, 28, 28, 30, 31, 67–69, 75, 77, 102, 151–52, 184n18, 187n48, 200n61, 211n47, 214n2, 217n27 Estate of, 72, 182nn3–4, 183n5, 210nn42–43, 215n8 exhibitions, 1, 2, 22, 25–27, 28, 29, 30, 43–44, 46, 48, 58, 73, 87, 92, 99, 113, 126, 127, 134, 138, 168–70, 188n56, 189–90n8, 190n10, 190nn12–13, 191n28, 192n34, 193n55, 200n67, 208–9n29, 208n27, 210n43, 216n27 and Feininger, 37, 39–41, 40, 43, 191n28, 192n34, 192n36, 199n51 and forging, 96, 100, 102, 113–14, 114, 121, 166, 205n53 and found objects, 6, 8, 14, 19, 29, 73, 122, 126, 138, 166, 184n20 gender in the work of, 5, 20, 24, 151, 153, 155–57, 164, 165, 166–67, 171 and Giacometti, 63, 96, 181n1, 201n10 in Greece, 182n3, 187n52, 206–7n4 and Greenberg, 5, 21, 23, 25, 41, 72, 75, 87, 126–27, 128–29, 132, 137, 163, 164, 183n13, 188n58, 192n36, 192n42, 200n67, 210nn42–43, 210n47, 212n56, 212n66, 217n48 interviews with, 61, 116, 123, 133, 134–35, 136, 140, 148–50, 164–65, 167, 214n84, 217n32 and Kramer, 1, 21, 127, 138, 141, 197n36, 201n10

and Krauss, 3, 20, 21, 23, 61–62, 71–75, 73, 89, 127–28, 160–61, 165–66, 170–71, 184nn18–19, 187n51, 188nn57–58, 196n9, 197n27, 198n42, 198n46, 200n67, 201n7, 203n27, 209n35, 210nn41–42, 210n45, 210–11n47, 212n64, 215n17, 216n25, 217n32 and Lances, 30, 31, 31, 37, 191n28 lectures and writings, 5, 23, 29, 60, 62–64, 66, 67, 69, 70, 84, 85, 115, 120–21, 123, 124, 136, 137, 138–40, 150, 183n6, 199n60, 208n24, 211n47, 215n12, 218n6 and Man Ray, 37, 68, 159–60, 160, 187n51 and Matulka, 14, 15, 120, 183n6 and minimalism, 5–6, 112, 124 and models, 142, 143, 144, 145–46, 147, 148, 153, 155, 156, 159, 161, 163, 164, 167, 171, 198n36, 214n2, 215n9, 216n27 and Moholy-Nagy, 14, 37, 39, 65, 68, 187n51 and Moore, 12, 23, 92–93, 108, 116, 174, 176 and Mulas, 7–8, 8, 46–47, 48, 71–72, 100, 101, 102, 103, 108, 183n5, 188n58, 198n42, 200n67 nude paintings, 24, 143, 144–46, 147–50, 168, 171, 214n2, 217n41 nude photographs, 6, 23–24, 142–48, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 152–55, 154, 156–57, 156, 157, 158, 159–60, 159, 161–65, 162, 167, 168, 171, 173, 215n8, 215n18, 216n27 and O’Hara, 21, 93–94, 96, 97, 118, 127, 132–33, 134, 138, 140, 142, 164–65, 167, 171, 208n24, 214n84, 218n51 painted sculptures, 20–21, 23, 93, 120–21, 126–29, 132, 134, 140, 141, 209n34, 210nn42–43, 210–11n47, 212n56, 212n64, 212n66 and painting, 6, 7, 15–19, 26, 63–64, 67, 97, 120, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 136, 170, 176, 183n6, 196n2, 208n24, 210–11n47, 214n2 photo-collages, 15, 17, 37, 66 photographic archive of, 21, 46, 71, 123–24, 181–82n3, 215n8 photographic equipment of, 2, 2, 14, 27, 44, 182n4 photomontages, 16, 37, 66, 187n51 and Picasso, 3, 5, 12, 15, 33, 60, 64, 183n6, 191n29

radio broadcast of, 59–60, 196n2 and Rosso, 23, 51, 53, 55–56, 58, 77, 81, 176 self-portrait of, 124, 125 sprays, 67–69, 211n47 and steel, 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, 14, 20, 22, 25, 26, 41, 43–44, 46, 47, 48, 55, 56, 57, 67, 70, 75, 77, 89, 92, 93, 94, 96, 98, 99, 99, 100, 101, 102, 108, 113, 115, 118, 120, 121, 122, 124, 129, 132, 133, 138, 141, 166, 168, 173–74, 175, 183n6, 184n19, 190n12, 191n28, 199n51, 199n61, 205n53, 210n42, 211n47, 211n77 and surrealism, 15, 72, 127, 159, 160 in the Virgin Islands, 14, 14, 15, 16, 18, 19, 19, 182nn3–4, 187n49 and the vulgar, 24, 140, 150–51, 152–53, 155, 161, 167, 215n11 and welding, 2, 3, 5–6, 8, 19, 20, 29, 33, 43, 44, 48, 55, 73, 77, 84, 88, 89, 94, 99– 100, 101, 114, 118, 120, 121, 138, 139, 150, 187n55, 199n61 and Willard, 27, 31, 37, 39, 43, 45, 57–58, 181n2, 183n5, 190n13, 190n17, 193n55, 193n59 and the Willard Gallery, 25, 60, 113, 206n70 Works 2 Circle IV (photograph of ), plate 25 5 Units Equal, 168 7/29/53, 88 17 H’s, 209n34 ΔΣ 9/8/52, 68 ΔΣ 9/14/52 (Study for Tanktotems), 102, plate 18 Aftermath Figure (photograph of ), 33, 36, 43 Agricola I, 122 Agricola VIII, 122 Albany II (photograph of ), 7 Albany series (photograph of ), 7 Australia, 75–77, 87, 199n53 Australia (photograph of ), 75, 76, 77, 87 Becca, 211n47 Bec-Dida Day, 120, 139 Bec-Dida Day (photograph of ), 139, plate 41 Bi-Cycle (photograph of ), 88, 91, 104 Blackburn, Song of an Irish Blacksmith, 62, 72–73, 196n, plate 8 Blackburn, Song of an Irish Blacksmith (photograph of ), 72–73, 73, 74, 196n

Index

   •   25 3

Smith, David: Works (continued) Blue Construction, 121 Bombing Civilian Populations, 60, 61 Bouquet of Concaves, 70–71 Bouquet of Concaves (photograph of ), 46, 70–71, 71, 81 Bouquet of Concaves II, 120, 137 Bouquet of Concaves II (photograph of ), 137–39, plate 36 Bronze Plane series, 168 Circle and Box, 210n42 Circle I, 122–23, plate 24 Circle I (photograph of ), plate 25 Circle II (photograph of ), plate 25 Circle III (photograph of ), plate 25 Circles and Arcs (photograph of ), 138, plates 37, 38 Circles Intercepted, 120, 138 Circles Intercepted (photograph of ), 138, plates 37, 38 Circle series, 122 Classic Figure III, 37 Classic Figure III (photograph of ), 37, 38, 43 Cockfight, 41, 44, 46, 55 Cockfight (photograph of ), 41–43, 42, 44, 46, 48, 51, 55, 70, 92, 94, 134 Construction in Rectangles (photograph of ), 113–14, 114 Construction with Forged Neck, 114, 166 Construction with Forged Neck (photograph of ), 114, 114 Construction with Points (photograph of ), 191n28 Cubi III, 28, 168, 200n61 Cubi III (photograph of ), 201n7 Cubi VII, 168–70 Cubi VII (photograph of ), 169, 171 Cubi IX (photograph of ), 101 Cubi XXIII, 170, 217n48 Cubi XXIV, 170 Cubi XIX (photograph of ), 139, plates 39, 40 Cubi series, 138–39, 167, 168 Cubi series (photograph of ), 24, 77, 182n4 Doorway on Wheels (photograph of ), 7, 119, plate 19

25 4   •   I n d e x

False Peace Spectre, 196n4 The Five Spring (photograph of ), 175 Forging I (Unfinished) (photograph of ), 114, plate 16 Forging II (photograph of ), 114, plate 16 Forging III (photograph of ), 114, plate 16 Forging X (photograph of ), plate 16 Forging XI (photograph of ), 113, 114 Forging series, 121 Forging series (photograph of ), 96, 113 Fourth Estate: The Free Press, 151 Gondola series, 120 Growing Forms (photograph of ), 39–41, 40, 43 Head as Still Life II (photograph of ), 33, 35, 43 Headscrew (photograph of ), 39–41, 40, 43 Helmholtzian Landscape, 127, 129, 212n56, plate 28 The Hero, 166, plate 3 The Hero (photograph of ), 46, 51, 70, 81, 92, 94, 134, plate 2 Hirebecca (photograph of ), 138, plate 37 Hudson River Landscape, 173–74 Hudson River Landscape (photograph of ), 173–75, 174 The Iron Woman (photograph of ), 96, plate 16 Land Coaster (photograph of ), 7 Lunar Arc, 210n42, plate 26 Man and Woman in Cathedral, 96, plate 16 March Sentinel (Stainless Steel Planes) (photograph of ), 98, 99 Medals for Dishonor series, 60, 61, 151–52, 152, 191n28 Menand II (photograph of ), 142, 147, 164 Menand III, 163, 164 Menand III (photograph of ), 163, 164, plates 43, 44 Menand V (photograph of ), 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 146, 148, 154, 156, 164 Menand series, 168 Menand series (photograph of ), 24, 163 Ninety Father (photograph of ), 138, plate 37 Ninety Son (photograph of ), 138, plate 37 Oculus (photograph of ), 45, 56, 56–57, 57, 57–58, 92

Oval Node I, 210n42 Personage of August (photograph of ), 175 Personage Seeking Australia, 166 Pilgrim (photograph of ), 175 Pillar of Sunday, 121, plate 23 Pillar of Sunday (photograph of ), 46, 47 Portrait of a Lady Painter, 29–30, 181n1, plate 1 Portrait of a Lady Painter (photograph of ), 1, 19–20, 151, plate 1 Portrait of a Painter, 29 Primo Piano III, 210n42 Primo Piano series, 210n45, 210–11n47 Raven IV, 3, 4, 121 Raven series, 121 Rebecca Circle, 210n42 Reclining Construction (photograph of ), 33, 34 Reclining Figure, 30, 31 Running Daughter (photograph of ), 175 Sentinel I (photograph of ), 175 Sentinel II (photograph of ), 175 Seven Hours (photograph of ), 81–82, 82, 83, 84, 85 Spectre of War (photograph of ), 37, 39, 41–43 Structure of Arches (photograph of ), 199n51 Suspended Cube, 168 Suspended Cube (photograph of ), 47, 48 Tanktotem III (photograph of ), 88, 90, 91, 104 Tanktotem IV (photograph of ), 88, 90, 91, 104, 117, 118 Tanktotem VI (photograph of ), 175 Tanktotem VII (photograph of ), 119, 122, 135, plates 20, 21, 37 Tanktotem VIII (photograph of ), plates 32, 34, 37, 38 Tanktotem IX (photograph of ), 119–20, 124, 125, 135, 136, 137, plates 22, 31, 37, 38 Tanktotem X (photograph of ), 20–21, 133–34, 137, 140, plates 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 37, 42 Tanktotem series, 102, 120, 166 Tanktotem series (photograph of ), 20, 92

Torso (photograph of ), 191n28 Two Box Structure (photograph of ), 98, 99 Two Circle Sentinel (photograph of ), 98, 99 Untitled (1937), 208n22 Untitled (1955), 128, 210n45 Untitled (1955) (photograph of ), 113, 114 Untitled (1959), 8 Untitled (1959) (photograph of ), 8, 8 Untitled (1960) (photograph of ), 7 Untitled (1961), 168 Untitled (1963), 68–69, 210n42, plate 15 Untitled (Aerial View), 59, plates 6, 7 Untitled (Barn Wall, Maine), 63–64, plate 11 Untitled (Candida), 211n47 Untitled (Model for Sculpture), 6 Untitled (Mud and Detritus), 64, plate 14 Untitled (Muddy Ground), 64, plate 13 Untitled (Nude), Bennington Pottery Works, 162 Untitled (Nude) (gelatin silver print), 154, 157, 158 Untitled (Nude with Menand II), 147 Untitled (Nude with Menand V), 143, 144, 145, 146, 148, 154, 156 Untitled (Photo-Collage), 17 Untitled (Piece of Fluorite), 63, plate 9 Untitled (Round Stone), 63, plate 10 Untitled (Seaweed, Maine), 64, plate 12 Untitled (Study for Medals for Dishonor), 151, 152 Untitled (Terpsichore and Euterpe, in Landscape), 97, plate 17 Untitled (Virgin Islands Photomontage), 16 Untitled (Virgin Islands Tableau), 18, 19 Virgin Islands, St. Thomas, Looking across the Bay at the City of St. Thomas from the West Indian Company (LTD), 8, 14 Voltri-Bolton Landing series, 129 Voltri-Bolton Landing series (photograph of ), 78 Voltri-Bolton V (photograph of ), 167 Voltri III (photograph of ), 102, 103 Voltri IV (photograph of ), 102, 103 Voltri V (photograph of ), 102, 103 Voltri VI, 199n61

Index

   •   255

Smith, David: Works (continued) Voltri VI (photograph of ), 101, 101 Voltri XIII (photograph of ), 102 Voltri XVIII, 210n42 Voltri series (photograph of ), 100 Wagon I (photograph), 124, plates 25, 26 Wagon II, 129, 210n42 Zig II (photograph of ), 98, 99 Zig III (photograph of ), 98, 99 Zig IV, 124, 127, 134–35 Zig IV (photograph of ), 124 Zig VII, 134–35 Zig VIII, 134–35 Zig series (photograph of ), 97, 98, 99 See also abstraction; figuration Smith, Rebecca, 187n48, 210n43 referenced, in Smith’s work, 120, 138, 139, 210n42, plate 41 Smithson, Robert, 176, 177–78 and the aerial view (aerial art), 86–87, 200n66 Hotel Palenque, 198n38 Yucatan Mirror Displacement series, 177–78, 178 Snyder, Joel, 10, 189n62 Solomon-Godeau, Abigail, 65, 145 Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, exhibition at, 208n29 Sontag, Susan, “In Plato’s Cave,” 1 Soviet Union, 182n3 Speaks, Elyse, 205n52 Spiro, Tina Matkovic, 214n2 Spoleto, installation in, 46, 100–101, 102 photographs of, 46, 100, 100, 101, 102, 103, 108 staging of sculpture, 93 Bourgeois and, 23, 93, 112–13 Brancusi and, 23, 93, 104–6, 203n34 Giacometti and, 23, 93, 108, 201n10, 206n68 Moore and, 23, 53, 93, 108, 201n10, 203n34 Smith and, 2–3, 6, 12, 20, 22, 33, 37, 75, 88– 89, 92, 93, 94, 100, 102, 104, 113, 116, 118, 138, 168, 175, 201n10, 201n12 Steichen, Edward, photographs of Rodin’s Monument to Balzac by, 11, 107 Steinberg, Leo, “Other Criteria,” 66–67, 81

25 6   •   I n d e x

Stella, Frank, 124, 208n22 Stevens, Peter, 68, 208n24, 210nn42–43 Stevens, Wallace, “The Auroras of Autumn,” 119 Stieglitz, Alfred, Equivalents series, 65, 66 Stimson, Blake, 103 Sunami, Soichi, as photographer of Smith’s work, 31, 37, 191n28 surrealism, 15, 72, 127, 159, 160 Sylvester, David, interview with, 29, 116, 190–91n23 Szarkowski, John, 188n58, 200n67 Tanguy, Yves, 15 Temporary Emergency Relief Administration, 120 This Quarter, 27 tombs, Chinese, 100, 204n42 Treasury Relief Art Project, 120 Truitt, Anne, 122, 124 United States, 12, 22, 59, 102 University of Arizona Art Museum, donation of Smith’s 17H’s to, 209n34 Valentiner, W. R., 25–26, 43 Origins of Modern Sculpture, 30, 108–110, 111, 194n69, 204n42 vantage point, 10, 11, 13, 14, 39, 47, 50–52, 53, 58, 66, 94, 112, 194n68 Smith and, 1, 2, 3, 9, 12, 15, 19–20, 22–23, 30, 33, 37, 41, 45, 46, 47, 48, 53, 55, 56–58, 60, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 69, 70, 72–73, 75, 77, 84–85, 86, 89, 92, 94, 97, 102, 113, 115, 119, 134, 137, 138, 139, 142, 143, 145, 146, 147, 153, 156, 161, 171, 173, 174, 176, 201n7 Wölfflin and, 9, 54–55, 56, 58, 184n21 Venice, 194n62 Verrocchio, Andrea del, David, 54 Vidler, Anthony, 97 Wagner, Anne M., 5, 99–100, 122, 193n50 Warhol, Andy, 124 Washington, D.C., 209n31 Weber, Max, 107

Weisman, Londa, 216n27 Weston, Edward, 159, 159 Willard, Marian, 43, 193n55 and hiring of professional photographers to document Smith’s work, 31, 37, 39, 43, 183n5 Smith’s correspondence with, 27, 45, 57, 181n2, 190n13, 190n17

Willard Gallery, New York exhibitions at, 25, 48, 60, 113 severing of connections with, 206n70 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 131, 213n70 Wölfflin, Heinrich, 69, 212n78 “How One Should Photograph Sculpture,” 9, 54–55, 56, 58, 184n21, 195n78 Wood, Jon, 106, 203n34

Index

   •   25 7

Text: 9.5/14 Scala Pro Display: Scala Sans Pro Compositor: BookMatters, Berkeley Prepress: Embassy Graphics Indexer: Jane Friedman Printer and binder: QuaLibre