David Smith combined the influences of European Surrealism and Cubism with distinctively American materials and methods to create an entirely new style of Abstract art. His welded-steel sculptures were the first of their kind by an American artist. Although they were not publicly associated with the New York School in the 1950s and 60s, Smith's sculptures successfully translated the intellectual and formal concerns of the Abstract Expressionist movement into three dimensions.

• Smith's use of steel and spot-welding techniques allowed him to bring the spontaneous gestures and psychological automatism of Abstract Expressionist painting into three-dimensional form.
• Smith was a remarkably prolific artist who often worked rapidly, free-associating to create series of multiple works that expanded upon a central formal or intellectual theme.
• The simplified, abstract forms and industrial materials and techniques that defined Smith's mature works were very influential for the establishment of the Minimalist sculpture style in the 1960s.

David Smith was born in Decatur, Indiana in 1906 and moved with his family to Paulding, Ohio in 1921. Smith's mother was a schoolteacher, while the artist's father managed a telephone company and was an amateur inventor. Smith was the great-grandson of a blacksmith, and of his childhood, the artist recalls, "we used to play on trains and around factories. I played there just as I played in nature, on hills and creeks." (Hughes, "Iron Was in His Name." p.2) Smith left college after only one year and, in 1925, began working at the Studebaker automobile factory in South Bend, Indiana. There, Smith learned soldering and spot-welding techniques that he would use throughout his artistic career.

After a brief period in Washington D.C., Smith came to New York City in 1926. He soon met his first wife, the sculptor Dorothy Dehner, and enrolled in the Art Students League, where he studied painting and drawing over the next five years. Smith never received formal sculptural training. His ASL teacher Jan Matulka did, however, encourage Smith to start adding three-dimensional elements to his paintings. At this time, Smith began creating relief-like works that evolved into more sculptural and object-like pieces. Through the ASL, Smith also befriended artist and collector John Graham. It was Graham who introduced Smith to other New York artists, such as Stuart Davis, Willem de Kooning, and Arshile Gorky. Around 1930, it was also Graham who, through reproductions in the French magazine Cachiers d'Art, introduced Smith to the welded-metal sculptures of Pablo Picasso and Julio Gonzalez. This was a moment of epiphany for Smith, as he realized that the industrial techniques he had learned as a skilled laborer could be applied to art. Smith bought welding equipment in 1932, and, in 1933, began renting out space in a Brooklyn welding shop called Terminal Iron Works. He experimented with working in metal over the next several years, creating relief plaques such as the politically charged Medals for Dishonour (1937-1940), and small-scale, increasingly abstract sculptures that incorporated found objects and the formal languages of Cubism and Surrealism. He received his first one-man show (featuring drawings and welded-metal sculptures) at Marian Willard's East River gallery in 1938.

In 1940, Smith and Dehner permanently relocated to their farm in Bolton Landing, in Upstate New York. He named the farm "Terminal Iron Works," after his Brooklyn studio. This move was followed by a two-year period of decreased productivity, during which Smith worked in a locomotive factory in order to avoid the draft. The majority of the 1940s was a very productive time for Smith, and he worked through the influence of Surrealism to arrive at a style of sculpture that framed abstract, metamorphic forms within a purposely flattened, Cubist space. With these works, Smith emphasized the act of viewing, particularly from one fixed vantage point. In this way, he produced a perceived flattening of sculptural forms that subverts the painter's attempt to create the illusion of three-dimensionality in the two-dimensional medium of painting. The science of perception and the intersection of painting and sculpture were interests that occupied a great deal of Smith's work.

After taking a teaching post at Sarah Lawrence College at the end of the 1940s, Smith received two Guggenheim awards, in 1950 and 1951, respectively. This infusion of funds allowed the artist to devote all of his time to art making, and to increase the scale and ambition of his work. In sculptures such as Hudson River Landscape (1951), Smith used the improvisational and material possibilities of his welded-steel technique to create large, expressive sculptures that appear to be drawings in space. With their flowing lines and open construction, these works not only betray Smith's formal training as a draughtsman and painter, but also approximate the spontaneous, automatism-inspired method favored by several of the New York School painters.

Like many of the other New York School artists, Smith was also interested in exploring universal human symbols and themes. In 1952, this interest found expression in Smith's first two numbered series of works, the Tanktotem and Agricola series. These works, and those created over the next decade, were pieced together through a process of largely improvisational assemblage, using found objects (such as old farm implements), industrial components (ordered from standard catalogs), and in the mid-1950s, forging techniques, to create vaguely human-like, totemic forms. Throughout the rest of his career, Smith continued to work in numbered series, expanding upon a single core theme in each group and naming each series after a common material or thematic element. Despite the artist's goal of expressing universal topics, and despite the industrial materials and construction techniques that defined these works, Smith's sculptures always maintained a personal, even introspective nature. And, with their hastily welded joints and imperfect surfaces, they also continued to show the hand of the artist. This fruitful period in Smith's career was capped by a one-man show at The Museum of Modern Art in 1957 that featured 34 of the artist's sculptures.

Smith's increased artistic and professional success during these years was matched by significant turmoil in his personal life. Dehner left Smith in 1950 after she discovered that he had been carrying on an affair with one of his Sarah Lawrence students. In the next several years, he married the student and had two children with her, only to have this marriage end as well in 1958.

In 1961, Smith began the Cubi series, perhaps his best-known group of works. These sculptures are composed of geometric, mostly rectilinear forms in stainless steel, and are welded together in improvised groupings that approximate the human body in shape and scale. Like many of his earlier works, these pieces imply a singular viewpoint, and they explore the idea of three-dimensional shapes appearing to exist in a flat, pictorial space. The majority of these pieces were left unpainted (Smith did paint other sculptures at this time, as in the contemporaneous Zig series), and they feature heavily burnished surfaces that create almost calligraphic patterns, recalling the effect of brushwork on an Abstract Expressionist canvas. Smith in fact also worked on a number of paintings based on his Cubi sculptures. These paintings were composed by laying the sculptural forms on a white surface and spray-painting around the objects, creating negative images that further connect Smith's sculptural work to his academic background in painting and drawing.

In 1962, Smith was invited to create new work for an arts festival in Spoleto, Italy. To compose this work, he was given free reign of an abandoned steel factory in the town of Voltri. The setting - so like his old Terminal Iron Works studio - along with the ample supply of materials and assistants, inspired a period of feverish creativity. Smith produced 27 sculptures - known as the Voltri series - during his month-long stay. He was so taken with the place that he had a large amount of steel from the factory shipped back to the United States. There, he continued to work with the Voltri materials in a new group of sculptures that he called the Voltri-Bolton, or Voltron series.

In 1965, at the apex of his creative and professional development, Smith died suddenly and tragically from injuries sustained in a car accident in Bennington VT.

David Smith is considered by many to be the most important American sculptor of his generation. He was almost certainly the first to work in metal, and was singular in his ability to synthesize the influences of Surrealism and Cubism into a new, highly personal and yet distinctively American sculptural style. With his improvisational compositional techniques, Smith was able to translate the formal and intellectual interests of the Abstract Expressionist movement into three dimensions. Smith's work was hugely important for Minimalist sculptors working in the years after his death, and he provided both inspiration and a point of departure for much of the abstract sculpture that followed him.
Below are David Smith's major influences, and the people and ideas that he influenced in turn.


"What [steel] can do in arriving at form economically, no other material can do. The metal itself possesses little art history. What associations it possesses are those of this century: power, structure, movement, progress, suspension, destruction, and brutality."

"I do not work with a conscious and specific conviction about a piece of sculpture. It is always open to change and new association. It should be a celebration, one of surprise, not one rehearsed."

"The sculpture work is a statement of my identity. It is part of my work stream, related to my past works, the three or four in process and the work yet to come. In a sense it is never finished. Only the essence is stated, the key presented to the beholder for further travel."

"Art is the raw stuff which comes from aggressiveness by men who got that way fighting for survival."

"Art before my time is history explaining past behavior, but not necessarily offering solutions to my problems. Art is not divorced from life. It is dialectic."