The Artist’s Room

The pre-eminent Abstract Expressionist artist David Smith is primarily known for his ground-breaking sculptures, so much so that the significance of his sculptural achievements has largely overshadowed his work in other mediums. Smith, however, was also a fervent painter, draughtsman and printmaker, and saw these practices as integral to his artistic process and no different from his work in three dimensions. His works on paper served many purposes: as preparatory sketches, drawings after existing sculptures, independent works and exercises to keep his artistic skills honed. Indeed, Smith himself did not consider himself a sculptor, but rather, a painter: ‘I belong with painters in a sense, and all my early friends were painters … I never conceived of myself as anything other than a painter because my work came straight through the raised surface.’ The methods and materials that he brought to his two-dimensional works were no less innovative and significant than those of his sculptures, further evidence that he saw little distinction between them.

Smith was born in Decatur, Indiana, in 1906, and after developing an interest in art began taking a correspondence course in drawing from the Cleveland Art School in 1921. In 1925, he spent a summer working as a welder and riveter at a Studebaker automobile factory, which provided training in industrial materials and techniques that would later prove essential to his career. In 1926 Smith moved to New York and enrolled at the Art Students League. It is likely that his early exposure to expressive drawing techniques came from his classes there, where one instructor in particular demanded students draw every day, a practice Smith continued throughout his life. During this time Smith developed close friendships with other avant-garde artists, such as Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky and John Graham. It was the latter who introduced Smith to the welded sculptures of Julio González and Pablo Picasso, which became great sources of inspiration to the artist. Smith followed in the footsteps of these great European Modernists in developing a style of sculpture that was more akin to drawing in space. Indeed, the great modernist critic Clement Greenberg, a champion of Smith’s, once noted that: ‘It is obvious that Smith aims at effects closer to drawing than to sculpture.’

Drawing was an intimate activity for Smith that, after moving to the Adirondack town of Bolton Landing in 1940, largely took place in a separate drawing studio in his home after long days working on sculpture, and he would strive to complete at least one new drawing a day. Drawings were signed with the Greek letters ‘delta’ and ‘sigma’ as stand-ins for his own initials, along with the date. In 1950, Smith’s work in both drawing and sculpture underwent a transition, shedding the complex symbolism of his previous work in favour of a more linear, expressive style, both free and rhythmic, abstract and yet recognisable. He began to experiment more with new media, developing his own by mixing black Indian ink with egg yolk. The yolk added body and texture to the ink, and by varying the mixture he could create a range of surface qualities, from a thick, waxy quality to a thin, liquid wash, allowing him to achieve gestural effects in his drawing that previously could be done only with oil paint.

An early example of Smith’s work in this new medium, ΔΣ 10/5/4/53 demonstrates the artist’s exploration of drawing’s simplest element: the single line. The line, for him, was a personal choice, the first stroke of the pen or brush would demand a certain second one, and then a third, and so on. Here, a series of upright strokes in variegated black march across the page. Their undulations, though abstract, are also humanlike, and their similarity to the lean, elongated subjects of his contemporary Alberto Giacometti is unmistakable. The allusion to sculptural form in this work is emblematic of the ways in which drawing and sculpture were beginning to converge in Smith’s work, and the gestural, repeating figures in profile that make up ΔΣ 10/5/4/53 became a meditation on a theme, borne out in a series of increasingly abstract drawings over the next two years. In 1955, Smith began to translate the spontaneity of these brushed line drawings into three-dimensional forms in his groundbreaking Forgings series, where each single, flat, upright steel forms a manifestation of that meditative first brush stroke.