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PARTISAN REVIEW
things that could be constructed in three dimensions, in the same way as
Picasso's series of skeletal bathers, those paintings of elongated, bony
"cages" set against sea and sand, were intended, it seems, as images of
ideal, unbuilt monuments.
Smith, however, appears to have treated his paintings not so much
as surrogates for sculpture (although some may be just that) but as
preliminary versions. He often constructed images first stated on canvas in
metal, a few years later. (Of course, this is also an indication of his life–
long habit of repeating particular images, abandoning them, and then
returning to reinvent them, at irregular intervals.) Despite his acclaim as a
sculptor, Smith always insisted that he "belonged with painters" and ex–
plained that he had begun to make sculpture, in the first place, via the
flat canvas. Construction in three dimensions, he said, was a logical ex–
tension of the way he used aggressively varied textures to separate planes
in his two- dimensional paintings.
Yet it was clear from even the small selection of works at Washburn
that Smith thought as a sculptor from the beginning. Not only do his
painted images look as though they could be built, but they already
point to the nuances of space, the subtleties of how things touch and
project. the way things nudge each other out of true that are so crucial
to
Smith's three-dimensional work. The play of color on a flat surface.
the notion of a painting as a continuous expanse of strokes seem
to
have
been less interesting
to
him than the depiction of the potentially solid.
The sculptures in the show from the thirties and early forties were
small and fierce, teetering between representation and allusive abstraction.
Smith was in his late twenties and early thirties when he made them, in–
venting a method of metal working as he went along, improvising a new
expressive formal language based loosely on radical European works he
knew only from descriptions and black-and-white photos . There are
echoes of Picasso and Gonzalez in these pieces, even of early Surrealist
Giacometti, in a slung, reclining carapace-like figure, but they are already
very much
Smith.
(It helps to remember that when Smith made his first
constructions in metal - the first created in the United States - in 1933,
Picasso and Gonzalez had been making constructed metal sculpture for
less than five years.) Smith's profound individuality is already evident in
the sculptures' elusive, open forms , their confrontational stances, and
their delicate, complex spatial play. Among other things, the exhibition
helped to remind us of just how articulate and physical Smith's sculptures
always are. They photograph as unnaturally flat, but in the flesh, even
these modestly-sized, charged figures and heads, bathers and billiard
players displace space as much as they allow themselves
to
be penetrated.
Smith's sculptures help us to read his paintings, just as his early
