KAREN WILKIN
461
heads created in direct response to his seeing photographs of Picasso and
Gonzalez heads in
Cahiers d } art.
Those Picassos and Gonzalezes were pre–
sent, but the Smiths were absent. Absent, too, was Giacometti's fragile
The
Palace at
4
A . M.,
1932-33, a work that haunted Smith through the
thirties and forties and provoked some of his most powerful and enigmatic
sculptures - four of which were among the show's standouts. That
The
Palace at
4
A.
M.
isn't made of iron was clearly not the issue, since most of
the included Giacomettis were bronze, while the catalogue states that for
the purposes of the show, iron was not only a specific material but "a
metaphor for the crisis that arose in society and the avant-garde itself be–
tween the two world wars," a crisis loosely defined as a conflict between
humanism and modernism. (Whether this was evident in the works in the
show is another question.)
Moderately-scaled sculptures, like people, look good at the
Guggenheim, despite the way objects must be seen sequentially, framed as
though they were in shop windows.
Picasso and the Age of Iron
looked
handsome; even the slightly overwrought bases that compensated for the
slope were generally acceptable. But who decided to jam so many of the
sculptures against the wall of the ramp and restrict our view of them to a
single side? For Smith, particularly, this was disastrous. It's true that his
work is often described as frontal, flat, and picture- like, but anyone who
has
looked attentively at Smith's
sculpture,
as opposed to
photographs
of his
sculpture, will attest to its being, quite the contrary, subtly and intensely
three-dimensional. Smith elicits drama from the way elements touch or
from how they cut across an implied "picture plane." Many works are
elusive, forcing us to search in vain for vantage points that will reveal hid–
den elements or clarify those facing away from us, something that is clear
only when they can be seen in the round. Treating so many Smiths as
though they were wholly pictorial and wholly legible from a single view–
point badly distorted them.
The Letter,
1950, for example, where tiny, ag–
gressively plastic "secret" sculptures are set at right angles to rows of let–
ters on a vertical rack, was placed against a wall. So was
The Hero, 1951-
52,
which rendered the difference between convex and concave sides in–
visible (a too-high plinth did further damage). Similarly, the complex
painting on the back of
Billiard Player Construction,
1937, crucial to Smith's
imagery, could not even be guessed at.
The catalogue essays were, to say the least, odd, attempting to make a
case for including Calder and Giacometti on the basis of their having ex–
panded Gonzi!ez's notion of "drawing in space," and succeeding in in–
tensifying the confusion. Carmen Gimenez's introduction was concilia–
tory
and apologetic, Dore Ashton's article provided a good overview of
the period, and Francisco Calvo Serraller's read like an obligatory piece of
