David Smith

The American sculptor David Smith (Indiana, USA, 1906 – New York, 1965) was the artist who most helped spread and disseminate Julio González’s legacy on an international scale at a time when the Catalan artist’s work was little known. In 1956, David Smith published in Art News the essay “González: First Master of the Torch”, an undisguised tribute to the figure of the Spanish sculptor that coincided with an exhibition of his work held at the MoMA in New York at the time. David Smith began to experiment with metal while working in an automobile factory as a young man. He took up sculpture professionally in the thirties when he discovered the work that Julio González and Pablo Picasso were producing together. Julio González’s work, however, was the authentic revelation that was to mark all his sculpture from that time forward. David Smith took and developed much of his artistic research from Julio González’s oeuvre: the plasticity of forged metal, the processes of formal synthesis and the technique of welding iron that González introduced into sculpture as his chosen device to emphasise the condition of a built, assembled or, in other words, fictional artefact that defines every artwork. To David Smith every sculpture is a segment of his working life, linked to his past, his present and his future like a declaration of identity. His drawings capture precisely this concept, that of Chinese calligraphy, which begins off the paper, continues over the space of the paper and is projected beyond it. Only through his drawings can we appreciate fully and in depth the development of his work. Since the Whitney Museum of American Art exhibited some 140 drawings by the artist in 1979, no specific effort has been made to prepare another compilation. Alain Kirili, the curator of this show, will establish for our public a dialogue between the drawings and some sculptures by David Smith that will help us understand the creative process of his work.