David Smith: The Art and Life of a Transformational Sculptor
by Michael Brenson.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022,
$50.00 (cloth).
When Michael Brenson’s new biography of the sculptor David Smith arrived in the mail, I thought I wasn’t interested. I texted a sculptor friend and offered it to her. Then I started reading and apologetically texted again. Did she mind waiting?
Michael Brenson—himself the son of an abstract expressionist painter, currently a faculty member in sculpture at Bard, and at one time an art critic for the New York Times—writes with the cooperation of the Smith estate, now overseen by Smith’s two daughters. (Smith died in 1965.) The book, over seven hundred pages long, is dense, ambitious, and hard to put down. Brenson is erudite without being pretentious, and one delight of the reading effort is revisiting twentieth-century artists and their worlds. A second pleasure is the way the story stamps and folds the flat tin of the tired epithet “David Smith, great American sculptor” into a dimensional, voluminous person.
Reading the book stirred up personal dust, a stained nostalgia, and perhaps this reaction made my interest particular. My father taught at Bennington College, and so I spent the 1960s in Bennington, Vermont, one of the places that Smith, too, was then spending time. I crossed paths or heard about artists and onlookers quoted in the book, like the painters Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, and Robert Motherwell, the sculptor Anthony Caro, and the art critic Clement Greenberg, among others. I didn’t really know any of them, but I passed many summer days with one of Ken’s daughters, and during fifth grade had an unrequited crush on Caro’s son, who spent a year in the tiny North Bennington public school and talked like one of the Beatles. I audited a brief seminar with Motherwell when I was sixteen or seventeen, and often saw Greenberg around the Nolands’ swimming pool. I didn’t meet Smith, but his name was a community mantra.
Brenson accurately recreates the mixture of creative ferment and sordidness that characterized the art scene in Bennington during that decade. Bennington students, all women until 1969, were intellectually alive and engaged. Those who studied the arts were encouraged to take themselves seriously and pursue rigorous apprenticeships. They were instructed, often intimately and individually, by their teachers, many of whom were impressive scholars and artists. As Brenson so aptly illustrates, they were also encouraged to have sex, with or without seduction and romance, with any teacher who hit on them. The faculty and the visiting artists and critics were mostly men. They loved to talk art, literature, and philosophy, and many loved to drink. Braggadocio was rampant, as was competitive sexual conquest.
I was young. Much was inchoate. I sensed but could not trace out then the myriad fraught, over-excited relationships among these men and the women they pursued. Nor did I grasp the barbed-wire tangle of influence, competition, rawness, ambition, and common purpose that bound them together—not only the artists and critics in Bennington, but others in Smith’s various circles, including Mark Rothko, Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Lewis, Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, and Willem de Kooning. I witnessed and heard a lot during those years, and it offered me a rich education I only gradually appreciated. At the same time, it left me puzzling for a lifetime about artists, sex, booze, maleness, femaleness, self-destructiveness, egotism, entitlement, and art.
During his early childhood in Decatur, Indiana, David Smith was often whipped by his father, and as a tiny kid ran away from home, or tried to. (His mother tied him to a tree to stop him.) He enjoyed his father when they built things together and his mother when she showed him art books. He started drawing early. He did well in high school after they moved to Ohio, and poorly in the different colleges he attended. His possessed great charisma, an explosive temper, and a penchant for resentment.
He was a very big man, over six feet, heavy-set, strong, not handsome. He once unhappily compared his own face to that of a cow, and some photos support his angst. He was frequently overwhelmed by wildly contradictory moods. He married twice, and ended his first marriage by repeatedly kicking his wife, Dorothy Dehner, so hard during a rage attack that he broke some or all of her ribs. It was hardly his first violence toward her in the quarter century they spent together. All the same, he attracted devotion, hers and other people’s. There was something tender, generous, questing, hugely talented, industrious, and driven about him—qualities that drew both male friends and women to him, and often kept his exes writing him warm letters long after they had left or fled.
Dehner and Smith both studied at the Art Students League in New York City, to which she had introduced him in 1927. He learned his welding and metalworking skills on his own, first in a Brooklyn welders’ shop, Terminal Iron Works, and later, during the Second World War, working in an arms factory. Smith taught himself rigorously, read widely, experimented with techniques, traveled in Europe and Russia with Dehner, and always conversed with other artists. He visited museums, studios, and galleries, and came to know a vast amount about the history of painting and sculpture, from ancient Sumer and Greece, to African carving, European marble and polychrome, and works by contemporaries like Giacometti, Picasso, Calder, and Moore. Once he and Dehner had bought their home in Bolton Landing, New York, he often presented himself as a laborer, a working-man artist; neighbors and farmers came for help making tractor repairs and the like. He could fix anything. He hunted and cooked deer and bear.
Picasso was the artist and Cubism the art that fundamentally sparked Smith, and Abstract Expressionism offered him a path forward. Groping for self-understanding as well as inspiration, he read much about “primitive” art, totem, taboo, myth, and ritual, and began wrestling his feelings into sculptures. Though he refused Deh-ner’s pleas that he try psychoanalysis, he studied Ernst Kris’s 1953 volume The Psychoanalytic Explorations of Art, and understood that his prodigious energy to create and his potential for originality were inseparable from the unresolved and likely unresolvable unconscious turmoil that dogged him. His sculptures, he knew and more or less said, were his way of welding found objects and metal so they melted together bits of his emotions, fragments of memory, impressions, and psychic history with all he’d metabolized about art and form.
Brenson attends to the work as much as the life, keeping them on track with each other. He follows the artist’s sometimes quick, often arduous process, and takes readers though the creation of the series of bronze Medals of Dishonor, the Agricolas, the Forgings, the Sentinels, to the Voltris, the Cubis, the Wagons, and many more. He quotes Smith’s own thoughts about painting and sculpture as well as others’ thoughts about Smith’s pieces.
Smith’s mind often fired so quickly, one work leading him to conceive another, that his production could not keep up with his fancy. Except for several months in Italy in 1962, when Italian corporate and government subsidy gave him everything he needed to work prolifically, he was often oppressed by worrying about how to get money to buy materials, support his children, and pay alimony. When he had cash, he spent it. He fought with collectors and galleries. (Smith hated the dealers who reproduced sculptors’ works—Degas’s ballerinas, for example—after the artist died, and fiercely refused to allow any piece of his ever to be reproduced.) He sometimes took pleasure in alienating powerful museum curators.
As a young man Smith hadn’t been much of a drinker, but his thirst steadily grew. After his second wife, Jean Freas, departed, taking his adored young daughters with her, he fell into a lonely misery that never fully lifted. Alcohol’s siren song grew ever more persuasive, and ever more dangerous. In his later years, at home in Bolton Landing, he often drank cognac, smoked cigars, and listened to Beethoven until he passed out. One woman guest remembered the two of them (he more than her) consuming most of a case of wine before, after, and during a single one of his expertly cooked dinners.
Drinking made him more provocative. An expected guest might arrive to find a nude woman in Smith’s living room. On one occasion in Italy, he woke his fellow visiting sculptor, Beverly Pepper, in the middle of the night to ask her how to say “blow job” in Italian. Women who lived with him became tense and frightened. Each year that passed, each failed effort he made to find a third wife, left him more obsessed with sleeping with young women, including prostitutes as well as dozens of students and drawing models.
Smith love for his daughters bordered on obsession, and he worked hard to make their summer visits into good, even memorable times. He bought a pony, arranged activities and lessons, taught them about the natural world, encouraged them to make art beside him in his studio, cooked them special meals, and organized elaborate birthday parties. He missed them terribly when they were not with him and made long drives to visit them. But one senses it must also have been difficult for them, spending time with a man whose life was out of control, who was often distracted, and who loathed their mother, complaining about her constantly to anyone who would listen. At the end of one visit, when Rebecca was four and Candida three, he drove them to the train station in Schenectady, New York, and put them on the train, apparently alone, for the nine-hour ride home to Washington, D.C. Brenson says little about his impact upon their adult lives, simply noting that Rebecca is a sculptor and Candida was a dancer.
Bolton Landing and the surrounding landscape is Smith’s omphalos. He was an artist of place. As time passed, the bronze, steel, and stainless-steel pieces were increasingly created to root into the Lake George fields and hillsides, to seem as if they’d been born there, or had popped out of the ground like the mushrooms Smith enjoyed gathering. Perhaps influenced by old polychrome carvings, he gave much thought to painting his metal pieces; he changed their colors until he felt they sat just right in themselves or alongside others. The accumulated display stunned visitors. One thinks of the way, millennia ago, the three temples to Poseidon, Hera, and Ceres were set in Paestum beside the sea.
Smith sold his works to private collectors, galleries, and museums to try to build his reputation, and to get money to live. He set up executors, and signed a will before he died to provide wealth for his daughters. He knew it would require selling pieces from his property. But each departure was also an uprooting if not an amputation, the loss ultimately irreparable.
For all his honesty and directness, Benson sometimes seems protective of his subject. At least once he reminds his readers what a different era it was. And that is certainly true. No doubt he sought balance, wanting to foreground the sculpture-making against the life. Even so, the stories accrue. Smith’s dissipation wore me out by the end. I imagine what I felt was a tiny taste of the emotional exhaustion he and those around him felt more fully.
David Smith’s life ended at the age of fifty-nine. Drunk and woozy from pills, he died after crashing his pickup truck into a tree in Vermont. Whatever the cause, sorrow and shock ricocheted around Bennington. I was thirteen, and I remember that people spoke of little else for days. Some, my mother among them, made pilgrimages to Bolton Landing.
Was Smith a great sculptor, arguably the great sculptor of the twentieth century? Many of his contemporaries said so, and it was—as much as anything could be, in a community that loved disputing everything—a settled fact in the Bennington of the Sixties. Now the claim itself seems dated, almost silly, in our more pluralistic art world. Somewhere in the course of reading the biography, I wondered if I had ever really looked hard at Smith’s work, or had just glazed over it, satisfied with recognizing a piece: “Oh, a Smith.” Now I will. It is good to have the totem become a man.
Janna Malamud Smith is the author of five books and many essays. Her latest book, When the Island Had Fish, will be published by Downeast Books in 2023.
