David Smith

The landmark biography of the inscrutable and brilliant David Smith, the greatest American sculptor of the twentieth century.
The artist David Smith once wrote, "'Humanism' is a useless word in my time." A member of the Abstract Expressionist generation, he would do more than any artist of his era to bring sculpture to the forefront of the American scene. Central to this project was his desire to expand the notion of "the human" by exploding the limits of rationality and coherence in the postwar era. Smith was an artist of the impure, the unbalanced, and the unexpected, creating works of art that seem to change completely as the spectator moves from one point of view to another. Identity in his work is unstable, in process. So groundbreaking and prolific were his contributions to American art that by the time Smith was just forty years old, Clement Greenberg was already calling him "the greatest sculptor this country has produced."

Michael Brenson's David Smith: The Art and Life of a Transformational Sculptor is the first biography of this epochal figure. It follows Smith from his upbringing in the Midwest, to his heady early years in Manhattan, to his decision to establish a permanent home and studio in Bolton Landing in upstate New York, where he would create most of his most significant works-among them the Cubis, Tanktotems, and Zigs. It explores his at times tempestuous personal life, marked by marriages, divorces, and fallings-out, as well as by deep friendships with the likes of Helen Frankenthaler and Robert Motherwell. His second wife Jean Freas described him as "Salty and bombastic, jumbo and featherlight, thin-skinned and Mack Truck. And many more things"-and his work is tender, prankish, disruptive, and grand as well. He was a bricoleur, a master welder, a painter, a photographer, and a writer, and he entranced critics and attracted admirers wherever he showed his work. With this book, richly illustrated with more than one hundred photographs, Brenson has contextualized Smith for a new generation of fans and confirmed his singular place in the history of American art.