Master of the Monumentalists
(See Cover)
Gallerygoers at this week's sculpture show in Washington's Corcoran Gallery will have no trouble finding the exhibit. Once they step inside the skylighted atrium they will be in it, surrounded by it, and all but overwhelmed by it. Rising around them on spiky legs is an asymmetric network of 43 piers, a black behemoth, 45 ft. long, 33 ft. wide and 22 ft. high. Its thrusting structure wars against the gallery's Doric columns, seemingly pushing them aside to create its own hypnotic environment like some underwater coral growth.
When the behemoth, which is entitled Smoke, was put on view last week, a blue-eyed, bearded man, beaming from behind horn-rimmed glasses, said, "Don't you love it? It's crazy. It strikes me as one of the most profound things I've ever seen. It's so serene."
The speaker was Anthony Peter Smith, 55, from whose blueprints and models Smoke had been constructed, and who at the moment is the most dynamic, versatile and talented new sculptor in the U.S. art world, the darling of critics, the envy of every museum curator. Two years ago, Tony Smith*was an unknown, but today serenity is the last thing to be found in his life. He is currently riding a fast-cresting wave of enthusiasm--not merely for his sculpture but for all the huge, wild, pure (and impure) shapes of contemporary art. He is also the primary personification of a growing race of creators who have discarded modeling clay in favor of blueprints, the chisel in favor of the welding torch, and Vulcan's forge for a sheet-metal fabrication shop. This is the era, says William Seitz, organizer of the U.S. show at the Sao Paulo Bienal, of "sculptors without studios--sculptors who have their drawings turned into steel at a factory."
Tension Network. Smith has waited a lifetime for his own skills and public demand to come into conjunction. But once they did, there was a veritable explosion of creative activity and gratifying exhibits. This month, Smith's outsized geometric, yet curiously anthropomorphic sculptures are on exhibit in no fewer than seven cities in the U.S. and Europe. In New York, there are works outside at Lincoln Center, in the
Museum of Modern Art's sculpture garden and in the Guggenheim's International Sculpture Show. The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis is showing four Smiths; the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum, the New Jersey State Museum and Pittsburgh's Carnegie one apiece. Yet so sudden is the demand that only four of his pieces have actually been constructed in metal; the rest exist only as painted plywood mockups.
The Corcoran's Smoke is plywood also, but even in that form it took a lot of effort. For the past two months, three to seven workmen have been saw ing, painting, sweating and swearing in the museum's basement and on the main floor. Slowly the massive open construction took on the shape dictated by Smith's original small-scale cardboard model; each part was hinged together to form a baroque network of flowing spaces, held together primarily by tension and hauled into place by hoists. Now installed, the full-scale model cost $6,000; a metal version would have gone as high as $75,000.
Art of a Million Styles. Smith like many contemporary artists shares the impatience to see the future, even in mockups, for he feels that the U.S. is on the verge of a major artistic breakthrough. So far, he points out, the forms that the U.S. has contributed to Western civilization have been largely architectural: skyscrapers, grain silos, factories, petroleum drums, bridges. But Egypt matched its pyramids and temples with obelisks and sphinxes, while Greece's Parthenon was glorified by the handiwork of Phidias. Michelangelo unified Florence's Piazza della Signoria with his 14-ft.-high David--which was positioned in front of the Palazzo Vecchio by a committee that included Leonardo da Vinci and Botticelli.
Obviously, something larger is needed to match the scale of today's American cities. Indoor sculptures the size of Smoke, Smith thinks, are only a beginning. Says he: "I'm interested in fresh air. You can't really characterize what we've done in the past the way you can recognize the style of ancient Egypt. Our style has no landmark. Until now, the art of our country has been a million styles."
Stabiles in Harlem. But as he is the first to admit, it is the public's infatuation with the fast-unfolding art scene, magnified by massive dissemination through almost instantaneous communication and reproduction, that has prepared the way for acceptance of art as a natural and stimulating part of both private and public life.
The new art is challenging traditional painting and sculpture in the museums; the Philadelphia Museum of Art has currently installed "American Sculpture of the Sixties," with George Rickey's 37-ft.-high red blades soaring and Alexander Calder's white-petaled Ghost wafting under the 85-ft.-high ceiling of the Great Stair Hall before Saint-Gauden's bronze Diana (see color opposite). The new art is also demanding a permanent place there. This month, Minneapolis' Walker Art Center has installed its first permanent luminal-art gallery for light sculptures. And, because of its size, sculpture is now shouldering its way out of the museums and claiming space in the cities' public areas.
As a preview of what the future may hold, New York City's Administration of Recreation and Cultural Affairs is staging a month-long display of 25 massive works by the most imaginative sculptors that its advisory committee could line up. A glittering concatenation of neon by Chryssa attracts commuters in Grand Central Station. Three giant dolls by Marisol face Central Park at 59th Street, black stabiles by Alexander Calder stand in Harlem, police cars parade through gigantic, candy-colored building blocks by Lyman Kipp in Central Park.
In the year 1967, the styles and statements of America's brash, brilliant and often infuriating contemporary artists have not only become available to the man in the street, but are virtually unavoidable. And with proliferation comes confusion. Whole new schools of painting seem to charge through the art scene with the speed of an express train, causing Pop Artist Andy Warhol to predict the day "when everyone will be famous for 15 minutes."
Blades Above the Treetops. Tony Smith, who was thought of as primarily an architect at the time, witnessed the coming of age of the U.S. as a world art power in the 1950s. Many of the abstract expressionists who were responsible for that triumph were his friends, including Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman. Smith designed the Long Island homes of Painter Theodores Stamos and Gallery Owner Betty Parsons. Not the least important aspect of the abstract expressionists was the size of their paintings. To force the spectator to become a part of their huge gesture paintings, leaders of the movement expanded their canvases to the size of whole walls.
The pop artists who came after behaved like delighted, bright-eyed children let loose in a supermarket. They too liked their objects big. Andy Warhol enlarged a Campbell soup can and made it an object of veneration; Tom Wesselman celebrated bathrooms and kitchens; Robert Rauschenberg painted his own bed, made a sacred relic out of a stuffed goat with a tire round his middle and walked off with first honors at the 1964 Venice Biennale. Onetime Sign Painter James Rosenquist composed his images of the modern U.S.A. --from hair dryers to atomic bombs--on a canvas titled F-lll, which measures 13 ft. longer than the 85-ft. jet fighter-bomber itself. The painting was bought in 1965 for $60,000 by Manhattan Collector Robert Scull, and is currently one of the hits of the U.S. pop art exhibition in Sao Paulo.
Meanwhile, sculptors, using materials untried in art, began building complex works that physically re-created the frenetic pace and brilliance of modern urban life. To Chryssa, all of Times Square's jangle of signs is one total work of art, and she has set out with neon tube and stainless steel to rival its garish, flickering magic. Kinetic Sculptor George Rickey equates movement with life itself; his own tall blades and semaphores sway in the wind above treetop level and are capable of almost infinite extension.
Deluded by Camp Followers. Faced with what often seems outrageous demands for superscale ("The less the content, the more the discussion," snapped one critic), for imagery that can verge from the erotic to the apotheosis of the ordinary, the art fancier understandably asks: "What is art?" Replies Samuel Adams Green, who supervised the installation of New York's outdoor sculpture show: "Everything is art if it is chosen by the artist to be art." But even Green was taken aback when Sculptor Claes Oldenburg, known for his spoofing soft-plastic sculptures, last week ordered a hole dug in Central Park by professional gravediggers, and then had it filled in to produce "an invisible, underground sculpture."
The uneasy public feeling that some of contemporary art just has to be a put-on is not without reason, as the artists themselves point out. Says Los Angeles Sculptor Edward Keinholz, whose own "environments" of Nevada brothels and backstairs abortion rooms have raised plenty of eyebrows: "In a culture as rich as ours, art gets bastardized. Pop artists had a keen thing going until they let the dealers in. As a result, the span of life for pop art has been cut in half." With hundreds of sec ond-rate artists now trying to cash in, Millionaire Collector John Powers warns: "It is easy to be deluded by camp followers. The public is buying a lot of bad copies of truly creative work."
Bubbling & Expanding. As the fads rush by and art breaks out of its traditional boundaries, the public whose taste was formed earlier finds itself hard pressed. As Lady Bird Johnson remarked recently, while viewing a Roy Lichtenstein drawing: "I have friends who like it, own it, get excited about it. I keep trying." People who want a little peace and quiet in their art, Mrs. Peter Hurd said last week, are the ones who prefer the work of her brother, Andrew Wyeth. "He's probably painting the remnants of a simpler life," she admitted, and wondered if it was not his art, but the time, that has grown out of joint.
What keeps the art market bubbling and galleries expanding is that, for all the confusion, art is being bought. Some people buy it because they honestly want to learn to understand it, some because it is fashionable--some because it is fun. "Art is one of the ways to find out what it's all about," maintains Collector Scull. "The art world is live ly now," says Painter Jasper Johns. "People sense this, and wish to be involved with something that's lively."
Soup-Can Glasses. That the scene is lively, Tony Smith certainly agrees. While no pop art collector himself, he still thinks its cheerful acceptance has added yeast to the ferment. "It has helped art move from a private scene to a public scene," he points out. "In an odd way, the people who supported pop contributed to this by living public lives through mass media. We got to see their collections in magazines; they were talked about in the press, on TV. Their lives became public, and it made the general public much more aware of art and artists."
That much of the artistic fallout into fashion and decor--from op dresses and psychedelic posters to Andy Warhol soup-can glasses and kitchen design--is by nature transitory does not bother him. Using art as home decoration, he argues, "gives it a broader base." Nor is he overly moved by critics such as Clement Greenberg, who laments that too-happy acceptance of the new has killed the tradition of the avantgarde. Greenberg complains that the days of the great innovators are gone, that pop, op and minimal are not true avant-garde art, but merely "novelty art." The only thing that can save high art, he continues, is long periods of gestation. What's needed is for the "larger art public to stop breathing down its neck." In Smith's case, however, the argument is academic--because he has already spent some 30 years, in a manner of speaking, gestating.
Die by Telephone. Until two years ago, Tony Smith was self-confessedly an artistic wallflower. He was known, if at all, in Manhattan art circles as a minor architect and Sunday painter of geometric abstractions, a semiprofessional Irishman (his great-grandparents were from the land of Joyce) whose recitals of Finnegans Wake livened up artists' parties. Then, almost overnight, Smith blossomed.
His first sculpture was executed in 1962, when he was teaching basic design at Hunter College. It was a black box. As he recalls it, his students were constructing basic designs out of flip-top cigarette boxes. Tony had them enlarge their designs five times in cardboard to get the effect of added scale. Then one day his eye was caught by a black file box on a colleague's desk.
On his architect's drafting boards, he made a drawing of the box, enlarged the dimensions to 2 ft. by 3 ft. by 2 ft., took it into the Industrial Welding Co. in Newark, whose sign "You specify it; we fabricate it" he had seen while driving to and from his home in South Orange, N.J. "We were a little bit surprised at first," says William Schmidt, the welding company's president. "I wondered, is this guy a kook?"
Schmidt assigned two workmen to the job. First they cut the shapes out of sheet steel with mechanical shears, tack-welded it (a process similar to basting in sewing), then arc-welded it, checking and squaring the piece along the way for accuracy. Schmidt told his men that it was a work of art. "They didn't take it too serious," he says. But they did take special care to choose unscratched pieces of steel. In fact, they did such a good job that the next time Tony wanted a box, a six-foot cube that he named Die, "I just picked up the phone and ordered it."-
From Cool to Hottest. Slowly, Tony's yard in South Orange began to fill with huge, geometric shapes. Except for The Black Box, Die, and a third piece called Free Ride, all were plywood mockups, built with the help of friends and coated with auto-body underpaint. (Like Henry Ford, Tony believes in letting the customer have any color, so long as it's black.) "I never thought of them as sculpture," says Tony today. "I thought of them as basic design." But other sculptors in other studios were building basic boxes and calling it art. A trend was born.
In April 1966, Manhattan's Jewish
Museum staged its "Primary Structures" show, with Free Ride in its entry court. Minimal art was officially launched--and so was Tony Smith. As a movement, minimal art seemed out to prove to the hilt Architect Mies van der Rohe's dictum: less is more. Many of the objects were simply boxes, beams of steel or lines of bricks. Any figurative suggestions were banned. So was any sign of the craftsman's personal touch: whether large or small, the objects were commercially constructed, color was applied with a spray gun. The aim seemed to be to assault the viewer with the very "thingness" of the object. As shadows played across the empty surfaces, gallerygoers were invited to ponder the mysteries of life and the ultimate beauties of 3-D.
In such surroundings, the ultra-simple Free Ride fitted naturally enough. But, as curators and critics who traveled to South Orange soon discovered, the rest of Smith's work was in a totally different class. Far from being impersonal and "cool," his work exuded a life and an almost menacing presence of its own. In December 1966, Hartford's Wadsworth Atheneum and Philadelphia's Institute of Contemporary Art staged Tony Smith's first one-man show--or shows. Samuel Wagstaff, a curator at the Atheneum, decided to put four of Smith's pieces outside because "we felt that we ought to expand into the street." Smith delightedly constructed a new mock-up of Cigarette, double-size. It was a sensation. Next, Smith's works were assembled for a New York outdoor show. The great black forms were, if anything, even more impressive against the new-fallen snow, and Smith rapidly moved from being considered a cool minimalist to the hottest thing in sculpture.
Chimera & Despair. That viewers find themselves curiously moved by his powerful geometry delights Smith. "My own personal feeling," he says, "is that all my sculpture is on the edge of dreams. They come close to the unconscious in spite of their geometry. On one level, my work has clarity. On another, it is chaotic and imagined." The Snake Is Out, for example, coils for 24 ft. along the ground in back of Lincoln Center, bulging in its black skin like some prehistoric reptile. It propels the viewer to circle it and savor its tetrahedrons and octahedrons swelling and flowing. Yet the title, piling allegory upon allusion, comes from John McNulty's Third Avenue Medicine: "The snake is an ordinary little vein . . . that runs along the left temple of a man's head"--and distends when he is drunk.
What makes Tony Smith's work tower above that of his fellow minimalists is the fact that in many respects he is unlike them. He does not value simplicity for its own sake--nor is he a simple man. "I see my pieces," he says, "as aggressors in hostile territory. I think of them as seeds or germs that could spread growth--or disease." Into their creation has gone not only years of architectural experience--which shows in their angular construction and their house-size dimensions--but also years of frustration, of chasing chimeras, tragedy, illness and black despair.
Half a Bottle a Day. On the surface, Smith seems a cheery soul. From his burly, 6-ft., 205-lb. body, conservatively clad figure, pipes a merry, falsetto voice and a wealth of breezy wit. He is an incorrigible flirt--but friends who know him best compare him to St. Anthony and Martin Buber, calling him a kind of tormented saint. Says one of them, the painter Robert Motherwell: "Like myself and Jackson Pollock, he's a Celt. That partly explains his lyricism, his love of talk and drink --and his sense of being a minority."
Life for Smith is a continuing drama and a continuing ordeal. Teaching, though he has been at it since 1946 (at N.Y.U., Cooper Union, Pratt, Bennington and now Hunter), is still "an exercise in sheer hysteria. I sometimes think I'm going to pass out before I get going." Friends' trials move him deeply. In addition, since a 1961 auto crackup, he has developed a blood disease that causes frequent nosebleeds, and fogging out. What mainly sustains him nowadays is the heady thrill of success, the joy of being called upon to create bigger and more exciting monuments--and alcohol. He consumes at least half a bottle of Old Crow or vodka a day.
Prefab Isolation. Oddly enough, the man whose work now dominates rooms --and demands to live outdoors--grew up in a room all his own, in fact a whole house. Smith was born in 1912 in South Orange, the grandson and namesake of a waterworks manufacturer whose name, A. P. Smith, still decorates hydrants in half a dozen major cities. Tony's father inherited the business, and when the boy contracted TB, the family was wealthy enough to build him a prefab isolation ward in the backyard and provide him with his own nurse. Tony joined the family only on holidays, which was fine with him. He hated household smells.
"Everything was as bare as it could be," he recalls. "My medicines came in little boxes. I would construct pueblo villages out of them." On Saturdays Tony's father took him to the factory, and the boy could hardly tear himself away from its airy, oily expanses, its machinery and materials. "There's no question," says he, "but that there's a direct connection between the factory, my little house, and my approach to sculpture."
Lace-Curtain Whiskers. Schooling was a perfunctory affair. There were private tutors, four years at a Jesuit high school (after the TB had cleared up), two years at Georgetown University, which Tony hated. He came home, bought a bookstore, studied at the Art Students League by night and worked in the factory by day. In 1937, he moved to Chicago to study at the New Bauhaus, found it "awful." After a semester, he drifted into an apprenticeship with Architect Frank Lloyd Wright, traveling from project to project as "clerk of the works." "Wright," he now believes, "kind of brought me home. I discovered myself as a person."
Wright teased Smith about his intellectual pretensions and his Irishness ("Good morning, Sullivan," he'd say. Or "I see you're still wearing the lace curtains," referring to Tony's then red beard). But Wright also taught Smith the elements of good architecture and the drama of the flow of space. Though Smith never acquired an architecture degree or license, he decided to strike out on his own, designed several houses, which visitors say are "logical, livable, not fancy, but in perfect dimension."
Fly in the Ointment. Today, married to the former Jane Lanier Brotherton, a onetime actress known professionally as Jane Lawrence, Smith once again has a house of his own. Jane, along with Kiki, 13, and Twins Bebe and Annie, 12, together with one family cat and several fish, live in the South Orange house where he was born. Tony, on the other hand, lives in a 15-room Georgian mansion in neighboring Orange, which he bought two years ago, together with a bull mastiff named Dutchess, a second family cat--and his 20-canvas collection that includes works by Newman, Pollock and Kline, bought when his friends' works were selling for peanuts 20 years ago.
Jane and the children join Tony for dinner every night, returning in the evening so that the children can attend the South Orange public schools, which the Smiths rate better than the ones in
Orange. And Tony has the freedom and the privacy to wander down to his sparsely furnished basement workroom, which looks very much like a draftsman's workshop with its cardboard models, drawing board, slide rules, and rolls of blueprints.
There is only one small fly in this idyllic esthetic ointment. Tony Smith's income still comes primarily from the $15,000-a-year teaching job at Hunter, and his $5,000 grant from the National Council on the Arts. Despite critical raves, demand for the steel versions of his work is low. In the past 18 months, exactly three Smiths have been contracted for, bringing a total of $44,000.
Big-City Spaces. On the surface, the reason is a simple one. Smith's works must be fabricated individually by commercial firms such as Industrial Welding. According to Smith's dealer, Donald Droll of the Fischbach Gallery, even the simplest works, such as Die, cost as much as $2,000 to produce. Besides, the work is too big and heavy to keep in the house. It is intended for outdoors, for the public to enjoy. Tony Smith is not the only artist to think in terms of outdoor space. Many other sculptors are beginning to create works on a civic scale. Among Tony Smith's fellow monumental sculptors: > Robert Grosvenor, 30, New York-born son of an amateur animal sculptor, builds immense brilliant yellow or red and black cantilevered diagonals, engineering marvels that sometimes hang from the ceiling or wall down to within a foot from the floor. One of his most recent works, destined for Long Island Sound, consists of twin T-shaped towers, constructed of triangular steel beams about eight inches thick and colored a brilliant orange; they are de signed to rise eight feet above the water, held in place by two submerged steel buoyancy tanks.
-- Mark di Suvero, 34, a Shanghai-born stablemate of Grosvenor's at the downtown Manhattan Park Place Gallery, constructs giant wood, steel, rubber-tire and rope constructions at his New Jersey junkyard. They are often designed to let viewers ride or swing on them, carry richly evocative titles such as Elohirn Adonai, Stuyvesantseye or Love Makes the World Go 'Round. -David von Schlegall, 47, is a space-age Mainer who fabricates immense wing-shaped constructions and soaring bolts out of shiny aluminum. One of his giant untitled works, supported by an interior space frame, is currently on display outside the Union Carbide building in New York.
-- Barnett Newman, 62, better known as an abstract expressionist, has recently attracted attention with his sculpture. His 26-foot-high Broken Obelisk, now standing outside the Seagram Building, was built at the Lippincott Environmental Arts fabrication plant in North Haven, Conn. Newman supervised each step of the process, had to draw a sloping line across the top of the inverted obelisk to show workmen exactly where to cut. Then the base was "flame cut"--i.e., burned with a cutting torch, in order to leave a grainy pattern of vertical lines.
City Scale. What Tony Smith and fellow monumentalists want to create is architectonic mastodons, varied enough to refresh the eye after the stark grids of city walls and streets, strong enough to war with jet-generation girders, large enough to command space-age piazzas. Out of the present confusion, Smith believes, a single, unifying style will emerge: "Art is becoming a tangible reality to the public. People are beginning to pass this stuff on their way to work. As art becomes public in this way, people will develop a judgment about it, a sense of universal style."
The Met's Tom Moving agrees, points to Eero Saarinen's St. Louis Gateway Arch and the new Picasso in Chicago (TIME, Aug. 25) as evidence of the trend toward monumental sculpture. "We're slowly coming back," Hoving believes, "to sculpture as something to be interested in. It's part of the conversational environment. As more cities solve their problems, they will want to make things look better with sculpture." But if sculpture is going to take its rightful place in the modern cityscape, it will have to acquire for itself the very qualities of scale, materials, tools and technology that made the city itself great.
Rust & Shipyards. "Napoleon could pay for big works; so he got big works," says Sam Green. City governments and corporations are already beginning to play a similar role. Chase Manhattan Bank thinks nothing of setting aside $100,000 a year for sculpture and paintings for their banks. Sculptor James Wines has finished an ll-ft.-high piece for Hoffmann-La Roche, Inc., in Nutley, N.J. In Los Angeles, Alcoa's huge new Century City complex will be complemented by a 30-ft.-long, 8-ft.-high Peter Voulkos.
Industrial companies have also learned to contribute generously to the cost of building new sculptures. Les Levine, whose transparent Star Garden was shown at Manhattan's Modern Museum this spring (TIME, May 5), built his work with $2,000 worth of plastics and labor donated by American Cyanamid. Businessman Don Lippincott is the angel behind the North Haven plant where Broken Obelisk was fabricated, invested $100,000 in it so that sculptors could produce works for civic groups and industry. U.S. Steel supplies Lippincott with its new Cor-Ten steel, which weathers to a russet brown, at a generous saving. Bethlehem Steel let Robert Murray use its San Pedro, lif., shipyard to build his Siton Duet.
Promise & Peril. It is because artists are convinced that the great civic monuments of the future will not be pallid mitations of Greek, Gothic or Renaissance sculpture that they are now boldy taking their huge, industrially produced works to the public. It is a moment dizzying with promise and fraught with peril. For novelty quickly washes away, and bigness for its own >>ake becomes merely ponderous. The reason why so much critical attention and acclaim is focused on Smith's work at the present is that, even in mock-up t has the quality of permanence. His .culptures assert their authority through heir scale as much as through their size, a unique wedding of robust geometry and personal vision.
-No kin to the late U.S. Sculptor-Welder David Smith or to Britain's Richard Smith, whose shaped canvases won the grand prize at the current Sao Paulo Bienal. -Not all fabricators do such good work. A duplicate of Die was ordered from a Los Angeles firm for last spring's County Museum sculpture survey show, but its surface is badly scratched and, for lack of proper interior bracing, it has an oddly flimsy look.
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