Totems of a Titan

"My effort is to drive to the fullest extent those few talents that were given to me," the late David Smith once said. The brawny, Indiana-born metal worker was perhaps the most restless as well as the most gifted sculptor of an impatient nation and century. For 25 years, he labored to populate the fields of his "sculpture farm" near Bolton Landing in upper New York State with a dozen different species of welded totems, signposts, sentinels and ti tans. He was still pursuing at least five different styles when the pickup truck he was driving veered off the road and he died, at the age of 59, in May 1965.

Given such a massive body of work, a major problem in staging a retrospective was to find a museum that could adequately display it. Manhattan's Guggenheim Museum turns out to be just the place, with its soaring inner space and gigantic spiral ramp designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. A few large, most strongly vertical works look slightly lopsided because of the ramp's slope. But by and large the Guggenheim's arbitrary architecture admirably enhances the drama of Smith's career.

Poetry and Vision. Just inside the door is Cubi XXVII, Smith's last work. A commanding construction of stainless steel, its open central square draws the visitor toward it, then past it up the ramp. Thus, instead of going up by elevator and sauntering downward--as he does with most Guggenheim exhibitions-- he finds himself climbing upward, approximating the demanding path that the sculptor pursued.

The upward pilgrimage begins with Smith's earliest wood and wire constructions. Already evident is the haunting and haunted poetic imagery that informs even the starkest of his mature works. It was while he was studying painting at New York's Art Students League that Smith discovered the first installments of Finnegans Wake in transition and became fascinated with the parallels between poetry and the visual arts. A crudely constructed, painted Head of 1932 translates into visual terms the kind of controlled ambiguity that Joyce used: its profile simultaneously suggests a dancing woman.

But it was in metal that Smith was to find his calling and his towering achievement. He was a born craftsman. As a boy growing up in Decatur, III., he remembered, "I played on trains and around factories just like I played in hills and creeks. Machinery has never been an alien element; it's been in my nature." During his college years, he worked for a summer as a riveter and spot welder at Studebaker's South Bend plant. Looking through French art periodicals in his art-student days, he saw how Pablo Picasso, working with the Spanish metalworker Julio Gonzalez, had built small sculptures of welded steel. In the fall of 1933, he abandoned painting, rented space in a machine shop called the Terminal Iron Works in Brooklyn, bought a welder's torch and outfit, and began to weld.

Form Giver. More than any man, Smith gave the obdurate metal of the Industrial Revolution its own sculptural form. He liked the fact that steel had little real history in art. What associations the metal possesses, he argued, "are primarily of this century: structure, movement, progress, suspension, destruction and brutality."

His first efforts looked like so many small Picassos. Later, they also began to resemble the small, stage-like Surrealist compositions of Alberto Giacometti, whose work Smith admired because it also incorporated the Freudian dream imagery so dear to Joyce. In 1940 Smith moved to Bolton Landing, and during the war years, he spent most of his time at his welder's trade, working on locomotives and tanks at a nearby plant. But by 1945, he had accumulated an exquisite series of small, neo-Surrealistic bronze-and-steel tabletop tableaux. Both Home of the Welder and Reliquary House are rich with Smith's private sexual imagery.

Seeking to translate this symbolic imagery into clearer, simpler compositions, Smith developed his "line drawing" sculptures, made from strips of steel welded together into flat, picture-like compositions. His masterpiece in this genre is Australia (1951), a 9-ft.-wide, predatory sort of flying queen ant that stands on a pedestal, as much signpost as symbol. Australia occupies a niche of its own at the Guggenheim, for it marks the end of Smith's apprenticeship to foreign styles and his emergence as an innovator with followers of his own. Thereafter, his works became increasingly abstract, although to the last their profiles also ambiguously suggest the stature and presence of a human being.

He began to work in series, the first of which was "Agricola": graceful totems made from bits of old agricultural implements salvaged from barnyards. He was immensely proud of the fact that his grandparents had been pioneers and thought of these shards of pioneers' tools as belonging "to my grandfather and thus to me."

Beginning in 1957, larger, heavier and subtly more ominous forms intrude. The 7-ft.-high "Sentinels" are towers of chunky I-beams or weather-vane slabs. Smith set some on little wheels, explaining that he had gotten .the idea from Hindu temple chariots. He always prided himself on his sheer physical energy, as if he were clinging to his image of himself as some machine-age peasant with industrial muscles. Invited to contribute to Italy's Spoleto festival in 1962, Smith stunned nearly everyone by producing 26 works in less than a month and studded the Spoleto amphitheater with them.

Proud Zigs. As the works grew more monumental, Smith experimented with bright enamels to keep his monuments joyful. Color endows three flat, empty-centered "Circles" with dashing zest. Enamels brighten the statuesque "Zig" (for Ziggurat) series of tilting or semicircular sheets of steel. Nature itself is meant to tint the burnished-steel "Cubi" series. "I polish them," Smith explained, "so that on a dull day they take on a dull blue or the yellow glow of an afternoon sky."

On the last turn on the ramp at the Guggenheim, lined with proud "Zigs" and sprightly "Arcs," Wright's giant skylights loom close above the sculpture, filtering wan daylight through and crushing the mighty works down to an almost puny human scale. But if the ambience seems bleak, it is also strangely appropriate, for Smith's last works were conceived and built in desolation. His second wife had left him in the isolated mountain house, taking with her their two daughters. Visitors, though they revelled in the gourmet meals that the sculptor cooked and joined in the monumental drinking bouts, could see that he was desperately lonely. "If you ask me why I make sculpture," he once said, "I must answer that it is my way of life, my balance and my justification for being." As a balance wheel that served in lieu of commoner satisfactions, it impelled him to subdue the brutal stuff of the machine age, giving it a style, a presence--and perhaps an esthetic future.

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