Tony Smith (sculptor)

Anthony Peter Smith (September 23, 1912 – December 26, 1980) was an American

Education and early life

Smith was born in South Orange, New Jersey, to a waterworks manufacturing family started by his grandfather and namesake, A. P. Smith. Tony contracted tuberculosis around 1916, which lasted through much of elementary school.^[1] In an effort to speed his recovery, protect his immune system, and protect his siblings, his family constructed a one-room prefabricated house in the backyard. He had a full-time nurse and had tutors to keep up with his school work; he sporadically attended Sacred Heart Elementary School in Newark. His medicine came in little boxes which he used to form cardboard constructions. Sometimes he visited the waterworks factory, marveling at the industrial production, machines and fabrication processes.^[1]

Smith commuted to

In 1940, Smith began his career as an independent architectural designer, which lasted until the early 1960s. He built approximately twenty private homes and envisioned many unrealized projects, such as the 1950 Model Roman Catholic Church, with paintings on glass by Jackson Pollock (1950). His work included homes for many in the art community, including Fritz Bultman (1945), Theodoros Stamos, Fred Olsen (1951), and Betty Parsons (1959-60).^[2][3][1] Despite these successes, the architect-client relationship frustrated Smith enough that he gravitated toward his artwork.^[2]

Smith returned to the East Coast after two years in Hollywood, California (1943–45) and began teaching, while developing architectural projects, at the same time as developing various theoretical ideas and painting abstractly. He became a central member of the New York School community, with ties ranging from Gerome Kamrowski to Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko.

He lived in Germany and traveled extensively in Europe from 1953 to 1955, accompanying his wife Jane who was there as an opera singer. There he developed a new group of architectural projects and painted extensively, including the landmark group of Louisenberg paintings (1953–1955). Chiara "Kiki" Smith was born in 1954, when they were living in Nuremberg. Twins Beatrice (Bebe) and Seton were born after the family returned to South Orange, in 1955.

Smith taught architecture and design-related classes at the Delahanty Institute (1956–57) and Pratt Institute (1957–1959), where he developed Throne (1956). This critical early work developed from a class assignment for students at Pratt to determine the simplest possible three-dimensional joint that could be stacked for more than two levels. Smith enhanced the geometrical solution of four triangular prisms by adding another joint, resulting in a new form with seven triangular prisms enclosing two tetrahedra. After some time passed, he decided that the resulting form was something other than a design exercise, so titled it Throne because the symmetrical abstraction reminded him of the dense volume of an African beaded throne.

Smith joined the faculty at Bennington College, Vermont. In 1960 a class project investigating close-packed cells based on D'Arcy Thompson's book Growth & Form (1918) sparked Smith's search for artistic inspiration in the natural world. The resulting agglomeration of 14-sided tetrakaidecahedrons, the ideally efficient soap-bubble cell, is known as the Bennington Structure. This was the first time Smith saw the impact that enlarged geometric shapes could have as independent but architecturally scaled forms - as sculpture.

While recovering from an automobile accident at home in 1961, Smith started to create small sculptural maquettes using agglomerations of tetrahedrons and octahedrons. By 1962 he was teaching at Hunter College. In this year he created Black Box, his first fabricated steel sculpture. The dense rectangular prism, less than two feet high, developed from a mundane object, a 3 x 5" file card box that Smith saw on the desk of American Art critic and historian Eugene Goosen, his colleague and friend. Smith enlarged the proportions of the box five times, like a recent class assignment. He phoned a local fabricator, Industrial Welding, whose billboard he had seen while driving on the New Jersey Turnpike and asked them to deliver it to his suburban home. Although the welders assumed he was crazed, they treated the project with the utmost workmanship and the result was a stunning form to Smith. With this piece, entitled Black Box, Smith had discovered a sculpting process that he continued to hone. Where others saw a pure geometric shape, Smith saw it as a mysterious form. The title alluded to the corrupt administration of New York mayor Jimmy Walker (1926–32), when contractors would drop bribes into a slot in a "black"box.^[4] is Black Box was set on the site of the black wood-burning stove in the little house he had lived in as a small child, so it functioned as a kind of gravestone. It was deliberately placed on a thin base of two-by-four inch plywood pieces to call attention to its status as a work of art.

In 1962, he made Die, a 6'

Allied with the minimalist school, Smith worked with simple geometrical modules combined on a three-dimensional grid, creating drama through simplicity and scale. During the 1940s and 1950s Smith became close friends with Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Clyfford Still. His sculpture shows their abstract influence. One of Smith's unrealized architectural projects in 1950 was a plan for a church that was to have painted glass panels designed in collaboration with his friend Pollock.^[8]

Smith also taught at various institutions including New York University, Cooper Union, Pratt Institute, Bennington College, and Hunter College, where he mentored artists such as Pat Lipsky.

Smith was asked to teach a sculpture course at the

As a leading sculptor in the 1960s and 1970s, Smith is often typically associated with the

Exhibitions

Smith's first exhibitions were in 1964, and he had his first one-person exhibition in 1966. That same year, was asked to anchor the seminal 1966 show at the

September 23, 2012 marked the one hundredth anniversary of Smith's birth. Institutions around the world celebrated his centennial with special events, including a daylong symposium at the National Gallery of Art, a panel discussion at the Seattle Art Museum, an outdoor sculpture installation at Bryant Park in New York, and the exhibition "Kiki Smith, Seton Smith, Tony Smith: A Family of Artists", which opened at the Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Germany, that day.^[11]

Collections

Smith's work is included in most leading international public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Menil Collection, Houston; the Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller Empire State Plaza Art Collection, Albany, NY; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark; and the Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, the Netherlands.^[12] In 2003, the National Gallery of Art in Washington acquired one of four casts of Smith's first steel sculpture, Die, created in 1962 and fabricated in 1968, from Paula Cooper Gallery.^[13]

Smoke (1967) currently fills the 60-foot high atrium leading into the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Ahmanson Building; the museum purchased the work in 2010.^[14]

The estate of Tony Smith is currently represented by Pace Gallery in New York.^[15]

Private life

Smith met his wife, opera singer and actress Jane Lawrence, in New York in 1943. They moved to Los Angeles and were married in Santa Monica, with Tennessee Williams as the only witness.^[1]

He was the father of artists Chiara "Kiki" Smith, Seton Smith, and the underground actress Beatrice "Bebe" Smith (Seton's twin, who died in 1988).

In 1961, Smith was injured in a car accident and subsequently developed

• Environmental sculpture
• List of sculptures by Tony Smith
• The Tony Smith Artist Research Project

References

Further reading

• Busch, Julia M., A Decade of Sculpture: the New Media in the 1960s (The Art Alliance Press: Philadelphia; Associated University Presses:
  ISBN 0-87982-007-1
• Charlot, John, "Tony Smith in Hawai'i", The Journal of Intercultural Studies, University of Hawai'i Press, No. 30 2003
• Shortliffe, Mark (coordinator), Not an Object. Not a Monument. The Complete Large-Scale Sculpture of Tony Smith (
  ISBN 978-3-86521-313-6
• Storr, Robert, Tony Smith: Architect Painter Sculptor (Museum of Modern Art: New York; 1998)
  ISBN 0-87070-071-5
• Chasnick, Ilya,
  Kasimir Malevich, Ad Reinhardt, David Smith, and Tony Smith. "Of Absence and Presence: April 23-May 24, 1986." (Kent Fine Art
  : New York; 1986).
• Thalacker, Donald W. The Place of Art in the World of Architecture, Chelsea House Publishers, New York, 1980.
  ISBN 0-87754-098-5
  .

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Tony Smith (sculptor).

• www.tonysmithestate.com
• Tony Smith Biography @ artnet.com
• Tony Smith Biography @ nga.gov
• Time Magazine Oct 13, 1967
• Free Ride in situ at Clos Pegase