Low Landscape

Illinois-born David Smith is considered one of the most important American sculptors of the twentieth century. His exploration of the expressive potential of welded metal for which he is most famous began in 1933 when he saw reproductions of Pablo Picasso’s direct-metal sculpture in an art journal. He already possessed knowledge of steel cutting and welding techniques gained through a 1925 summer job in an automobile factory.

As was the case with other artists associated with abstraction in New York after World War II, Smith’s non-figurative style of the 1950s was preceded by a body of work, exemplified in this 1946 mixed metal piece, indebted to the Surrealist concepts of the personage, the sculptural object, and biomorphic abstraction. The tableau quality of Low Landscape recalls, for instance, the 1930s constructions of the Swiss Alberto Giacometti, and the upright motifs, the organic and free-flowing shapes of Joan Miró or Jean (Hans) Arp, who were active in France.