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The Art and Life of a Transformational Sculptor
by Michael Brenson
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 sculptor of his era to bring the plastic arts to the forefront of the American scene. Central to this project was his desire to explode the logic that equated representation and harmony with humanistic values in the postwar era―instead, Smith sought out the unbalanced and unexpected, creating works of art that seem to undergo radical shifts as the spectator moves from one point of view to another. 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 major 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 studio in Bolton Landing in upstate New York, where he would create many of his most significant works―among them the Cubis, Tanktomems, 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 wife Jean Freas described him as "Salty and bombastic, jumbo and featherlight, thin-skinned and Mack Truck. And many more things"―and this was true of his work as well. He was a bricoleur, a skilled welder, a painter, 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.
"A capable, densely detailed portrait of the noted abstract expressionist sculptor...Brenson's careful, thoroughly researched biography does much to explain why [Smith's] work merits reconsideration...A lucid, welcome life of an artist who, though long gone, is well worth discovering." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Smith (1906—1965), an American artist known primarily for his large, welded-steel, abstract sculptures, comes to life in this comprehensive biography...Extraordinary as he conveys his subject to be, Brenson also sheds light on Smith's more complicated dimensions, including his problematic relationships with women, and struggle with alcoholism. Engrossing and erudite, this is sure to fascinate the artist's many admirers." - Publishers Weekly
"An epic achievement, perfectly proportionate to its subject, this magnificent biography gives a towering figure his due. Brenson captures with rare precision the texture of an artist's life, following Smith from small-town Indiana to New York City to, most importantly, rural Bolton Landing, where he created a legendary field of welded metal sculpture that revolutionized his discipline. Brenson, a tireless sleuth, combines a wealth of new material with commanding knowledge of mid-twentieth-century art, and elucidates Smith's work with grace and insight. He is frank about the artist's personal flaws and nonetheless deeply sympathetic to Smith's character as a person and artist. A propulsive, sweeping portrait." - Nancy Princenthal, author of Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art
"Protean, complex, attentive, disturbing, subtle, expansive, ground-breaking – words for sculptor David Smith's art and life, and for Michael Brenson's brilliant biography of Smith. So much is illuminated both by Brenson's rare insight and by the chorus of women's voices (friends, lovers, artists, gallerists, art critics, daughters) that decades of interviewing and immersion enable him to evoke; here is Smith's violent and compelling personality, here is a different, more multitudinous, world of Abstract Expressionists, and, above all, here is Smith's profound and wide-ranging artistic work. By book's end, I felt I had gone to live in the upended world of Bolton Landing, and that I had walked Smith's storied sculpture fields in the snow." - Rachel Cohen, author of Bernard Berenson: A Life in the Picture Trade and Austen Years
This information about David Smith was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Michael Brenson was for two decades a member of the sculpture faculty at Bard College's Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts and he is the author of Visionaries and Outcasts: The NEA, Congress, and the Place of the Visual Artist in America. A former art critic for the New York Times and an eloquent voice on modern and contemporary sculpture, Brenson has been a Getty Scholar, a Bogliasco Fellow, a Clark Fellow, and a Guggenheim Fellow, and he was awarded a Creative Nonfiction Grant from the Whiting Foundation. He has curated exhibitions at MoMA PS1 and the Sculpture Center, and has organized and moderated conferences or panels at the National Gallery of Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Rockefeller Foundation, and New York's Jewish Museum. He lives in Accord, New York.
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