artBahrain.org

NEW YORK, September 8, 2011 -- David Smith: Cubes and Anarchy examines the abiding
importance of geometric form in the work of American sculptor David Smith (1906-1965) from
his earliest small works through the monumental late masterpieces that he created in the final
years of his life. Organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where it debuted earlier
this year, the exhibition brings together approximately 60 works, including the largest grouping
of Smith’s Cubis and Zigs assembled in more than two decades. Cubes and Anarchy places these
acknowledged masterpieces in context with Smith’s earlier works in an exhibition that includes
sculptures, drawings, paintings, and photographs, many provided by the Estate of David Smith.
The show will be presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art in the fourth-floor Emily
Fisher Landau Galleries, from October 6, 2011, through January 8, 2012.

David Smith has been widely heralded as one of the greatest sculptors of the twentieth century.
His work has often been presented as a sculptural counterpart to that of the Abstract
Expressionist painters who were his friends. As an innovator of welded sculpture, he produced a
richly diverse body of work exemplified by his poetic assemblages of found objects and
industrial materials. Most scholarship has viewed Smith’s career as developing in a linear
fashion, from the European influences of Picasso and Cubism in the 1930s, to the surrealist,
expressionist, and lyrical works of the 1940s and 1950s, and culminating with his large-scale,
stainless-steel and boldly painted sculptures of the 1960s. The simplified geometry of Smith’s
monumental late sculptures, the final works he produced before his untimely death in a car
accident in 1965, are often seen as representing a distinct break from his earlier sculptures, which
often radically reinterpreted the traditional themes of painting, such as landscape, the figure, and
still-life. David Smith: Cubes and Anarchy, by focusing on geometry, revises the narrative of
Smith’s aesthetic development and, for the first time, places his final works in context.
Beginning with the artist's late stainless-steel and painted steel sculptures, and ending with his
earliest work from the 1930s, the exhibition’s installation traces the vital role that geometric
abstraction played in his work in sculpture, painting, drawing, and photography, throughout his
entire career.

The exhibition’s subtitle, “Cubes and Anarchy,” comes from a phrase Smith attributed to John
Sloan, his teacher at the Art Students League in New York in the 1930s. For Smith, the phrase
connoted the revolutionary power of geometric forms that had been heralded by the European
abstract artists he most admired, in particular the Russian Constructivists, Kandinsky, and the
Dutch De Stijl painter Piet Mondrian. Smith’s fusion of simple geometries with the techniques
and materials of industrial fabrication freed him to explore a broad range of formal and
expressive directions, including heightening the breakdown between drawing, painting, and
sculpture. With wildly gestural surfaces of burnished stainless steel and powerfully vibrant
painted steel, he united timeless form with the power and scale of modern life. In creating this
synthesis, Smith redefined the aesthetics and ambitions of sculpture.