LOS ANGELES, CA.- The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) will present David Smith: Cubes and Anarchy, the first major thematic exhibition devoted to the renowned twentieth-century American sculptor David Smith (1906-65), on view April 3 through July 24, 2011, in the museum‘s new Lynda and Stewart Resnick Exhibition Pavilion. Organized by LACMA, the exhibition will bring together more than 100 works and reveal a sculptor whose identification with the working class motivated him to adopt the geometric forms of the constructivist avant-garde (modernist artists who used hard-edged geometries to express utopian optimism) from the very first years of his career in the 1930s until his untimely death in 1965. Cubes and Anarchy includes sculptures, drawings, paintings, and photographs—many provided by the Estate of David Smith, which lent not only significant sculptures but also revelatory sketchbooks and photos, only a few of which have been exhibited previously.

"David Smith is a protean talent who created sculptures that Donald Judd once described as 'some of the best in the world,‘ yet there has not been an exhibition of Smith‘s work on the West Coast since a memorial show at LACMA in 1965," says Carol S. Eliel, exhibition curator and LACMA curator of modern art. "David Smith: Cubes and Anarchy considers for the first time the entirety of the artist‘s career while focusing on the theme of geometry in his work," she added.

Widely heralded as the greatest American sculptor of the twentieth century, Smith has often been presented as a counterpart to the abstract expressionist painters or as a draftsman in space. Most scholarship has viewed Smith‘s early work as developing out of surrealism and his later hard-edged forms as foreshadowing minimalism. Cubes and Anarchy offers a fresh interpretation of Smith, revealing geometry as a constant throughout his career, a leitmotif that was deeply connected to the artist‘s self-definition as a working man and his interest in international constructivism. From his earliest small-scale sculptures to his last monumental works, what Smith called "basic geometric form" was a powerful touchstone for the artist. LACMA‘s exhibition title derives from Smith‘s recollection that his concept of "cubes and anarchy" stemmed from the painter John Sloan, his teacher at New York‘s Art Students League in the 1920s, who exposed him to cubism, constructivism, and progressive social movements. As art critic Dore Ashton noted, Sloan "not only brought [Smith] into the modern art world, but also into the world of political commitment."

Politics and Art
Smith‘s sympathies for the cause of the American worker came in part from his own experiences. While a college student, Smith worked as a welder and riveter at the Studebaker automobile factory in South Bend, Indiana, a formative experience that introduced him to manufacturing techniques and processes. Smith worked again as a welder in the early 1940s, supplementing his meager income as an artist by making army tanks at the American Locomotive Company (ALCO) in Schenectady, New York. A member of Local 2054 United Steelworkers of America, Smith deliberately retained his union membership for years. He later explicitly affirmed the parallels between his working methods as an artist and those used by factory laborers. In his own words, he had learned from manufacturing "to assemble the whole by adding its unit parts," the same method of direct metal construction Smith used for his sculpture: "The building up of sculpture from unit parts…is also an industrial concept, the basis of automobile and machine assembly."

Artistic Influence
Intrigued by Pablo Picasso‘s and Julio González‘s welded iron sculptures that Smith had first seen in the early 1930s, he realized that what he had previously considered to be only an industrial material and technique could also be used to make art. Knowledge of their work—especially that of González, who like Smith, was trained to weld in an automobile factory—liberated Smith to make welded steel sculptures such as Saw Head (1933), combining a worker‘s tool (the saw) and methods (welding) with his interest in found geometries (the circular blade).

Smith was similarly fascinated with the Russian constructivists‘ use of industrial materials as well as their artistic vocabulary of abstract geometries used in service to populist ideals. The influence of Vladimir Tatlin, El Lissitzky, and others can be seen in Smith‘s sculptures ranging from the 1930s (Unity of Three Forms, 1937, and Suspended Cube, 1938) to the 1960s (Three Planes, 1960-61 and Zig IV, 1961).

Constantin Brancusi, Piet Mondrian, and Vasily Kandinsky likewise provided Smith with models of the avant-garde artist interested in geometric forms who also had populist roots or utopian aspirations. Smith paid homage to Brancusi, whose sculptures reflected roots in his native Romanian folk art and architecture, in various sculptures including The Hero (1951-52) as well as in drawings such as Untitled (1946). Smith alluded to Mondrian‘s strict geometries and made specific references to the Dutchman‘s compositions and palette in sculptures such as Zig III (1961) and Bec-Dida Day (1963). Smith and Kandinsky both understood and revered the circle in the sweeping context of human history. Smith‘s Bec-Dida Day demonstrates not only this shared love but also Smith‘s knowledge of Kandinsky‘s color theory and his specific correlations between particular shapes and colors.

As David Smith: Cubes and Anarchy makes clear, Smith adopted and adapted, throughout his short but significant career, the pure geometries of the constructivist avant-garde, creating a body of work that remains among the richest and most powerful ever made. The exhibition is organized by Carol S. Eliel, curator of modern art.