© Association of Art Historians 2014 2
Picturing Autonomy:
David Smith, Photography and Sculpture
Sarah Hamill
The art would be to be able to feel homesick, even though one is at home. Expertness in the use of illusion
is required for this. (Søren Kierkegaard, Stages on Life’s Way, 1845, as quoted in Walter
Benjamin, The Arcades Project, Convolute I, 1927–1940.)
In 1953 David Smith hauled several of his recent sculptures down the hill from
his studio to photograph them on a dock on Lake George, New York.1
The
sculptures – 7/29/53, Tanktotem III, and Tanktotem IV, completed that year – were
large-scale constructions, each made of sheared ends of boiler tanks, welded
iron rods, and other scraps or cuts of metal. Smith made eight photographs of the
scene, arranging the works differently in each. In one, he frames the sculptures
so that they overlap to form an abstract, cubic pattern of shapes that orders the
view in the distance: the left-most object organizes a distant forested island,
its iron rectangle miming the camera’s frame (plate 1). A shallow depth of field
accentuates the differences between sculpture and its blurred background. In
another, the sculptor placed 7/29/53 on top of a pallet, blocking a view of it with
Tanktotem IV; the two objects merge as one (plate 2). Off to the right, Tanktotem III is
poised to move beyond the frame, only peripherally part of the group. Smith also
introduced the insect-like sculpture Bicycle (1953) to the ensemble; its small size
acts as a measure of scale.
In these lakeside photographs, Smith staged his sculptures in a pastoral setting
to dramatize their anthropomorphism. With the exception of 7/29/53 in the second
view, the sculptures resemble figures, standing directly on the dock’s uneven
planks without the support of pedestals, yet their spindly legs and disjointed torsos
seem at odds with the generalized landscape around them.2
The photographs
frame a collision between sculpture and nature, where the result is unresolved.
Are these structures meant as stand-ins for bodies enacting other lakeside activities
– swimming, jumping, resting? Or are they welded frames, pieces of discarded tanks
that together constitute a sculpture? In Smith’s photographs this irresolution both
animates and abstracts the work. It stirs up questions of figuration and abstraction,
of belonging and place, all the better to show the sculptures’ separateness from their
surroundings. Photographing his works in 1953, Smith pictures sculpture as part of
an alternative world.
Smith was a sculptor known for radically shifting the terms of a medium
traditionally defined by casting, modelling, and carving. He was the first to make
Detail from David Smith,
Photograph of Oculus (1947),
Bolton Landing Dock, Lake
George, NY, c. 1947 (plate 3).
DOI:
10.1111/1467-8365.12086
Art History | ISSN 0141-6790
XX | X | Month XXXX | pages
XX-XX
© Association of Art Historians 2014 3
David Smith, Photography and Sculpture
1 David Smith, Photograph
of (left to right) 7/9/53,
Tanktotem III, and
Tanktotem IV (all 1953),
Bolton Landing Dock, Lake
George, NY, c. 1953. Gelatin
silver print, 25.4 × 20.3 cm.
New York: The Estate of
David Smith. © The Estate
of David Smith/Licensed by
VAGA, New York, NY.
industrial welding a sustained technique for large-scale sculpture, elaborating
on the constructions of Julio González and Pablo Picasso, which he saw in
reproduction in a 1931 issue of Cahiers d’Art. In 1946 Clement Greenberg took note
of Smith’s achievement, calling him ‘the best young sculptor in the country’.3
In
reviews and essays through the 1950s, the critic praised Smith’s virtual use of
welded line, which shaped ‘empty space’ to direct a pictorial illusion of matter.4
In his use of industrial materials, the sculptor sought a renewed connection
between art and modern industry, craft and steel – or as Anne M. Wagner
observes, his sculptures archive ‘what welding once achieved’, preserving the
obsolescence of industrial manufacture then in progress.5
It was a relationship
Smith also fashioned through his artistic identity as a sculptor-labourer, an
artist who was skilled in factory welding. Indeed, one of Smith’s most enduring
contributions to the history of modernism was modelling how sculpture could
actively account for industrial manufacturing.6
As stock narratives have it,
sculpture’s relationship to industry changed in the second half of the twentieth
century. Minimalists, including Richard Serra, Robert Morris, and Donald Judd,
© Association of Art Historians 2014 4
Sarah Hamill
2 David Smith, Photograph
of (left to right) Bi-Cycle,
7/9/53, Tanktotem III, and
Tanktotem IV (all 1953),
Bolton Landing Dock, Lake
George, NY, c. 1953. Gelatin
silver print, 25.4 × 20.3 cm.
New York: The Estate of
David Smith, New York. ©
The Estate of David Smith/
Licensed by VAGA, New
York, NY.
took up and critiqued Smith’s emphasis on welding by relying on industrial
production. Their objects – which were newly situational, rejecting the pictorial
qualities of Smith’s sculpture – were professionally fabricated, not handmade by
the artist’s torch.7
The path describing Smith’s contribution to the history of twentieth-century
sculpture is well trod.8
What is less known about the sculptor is his work
across media, and his simultaneous use of photography to experiment with the
perception of objects and space. Smith learned to take and develop photographs
in the 1930s, and although he stopped developing his own images in the 1940s,
he continued to use his camera as a representational medium until his death in
an automobile accident in 1965. From the mid-1940s on, Smith took thousands
of photographs of his sculptures and used them to promote his work. Taking
the reins of the documentary process from photographers hired by his gallery,
he photographed his objects in the landscape outside his studio in upstate New
York, radically departing from the neutral backdrops, even lighting, and head-on
© Association of Art Historians 2014 5
David Smith, Photography and Sculpture
3 David Smith, Photograph of
Oculus (1947), Bolton Landing
Dock, Lake George, NY, c. 1947.
Gelatin silver contact print
and ink, 8.9 × 12.4 cm. New
York: The Estate of David
Smith. © The Estate of David
Smith/Licensed by VAGA,
New York, NY.
vantage points standardized by professional photographers. Smith sent his resulting
photographs to critics, curators, dealers, editors and patrons; they were published
in countless magazines, newspapers, journals and exhibition catalogues, often as
anonymous illustrations of his sculptures. As early as 1947, Smith registered the
power of photographic reproduction as a display for sculpture. ‘Reproduction
seems to act as first acquaintance and eliminate some of the barriers’, he wrote
to his dealer, persuading her to include additional illustrations in an upcoming
catalogue.9
Through photography, Smith could launch his sculptures into the
public realm.
Since the 1940s, critics, curators, and art historians have used the
sculptor’s own photographs to illustrate their publications. As photographs
consulted by authors to write their accounts, these images influenced some
of the most enduring and significant accounts of his sculpture, by Greenberg,
Frank O’Hara, Hilton Kramer, Rosalind Krauss and others. Yet until recently
these photographs have been read as transparent documents of the sculptor’s
work; they have not been interrogated as mediating Smith’s sculpture or staging
a public display.10
Smith’s photographs are far from neutral, as they animate and
pictorialize his welded steel sculptures using the camera’s controls of vantage
point and frame.
In this essay I explore how Smith crafted a photographic display for
his objects that dramatized their autonomy or homelessness, a sense of the
temporal and spatial dislocation which is deemed central to the discourse of
modernism. His photographs exaggerated the siteless or ‘nomadic’ qualities of
Smith’s sculpture that Rosalind Krauss identified in her pivotal essay ‘Sculpture
in the Expanded Field’ (1979).11
Alex Potts has recently argued that qualities of
autonomy are located not exclusively in the formal characteristics of the object
itself, but are constituted by ‘a display that induces a viewer to see [the object]
as isolated from its surroundings and set in a sphere apart’.12
Here I propose a
© Association of Art Historians 2014 6
Sarah Hamill
new paradoxically intermedial account of modern sculptural autonomy which
shows how qualities of homelessness and placelessness are built into Smith’s
photographic staging of sculpture, tied to how the sculptor envisioned his objects
as contingent and unmoored. I extend Potts’s definition of display to include
photography by demonstrating how Smith and other modernists used the
camera to imagine their objects as both tied to the familiar world and isolated or
withdrawn. In Smith’s hands, the camera – a tool that Walter Benjamin described
as capable of ‘bring[ing] things closer’ – was a means to distance and dissociate his
objects, imagining their disconnection.13
Smith staged his sculpture’s separateness in two distinct ways: by either taking
one-on-one shots of his sculptures, or photographing them clustered together in
groups. Photographing individual works, he isolated them using low vantage points,
cropping and a shallow focus. For instance, in a photograph of Oculus (1947, plate 3),
Smith positioned his camera below the sculpture and cropped the photograph where
the sculpture meets its base, as his notations indicate. The sculpture seems suspended
above its backdrop, as if a free-floating linear form against a distant landscape. With
its connection to place, base, and space cropped from view, Oculus is dislodged from
its setting.
Smith took thousands of individual shots of his sculptures using this signature
low vantage point and cropping technique, and he was keenly aware of how these
tactics transformed his works. The acknowledgement came in a letter to his dealer
Marian Willard, who had complained that in Smith’s photograph, Oculus ‘seems
too disconnected from the base’.14
Smith responded: ‘Oculus base [sic] was meant
to be disconnected from the base [sic], hence the unusual elevation. The sculpture
part takes place at eye level. The photo takes place under eye level.’15
With these
sentences – written about a sculpture whose title references the eye – Smith
describes how his photographs elicit an encounter with his sculpture different
from the embodied one that takes place ‘at eye level’. Photography disconnects
sculpture: rather than mime viewing-in-the-round, it reinvents sculpture in a
4 Pages 154 and 155 of
Rosalind E. Krauss, Passages
in Modern Sculpture,
Cambridge, MA, 1977,
illustrating two views of David
Smith’s Blackburn: Song of
an Irish Blacksmith, 1949–50
(photographs by David
Smith). © Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, by
permission of The MIT Press,
and The Estate of David
Smith/Licensed by VAGA,
New York, NY.
© Association of Art Historians 2014 7
David Smith, Photography and Sculpture
compositional plane, using the camera as a pictorial device. Much like a pedestal
or base, Smith’s one-on-one photographs demarcate his objects as self-sufficient
forms using vantage point, abrupt crop marks, and a shallow depth of field. His
photographs cordon off the sculptural object from inhabited space, so that it seems
withdrawn or distinct.
Smith’s one-on-one photographs influenced Krauss’s accounts of his sculpture’s
totemic or autonomous qualities. She used the artist’s photographic archives,
which the Marlborough-Gerson Gallery made available to her, to write her 1969
Harvard dissertation, expanded into a monograph, Terminal Iron Works: The Sculpture
of David Smith (1971); a catalogue raisonné of Smith’s work, which she compiled as
part of her dissertation and published in 1977; and her chapter on his sculpture in
Passages in Modern Sculpture (1977).16
Nonetheless, Krauss, in her otherwise rigorous
and insightful studies, did not address how Smith’s photographs directed her
readings of his sculpture.17
The omission is particularly striking in her analysis
of Blackburn: Song of an Irish Blacksmith, a work she argues exemplifies Smith’s visual
language of totemism and distinguishes his objects from constructivist sculptures
by Naum Gabo and Ibram Lassaw, for instance, which rely on idealist modes
of sculptural perception. Blackburn, Krauss writes in Passages in Modern Sculpture,
structures ‘a grammar of extreme visual disjunction’, refusing viewers a stable and
totalizing view.18
Smith’s sculpture, she argues, unfolds unpredictably in time and
space in a sequence of irresolvable fronts. Seen from either view the sculpture’s
surfaces are unpredictable and opaque, and she describes how the work registers
as two different things to ultimately refuse a viewer’s possessive powers: the
work remains autonomous. Krauss illustrated her argument with Smith’s own
photographs, both taken from a low vantage point (plate 4 and plate 5). One view
depicts the work as an elongated, open silhouette; the other presents it as a dense
5 David Smith, Photograph of
Blackburn: Song of an Irish
Blacksmith (1949–50), Bolton
Landing Dock, Lake George,
NY, c. 1950. Gelatin silver
print, 25.4 × 20.3 cm. New
York: The Estate of David
Smith. © The Estate of David
Smith/Licensed by VAGA,
New York, NY.
© Association of Art Historians 2014 8
Sarah Hamill
knot of linear clusters. The two frames differ radically from each other, so that
when viewed side by side they animate the disjunctive encounter of incongruous
surfaces that Krauss described. The photographs direct a reading of the work as
unresolvable.
Sculptures like Blackburn elicit an unstable spatial encounter when seen
in the round – an encounter akin to the one Krauss described. Smith also
photographically dramatized these qualities of elusiveness by deploying camera
tactics so as to dislodge his sculptures from their setting. In photographs of
works like Oculus or Blackburn, sculptures register as weightless pictorial forms
that hover above the landscape. This presentation of sculpture as a pictorial
form elides other aspects of his works – for instance, Blackburn’s materiality, or
how, when seen close up, the dense puddles of welding material on the joints
of the sculpture’s different parts, the hatch marks on its cast bronze shape, and
the shorn edges of pieces of cut metal come into view. These material facets
of the work are obscured in the photographs, which envision the sculpture as
a commanding silhouette. Blackburn is imagined to be distant and withdrawn
thanks to the dramatic point of view.
Smith also animated a sense of the autonomy of his works in photographs of
sculptures positioned in groups in the landscape, often assembling works from
the same series for the camera. He published his group photographs alongside solo
shots in exhibition catalogues, encouraging viewers to grasp the individuality of
his objects, each one a unique thing, while also understanding how the sculptures
were tied to a separate space of animate and otherworldly forms, distanced from
the beholder.19
In the photographs he made of his Tanktotem series on a dock
– and in many other shots Smith took in the 1950s of his sculptures arranged in
loose collectives – he used a pastoral setting to point to how his sculpture differed
from its surroundings. By coordinating a set of tensions – between figural presence
and abstract steel sculpture, between inhabited space and fabricated thing – the
photographs raise questions about sculpture’s place or home. They suggest a reading
of sculpture both in and apart from its environment. Standing on the dock in an odd
configuration, the Tanktotems are situated within a setting to which they also seem
not to belong.
Smith’s group photographs can be situated within a history of the
photographic display of sculpture that includes works by modernists Constantin
Brancusi, Henry Moore, Alberto Giacometti and Louise Bourgeois, who
each installed their objects in collectives, and photographed them or hired
professional photographers to do so. These photographs inform a broader
discussion about the staging of sculpture before 1965. Smith, like these other
modernists, was invested in exploring uprightness, fragmentation and scale. He
was also participating in a dialogue about the relationship between figuration
and abstraction, the solitary individual and the collective. By staging sculptures
in groups, often directly on the ground, sculptors could activate and dramatize
the resemblances and differences of their objects. Smith’s photographs,
read alongside other displays, question the role of sculptural figuration and
belonging in a post-war world.20
‘Impassive idols of the machine age’
In 1961 the poet and curator Frank O’Hara recounted a visit to Bolton Landing in an essay
published in ArtNews, illustrated with Smith’s own photographs. O’Hara noted how Smith
had displayed his sculptures in the landscape in ways that seemed out of place:
© Association of Art Historians 2014 9
David Smith, Photography and Sculpture
6 Ernst Scheidegger,
Photograph of Alberto
Giacometti, L’Homme au
Doigt (1947), on the street in
front of the artist’s studio, c.
1950s. Gelatin silver print,
dimensions unknown. Zurich:
Estate of Ernst Scheidegger
(1051). © 2013 Alberto
Giacometti Estate/Licensed
by VAGA and ARS, New York,
NY. Photo: © Estate of Ernst
Scheidegger, Zürich.
Outside the studio huge piles of steel lay waiting to be used, and along
the road up to the house a procession of new works, in various stages of
painting, stood in the attitudes of some of Smith’s characteristic titles:
they stood there like a Sentinel or Totem or Ziggurat, not all menacing, but
very aware. … The contrast between the sculptures and this rural scene
is striking: to see a cow or pony in the same perspective as one of the
Ziggurats, with the trees and mountains behind, is to find nature soft and
art harsh; nature looks intimate and vulnerable, the sculptures powerful,
indomitable. Smith’s works in galleries have often looked rugged and
in-the-American-grain, which indeed they are in some respects, but at
Bolton Landing the sophistication of vision and means comes to the fore
strongly. Earlier works, mounted on pedestals or stones about the terrace
and garden, seem to partake of the physical atmosphere, but the recent
works assert an authoritative presence over the panorama of mountains,
divorced from nature by the insistence of their individual personalities,
by the originality of their scale and the exclusion of specific references to
natural forms.21
As O’Hara’s description suggests, to view Smith’s sculpture against the ‘panorama
of mountains’ was to see sculpture as a powerful, authoritarian presence: nature
was ‘soft’ and art was ‘harsh’. The self-sufficiency of the objects in scale and
in reference created that effect. As if repelling the landscape, sculpture neither
related to the landscape nor required it for its meaning; instead remaining
distinct from it, refusing to belong to it. For O’Hara, Smith’s fantasy of sculptural
viewing both placed the object in the landscape and set it apart, like a sovereign
power with dominion over its natural surroundings
– not threatening, but ‘very aware’.22
O’Hara’s account describes how the sculptures
he saw at Bolton Landing assert a commanding
independence. Such qualities also resided in Smith’s
photographic stagings of his sculpture. Oculus is
positioned above and against the blurry winter
landscape behind it (see plate 3). Blackburn looms
heroically above the soft contours of an Adirondack
mountain range (see plate 5). These photographs
celebrate welded steel sculpture as powerful forms,
traits that are tied to how the photographs frame a
pictorial encounter with sculpture that hinged on a
series of opposing terms. Steel was juxtaposed with
hill and forest; linear abstract form with open sky;
the familiar with the alien; communal with singular;
and present with absent. For Smith, the difference
between these terms was the crux of his sculpture’s
modernism, allowing him to animate the deep
otherness of his sculptures as dislocated from the here
and now.
In his group photographs, Smith similarly used
the landscape as a backdrop to enliven his objects.
The environments varied, and the dock on Lake
George was one of many incongruous settings that
© Association of Art Historians 2014 10
Sarah Hamill
Smith chose. He photographed his sculptures on a frozen Lake George, covered
in snow; on the dirt driveway leading to his studio; in the centre of a paved road;
and in the fields outside his studio. Like Ernst Scheidegger’s well-publicized
1950s photographs of Giacometti’s standing figures in empty urban spaces, these
photographs place sculptures in unexpected settings (plate 6).23
Scheidegger
chose city squares, the space between train tracks, a country path, and the edge
of a quay to stage and frame Giacometti’s work. In one, he pushed to an extreme
the differences between the slender, upright figure, with its densely compacted
surfaces, and a seemingly empty street through a shallow depth of field. The
sculpture is both evocatively present and curiously detached, not belonging to
its urban setting. Smith, by contrast, was drawn to the rural landscape to suggest
the non-belonging of his sculptures, or how they seem displaced from inhabited,
ordinary space.
Consider, for instance, a photograph Smith made of works from his Forgings
series of 1955, which he presented alongside The Iron Woman (1954–58) and Man and
Woman in Cathedral (1956, plate 7). The artist placed his sculptures on mismatched, ad
hoc pedestals – a barrel, cans of paint, and a crate – in the snow on Lake George. This
odd assortment of irregularly shaped totems seems not to fit into the landscape. They
also seem not to belong together. By presenting them as flattened contours against
the pale backdrop, Smith has underscored the originality and uniqueness of each
individual thing. He achieves this push and pull – between landscape and abstract
7 David Smith, Photograph of
(left to right) Forging III (1955),
Forging X (1956), The Iron
Woman (1954–58, unfinished),
Forging II (1955), Forging I
(1955), and Man and Woman
in the Cathedral (1956,
unfinished), Bolton Landing
Dock, Lake George, NY, c. 1956.
Colour slide transparency,
6.2 × 6.2 cm. New York: The
Estate of David Smith. ©
The Estate of David Smith/
Licensed by VAGA, New
York, NY.
© Association of Art Historians 2014 11
David Smith, Photography and Sculpture
steel sculpture, between individual and collective – using a low point of view and
crisp focus. Situated against the landscape, the sculptures articulate the polarities that
O’Hara described.
In this photograph as well as the dock series, Smith uses the landscape as both a
location and a backdrop to envision sculpture’s otherness, its dissociation from the
present. In a 1947 poem, Smith described the landscape in similar terms, offering a
model for imagining alterity by looking at what is close at hand:
I have never looked at a landscape without seeing other landscapes
I have never seen a landscape without visions of things I desire and despise
lower landscapes have crusts of heat – raw epidermis and the choke of vines
the separate lines of salt errors – monadnocks of fungus
the balance of stone – with gestures to grow
the lost posts of manmaid boundaries – in molten shade
a landscape is a still life in Chaldean history
it has faces I do not know
its mountains are always sobbing females
it is bags of melons and prickle pears
its woods are sawed to boards
its black hills bristle with maiden fern
its stones are Assyrian fragments
it flows the bogside beauty of the river Liffey
it is colored by indiana gas green
it is steeped in veritable Indian yellow
it is the place I’ve travelled to and never found
it is somehow veiled to vision by pious bastards and the lord of Varu the
nobleman from Gascogne
in the distance it seems threatened by the destruction of gold24
In textual images infused with fictional, geographic, and historical placenames,
Smith tacks between the present and a dream, between the landscape
he is in and the other landscapes he seeks. Alterity is figured in the landscape
he describes as the ‘faces I do not know’, and couched in a list of places that are
literary (Dublin’s river Liffey, made famous by Joyce), ancient (the Chaldean
soothsayer’s still-life), and geologic (the monadnock). The poem’s descriptive
terms ground a viewer in a range of evocative and disquieting scenes ­­– the
choke of vines, the black hills bristling with maiden ferns, or the mountains
of sobbing females – representing the landscape as vividly present but also
unavailable: it is the place never found, ‘veiled to vision’. Throughout, the
traveller-viewer is witness to the landscape’s conflicting terms. The space Smith
envisions is made up of diverse material facts and histories. It is a landscape
that invokes beauty and unease, location and detachment, the space he sees and
other possible spaces. Echoing the trope of the uncanny, Smith maps a fantasy of
peripatetic inquiry, distance and separation.25
Smith’s photographs of his sculpture similarly shuttle between the familiar
and the unfamiliar, the known and the unknown, projecting an encounter of
alienation and withdrawal. In 1961 Smith made a series of photographs, several
of which were used to illustrate O’Hara’s article, in which he presented recent
works from his Zig and Sentinel series in the fields outside his studio. In some
photographs, Smith homes in on the interplay of the different forms (plate 8).
© Association of Art Historians 2014 12
Sarah Hamill
8 David Smith, Photograph of
(left to right) Lectern Sentinel,
Two Box Structure, Zig III,
March Sentinel (Stainless
Steel Planes), and Zig II (all
1961) [The Carnegie Group],
Bolton Landing Dock, Lake
George, NY, 1961. Gelatin
silver print, 25.4 × 20.3 cm.
New York: The Estate of
David Smith. © The Estate
of David Smith/Licensed by
VAGA, New York, NY.
The planes of objects overlap and touch in a cubist surface or a pictorial collage
of shapes, framing a compositional geometry that makes the contours and
edges of objects difficult to read. In others, Smith used a higher vantage point
to emphasize his sculptures’ shapes and show their placement in the sloping
meadow outside his studio (plate 9). Composed of large-scale convex and concave
shapes, the sculptures seem incongruous in their natural setting. Viewers are
drawn into the image only to be thrust back out as they recognize that the scene
presents an alternative world for sculpture.
Defining his sculpture in these group photographs as autonomous, Smith
met a contemporaneous critical response to his work that described it as alien or
otherworldly. Reviewing exhibitions of his work in 1953 and 1961, critic Emily
Genauer observed that the sculptures were ‘M[e]n-from-Mars’ and ‘mysteriously
amused Martians’, anthropomorphic forms made alien.26
These epithets relate to the
collision that his group photographs relay, or how Smith’s sculpture in these images
seems to straddle the human present and some distant future. Welded steel sculptures
are made into quasi-figural forms, construed in an Arcadian scene. Genauer found
© Association of Art Historians 2014 13
David Smith, Photography and Sculpture
his ‘aggressive, talon-like monumental abstractions … immensely, mysteriously,
menacingly expressive’,27
the list of descriptive words and phrases itself invoking a
festival of qualities. The mystery she found suggests the open and aloof qualities of
these objects, their self-sufficiency.
If Genauer’s analogies seemed bound up in the Sputnik-like possibilities
of these objects, those of other critics revealed the nostalgia evoked by Smith’s
melding of human and machine. The curator Sam Hunter wrote in 1961 that
Smith’s world was ‘peopled by bland, amiable giants, impassive idols of the
machine age’, underscoring the historical traces borne by those sculptures, as well
as their deep mythical identities.28
Smith’s incorporation of discarded machine
parts, like the welded seams that hold them in place, stand in for and mark out
what the sculptor recognized was the impending obsolescence of welded objects.
As Wagner has argued:
When the age of tanks and locomotives was over, [sculpture] would preserve
the skills that had once brought them to be. Which is to say not only that
Smith grasped the inevitable obsolescence of welded objects but also that
he understood welded sculpture as both a quintessential product of its
moment and a means of manufacture ideally positioned to exhibit the skilled
9 David Smith, Photograph
of (left to right) Two Box
Structure, Zig II, Two Circle
Sentinel, and Zig III (all 1961),
Bolton Landing Dock, Lake
George, NY, 1961. Gelatin
silver print, 20.6 × 25.4 cm.
New York: The Estate of
David Smith. © The Estate
of David Smith/Licensed by
VAGA, New York, NY.
© Association of Art Historians 2014 14
Sarah Hamill
labour by which other products came to be. In so doing, it testified to skills,
livelihoods, and lifeworlds that, as Smith recognised, capitalism makes use of
only to leave behind.29
Smith’s photographs memorialize his works’ connection to industry by
exaggerating their disconnection from the landscape. His images of objects
clustered in provisional groups designate and mark out another world for
welded steel sculpture, operating like self-contained dioramas, an analogy that
the painter Kenneth Noland used to describe Smith’s staging of his works in his
fields.30
In a photograph of a group that includes works from the Sentinel series,
Smith positioned the sculptures on the gravel driveway outside his studio where
snow partially covers the ground (plate 10). The sculptures form an inverted V
shape, projecting into deep space. In this structured formation, the works seem
threatening, even menacing – effects the sculptor dramatized by using a low point
of view and by presenting their angular shapes and sharp lines against the soft
contours of distant mountains. Seen from close to the ground, objects register
as imposing, monumental things, and the photograph amplifies the structural
differences between them. Unlike the photograph of the Forgings on the frozen
lake (see plate 7), however, which presents a series of stark contrasts, Smith seeks a
relationship of give-and-take between sculpture and landscape. The sculptures look
10 David Smith, Photograph
of (left to right) Personage
of August (1956), Sentinel I
(1956), Running Daughter
(1956–60, unfinished),
Tanktotem VI (1957), Sentinel
II (1957), Pilgrim (1957), and
The Five Spring (1956), Bolton
Landing, NY, c. 1958. Gelatin
silver print, 24.8 × 19.8 cm.
New York: The Estate of
David Smith. © The Estate
of David Smith/Licensed by
VAGA, New York, NY.
© Association of Art Historians 2014 15
David Smith, Photography and Sculpture
like an army of individualized forms that are both grounded within and distinct
from their surroundings.
In 1962 Smith found a new setting in which to pictorialize his steel sculpture.
He received a residential grant that year from the Italian steel corporation, Italsider,
and was asked to make two sculptures for the Spoleto Festival of the Two Worlds.
Italsider gave Smith access to an unused factory in Voltri, Italy in which to produce
sculptures and, for the first time, assistance from a staff of six skilled workmen.
With their help, he began working on a larger scale and made twenty-seven works
in one month – sculptures of monumental size that incorporated discarded parts
and scraps from other Italsider factories.31
When it came time to install his work,
the director of the Spoleto Festival, Giovanni Caradente, placed the sculptures in a
reconstructed Roman amphitheatre as well as in the town of Spoleto. The classical
ruin offered a new foil for Smith’s modernist structures that photographer Ugo
Mulas dramatized in all-over shots that show welded steel sculptures occupying
the ancient ruin, some taken at night; the human scale of the setting amplifies these
already large industrially scaled forms.
Smith, too, took photographs of the scene; in one, he positioned his camera
low to the ground to monumentalize Voltri VI within and against its ancient Roman
backdrop (plate 11). The photograph frames a composition in which the sculpture’s
cut steel shape seems to merge with the architectural structure behind it. Smith
structures a formal interplay between sculpture and its classical surroundings like
the photograph of the Sentinels on the gravel driveway (see plate 10). The artist was
11 David Smith, Photograph
of Voltri VI (1962), installed
in the Anfiteatro Romano,
Spoleto, 1962. Gelatin silver
contact print and crayon, 6.2
× 6 cm. New York: The Estate
of David Smith. © The Estate
of David Smith/Licensed by
VAGA, New York, NY.
© Association of Art Historians 2014 16
Sarah Hamill
drawn to this staging of his work, observing how the juxtaposed stainless steel
cubes of Cubi IX – which Caradente placed in front of a medieval church after Smith
shipped it from Bolton Landing before the show – played off the ‘soft variables of
the church wall stones’.32
In stagings such as those at Spoleto, Smith relied on the medium of
photography to commemorate and embellish his sculpture, articulating their
connections to industry through setting and vantage point. These images tell us
something about how the artist used photography as a representational device
capable of capturing and transforming the objects of its focus. Notably, Smith
did not use drawing to visualize these scenes, although that medium also served
a role in his project. The sculptor often made preparatory sketches of works and
recorded his sculptures in his notebooks by sketching their contours. In his 1952
study for the Tanktotem series (plate 12), for example, Smith used inked lines as
well as brown and grey paint to imagine sculptural forms. Each form is based
on a tripod support comprising iron rods and ball bearings. Round tank shapes,
abstract pieces of steel, and pictogram letters make up the rest of the forms.
The spindly legs and arms of these sculptures call up an army of otherworldly
bodies, fodder for the sculptor’s torch. Studies or imaginative renderings, these
drawings do not conceptualize sculpture’s placement or setting or conjure a
believable world.
Look again at Smith’s dock photographs of 1953 (see plate 1 and plate 2).
They use the camera to stage an unsettling collision between the industrial and
the pastoral, present and past, figure and machine. Unlike the drawings, the
photograph conjures a convincing, illusionistic space for sculpture, all the better
to picture the radical otherness of his work. Situated on the human setting of the
dock, his sculptures form a loose collective of quasi-figural, primordial totems
in a space that seems mundane. Yet Smith has construed them at a remove using
a low vantage point and blurring the background through a shallow depth of
12 David Smith, ∆∑ 9/14/52
(Study for Tanktotems), 1952.
Tempera and ink on paper,
46.4 × 59.4 cm). New York:
The Estate of David Smith. ©
The Estate of David Smith/
Licensed by VAGA, New
York, NY.
© Association of Art Historians 2014 17
David Smith, Photography and Sculpture
13 David Smith, Photographs
of 7/9/53, Tanktotem III,
Tanktotem IV, and Bi-Cycle
(all 1953), Bolton Landing
Dock, Lake George, NY, c. 1953.
Gelatin silver contact prints
and ink on paper envelope,
11.4 × 15.4 cm. New York:
The Estate of David Smith. ©
The Estate of David Smith/
Licensed by VAGA, New
York, NY.
field. As contact sheets of these images reveal, Smith also reframed the scene,
cropping the landscape to fit an eight by ten format (plate 13). By restricting the
surrounding space, Smith placed emphasis on his sculptures, heightening their
command over their setting. In the final prints, the sculptures form a disorderly
group of individualized forms dislodged from their surroundings. Here is where
the memorializing function of Smith’s photographs lies. The dock photographs
stir up suggestions of belonging and place, of community and groundedness,
only to leave them unresolved. For the sculptures are not fully at home on the
dock; nor are they fully confident as a group. The photographs raise
questions about belonging and collectivity by upending connections to place and
site. To borrow the words of Blake Stimson writing about post-war photography,
they ask ‘How to belong in this world and constitute new forms of such
belonging?’33
In placing industrially made sculpture in a landscape setting, the
dock photographs visualize an unsettling of expectations for encountering solid
objects in the round, by suggesting that sculpture is both within and apart from
the here-and-now.
The Non-Belonging of Sculpture
Smith’s staging of sculpture proposes a fantasy of viewing in which the
modernist object is part of a separate world of fragmentary things. It was a
fantasy prevalent among modern sculptors’ photographic displays of their work,
the most famous of them Constantin Brancusi’s 1923 shots of his Paris studio at
8 Impasse Ronsin. In these evocative group images, the sculptor staged elaborate
scenes, using large blocks of wood and stone as props. He situated his sculptures
© Association of Art Historians 2014 18
Sarah Hamill
amid these colossal pieces of raw material, animating them in an imagined scene
of primordial ruin. Beginning in the 1920s Brancusi frequently published these
photographs and they likely influenced Smith’s own.34
The group photographs
appeared alongside one-on-one photographs of his works, forming concise
yet suggestive photo-essays of his sculptures that, as Potts has argued, invited
viewers to move between individual presentations and group studies ‘presented
as if one were coming across them almost accidentally while scanning the studio
environment’.35
In one of the 1923 photographs, several objects appear in shadow, while
others are illuminated by a flash of light erupting from behind a block of wood
(plate 14). The smooth finish of polished bronze is juxtaposed to the rough
surfaces of wood and stone. Off to the left, a canvas drapes and cloaks a form.
Brancusi’s framing seems arbitrary; objects are cut off haphazardly by the
frame, suggesting that the scene continues beyond what is visible in the picture.
The photograph structures, as contemporaneous writers repeatedly observed,
an order of space and time outside the rational structure of urban space. The
scene suggests a ‘dream’, ‘wild space’, ‘forest of spheres’ – phrases Brancusi’s
contemporaries used to describe what they saw on actual visits to his studio in
the 1920s, or derived from the sculptor’s photographs. These writers painted
an encounter of deep nostalgic fascination and engagement with a dislocated,
timeless sphere.36
In Brancusi’s images, the studio emerges as a place with a
disordered order of its own, like an untamed frontier or a space of wild abandon
and wreckage.37
In this fantastical image, the sculptor has crafted a separate world for sculpture
using the artist’s studio. As Jon Wood has described these photographs, they frame
a ‘microcosmic world where stone, wood and metal all take their place within a
strange, quasi-natural order’.38
Sculpture, Brancusi’s photograph suggests, is meant
to be read within that microcosmic world, a place that unsettles any expectations
that sculptures have boundaries and edges, just as it subverts more sanitized
aesthetic displays. Whereas a museum or gallery would present Brancusi’s works
14 Constantin Brancusi,
View of the Studio (with
The Sorceress (1916–24,
in progress), Bird in Space
(plaster, 1923–24), Bird
in Space (yellow marble,
1923–24), Socrates (1921–22),
and Princess X (1915–16)),
c. 1923. Gelatin silver glass
negative, 18 × 13 cm. Paris:
Centre Pompidou (MNAMCCI
(PH 37)). © Artists Rights
Society (ARS), New York/
ADAGP, Paris.
© Association of Art Historians 2014 19
David Smith, Photography and Sculpture
on pedestals lining the room, as contemporaneous installation shots show, his
microcosm departs from such an ordered installation and the logic of consumption
that goes hand in hand with it, proposing instead a timeless dream world.39
Like Brancusi’s studio views, Smith’s photographs of his objects present
an autonomous space for sculpture radically dissociated from the present. His
photographs return to an enduring narrative of modern sculpture’s alienation
and homelessness – what Rainer Maria Rilke termed its ‘own-ness’. In 1900 Rilke
described a romanticized fantasy of sculpture’s solitary stance in a passage about the
sculpture of Auguste Rodin:
The room in which a statue stands is its foreign land – it has its environment
within itself, and its eye and the expression of its face relate to that
environment concealed and folded within its shape. There are figures which
radiate tightness, crowdedness, interior, and others which are undoubtedly
imagined and seen in a wide open space, in a plain, against the sky. To him
who sees them correctly it is always their Own-ness that is their native
setting, not the accidental room in which they are placed or the empty wall
against which they stand out.40
Rilke defines modern sculpture’s identity: its relationship to its accidental
environment is as a foreigner. Meaning is located in the object, as a product of its
making and display. Such self-sufficiency carried an aesthetic mandate: in order
to be grasped as an artwork, sculpture must refuse the everyday world, remain
independent of ‘the people’, as Rilke wrote, conjuring an incidental crowd.41
Yet what Rilke construed as an aesthetic necessity also became an embellished
fiction. ‘It has its environment within itself’, he claimed, calling attention to the
somewhat forlorn solitariness of the modernist object. Sculptural autonomy, in
this view, is construed as a romantic individualism.42
Although they were taken
after Rilke wrote these phrases, Edward Steichen’s 1908 sensationalizing shots
of Rodin’s Balzac pictured as an individualized, looming figure under moonlight
conjure a similar vision.43
In her fundamental description of twentieth-century sculpture, Rosalind Krauss
subsequently jettisoned this mythologizing rhetoric of individualism. In ‘Sculpture
in the Expanded Field’ (1979), she categorized what she saw as the recent turn in
sculpture to site-based practices, and her argument hinged on an encapsulation of the
earlier model, what she called modern sculpture’s nomadism:
With these two sculptural projects [Rodin’s Gates of Hell and Balzac], I would
say, one crosses the threshold of the logic of the monument, entering the
space of what could be called its negative condition – a kind of sitelessness,
or homelessness, an absolute loss of place. Which is to say one enters
modernism, since it is the modernist period of sculptural production
that operates in relation to this loss of site, producing the monument as
abstraction, the monument as pure marker or base, functionally placeless and
largely self-referential. It is these two characteristics of modernist sculpture
that declare its status, and therefore its meaning and function, as essentially
nomadic.44
Krauss’s text frames modern sculpture’s separateness or autonomy as a by-product
of the alienating effects of modernization and rationalization, or as part of the
© Association of Art Historians 2014 20
Sarah Hamill
disenchantment of the world, to call upon Max
Weber’s formulation. Mirroring technological
modernization – specifically, processes of replication
and reproduction – sculpture operated in modernism
as a negative condition of the monument, a loss of site.
According to Krauss, it was repeatable and itinerant,
not requiring any particular placement for its meaning.
Siteless or placeless, sculpture operated increasingly
in modernism as pure negativity, as the absence of
place, marker, and base. By the 1950s, Krauss writes,
‘modernist sculpture appeared as a kind of black hole in
the space of consciousness, something whose positive
content was increasingly difficult to define, something
that was possible to locate only in terms of what it was
not.’45
This negative condition serves as the basis of
her formulation of sculpture in the twentieth century.
Modern sculpture registered as an unattainable,
nomadic object – a loss of place she claims was righted
in site-specific projects of the 1970s in their opposition
to landscape and architecture.
This essay proposes that photography’s
intervention in sculptural display offers an altogether
different and more nuanced picture of modern
sculpture’s homelessness. In photographs taken by
Smith and other modern sculptors, the disconnection
of sculpture from the here-and-now appears as a
positive condition, something to be imagined and
attained photographically, something to be magnified
and rendered. Homelessness thus describes not the object’s alienated stance, its
abstraction or lack, but the possibility of an open work of art. These proposals
are felt most deeply in photographs that stage a separate yet unstable world for
sculpture, forging new relationships of difference and precariousness.
One of the common ways in which sculptors imagined their works’
independence was by dramatizing their primitivism using the theme of the
archaeological ruin. Brancusi’s studio views and Smith’s and Mulas’s Spoleto
photographs stage groups of objects in ways that draw attention to their primitive
features, or how they appear as archaeological remnants or primeval forms. This
primitivizing of sculpture went hand in hand with conceptions of the modernist
object as a figure that was familiar but distant and unknowable. In 1930, for instance,
Alberto Giacometti staged three plaster abstract figures in Maloja, in the Swiss
Alps and had them photographed (plate 15). The works are studies he made for a
commission of a single sculpture he would complete later that year in Paris. In the
photograph, which was published in Minotaure in 1933 in the same article presenting
Brancusi’s studio views, Giacometti displays the triad in an alpine meadow, and
viewers are encouraged to read them as a familial group of prehistoric plinths or
primordial totems in the landscape.
Moore also animated his sculptures as primitive forms by photographing
them near his Burcroft, Kent cottage amidst rough-hewn, uneven plinths of stone
he had set in the garden and used as temporary bases for his work (plate 16). In his
photographs, he linked sculptures to their setting, as if the carved objects were
15 Unknown Photographer,
Photograph of Alberto
Giacometti, Three Figures
(1930–31), Maloja, c. 1931.
Silver print on paper, 7.9 ×
5.2 cm. Paris: Collection
Fondation Alberto et Annette
Giacometti (2003-0693). ©
Alberto Giacometti Estate/
Licensed by VAGA and ARS,
New York, NY.
© Association of Art Historians 2014 21
David Smith, Photography and Sculpture
also archaic forms that had been found amidst the stones. In these photographs,
Moore stages an interaction between sculpture and landscape that differs from
the unsettling one Smith construed.46
Whereas Smith’s photographs envisage a
disconnection of abstract steel sculpture from the resonant, mountain landscape,
Moore’s photograph imagines his sculpture in equanimity with its surroundings
– the Reclining Figure is an eternal, enduring body unified with the landscape setting,
conveying notions of solidity and permanence.
It was possibly these primitivist associations – staged photographically in
images by Moore and others – that W. R. Valentiner and Carola Giedion-Welcker
were drawn to in their studies of modern sculpture, which unfold as photo-essays
interspersed with text. Valentiner’s Origins of Modern Sculpture (1946) adopted its format
and content from Giedion-Welcker’s Modern Plastic Art (1937), a debt Valentiner
acknowledged in his introduction. Both texts recounted a history of modern
sculpture in their constellation of photographs, which illustrate ancient tombs and
prehistoric sites as well as sculpture. The viewer is invited to compare modernist
objects to archaeological ruins, suggesting a primitivist reading of modern sculpture
that is based on the visual correspondence of forms. Giedion-Welcker, for instance,
interspersed illustrations of Jean Arp’s sculpture with photographs of landscapes
of round stones in a streambed and images of prehistoric monoliths. Valentiner
borrowed this format, and even used the same contextual photographs to make his
arguments. He juxtaposed Moore’s 1930s photographs, for instance, to images of
the standing stones of Mên-an Tol and Ménec and the ordered archaeological sites of
Chinese tombs (plate 17). Valentiner makes a claim for these prehistoric monuments as
a corrective to urbanism and modern warfare. Their abstract shapes directly mark the
landscape, exhibiting signs of wholeness, an eternal oneness with nature, no longer
possible in modernity. Comparing Moore’s sculptures to these monuments, he finds
in them an expression of ‘our deep longing for a closer connection with the elemental
16 Henry Moore, Photograph
of Reclining Figure (1939),
Burcroft, Kent, 1939. Gelatin
silver print, dimensions
unknown. Perry Green:
Henry Moore Foundation.
Reproduced by permission of
the Henry Moore Foundation.
© Association of Art Historians 2014 22
Sarah Hamill
forces of nature as found in primeval deserts, mountains, and forests, away from
cities, away from artificial life guided by intellect instead of by emotional energies’.47
In Valentiner’s text, the series of photographs asks readers to see in Moore’s sculptures
the inscrutable remnants of an archaic past – as if Moore’s carved figures too had been
found in the landscape, strange objects whose original import and function remain
opaque yet whose promise of dwelling and unity captivates.
Like the photograph of Mên-an Tol that illustrates both Giedion-Welcker’s and
Valentiner’s books, Moore’s photographs suggest that his objects be read as immortal
things, as if sculpture is innate to the enduring landscape. Penelope Curtis and Fiona
Russell have argued that his photographs of sculpture contain resonant proposals for
‘comfort and renewal’:
17 Page 121 of W. R.
Valentiner, Origins of Modern
Sculpture, New York, 1946,
illustrating: ‘Men-an-Tol,
Cornwall’; ‘Menec, Brittany’;
‘Tombs, Ming Dynasty’;
‘Tomb, T’ang Kao-tsong’
[figures 99–102].
© Association of Art Historians 2014 23
David Smith, Photography and Sculpture
18 Aaron Siskind, Installation
View of Louise Bourgeois:
Sculptures, Peridot
Gallery, New York, 1950, c.
1950. Gelatin silver print,
dimensions unknown. New
York: The Easton Foundation
(LB-1277). © The Easton
Foundation/Licensed by
VAGA, New York, NY, and
Aaron Siskind Foundation,
courtesy of Bruce Silverstein
Gallery, NY.
The emptied-out body of a reclining female figure is filled by the landscape
which it frames or holds. We are on a level with both the landscape and the
sculpture. It is a sculpture of apparent continuity, a sculpture over which time
has already passed, but it is also a sculpture which empties the landscape of
its historical uneasiness and particularity.48
Curtis and Russell describe an effect of timelessness – a generalized, continuous
time – that adheres to Moore’s photographs, which imagine sculpture tied to the
landscape, an expansive bodily form that is part of an enduring, Edenic world. Unlike
Brancusi’s use of ruins to suggest a space of clutter and creative disorder, Moore
construes a space of community and wholeness, of harmony and renewal in the
landscape.
Smith’s photographs, by contrast, imagine a discordant and disparate collective
unsettled from their surroundings. His group photographs set off tensions between
objects, which exhibit disparate sizes and compositional structures. They do not
conjure a relationship of harmony or of homogeneity, like the serial repetitions that
minimalists would later foreground in their displays. For Smith, the differences
between objects set them in motion and raised questions about their collective
identity.
The psychological drama Smith’s photographs stage is closer to Bourgeois’s
installations in 1949 and 1950 of works in her Personage series at the Peridot gallery
in New York, an exhibition Smith attended.49
Bourgeois installed her totemic
structures directly on the floor of the gallery. Their bases, if any, were minimal,
several centimetres of steel to anchor the sculpture and secure the verticality of
the forms. Because the works were freestanding, they could be shifted into new
arrangements or ‘groups of objects relating to each other’, as Bourgeois emphasized.50
Sculptures were grouped in twos or threes, as if mapped on a ‘readable floor
graph’, but not arranged in a grid, as a photograph of the 1950 show taken by Aaron
Siskind makes clear (plate 18).51
Siskind captured the scene from a high vantage
© Association of Art Historians 2014 24
Sarah Hamill
point, probably from the top of two stairs that served as the entrance to the gallery,
framing the installation from above. The photographer places viewers outside the
grouping, just beyond a duo of sculptures, like intruders on a tense scene. The works
are paired off and stand together tentatively in mismatched clusters with each of
the pairs pulling away from each other. Their human size and upright stance draw
viewers into the group’s oppositional dynamic; yet the stark linear contrasts of the
abstract forms, no match to fleshy bodies, keeps identification at bay. In the Peridot
display, Bourgeois constructs a space in which one individual relates tentatively and
uncertainly to the next.
Bourgeois’s exhibition presented what she termed a ‘social space’, in which ‘you
had the very strong sense of something going on’, as she told an interviewer in 1976.52
Writing in 1954, Bourgeois described how her ‘work grows from the duel between
the isolated individual and the shared awareness of the group’,structuring a ‘drama
of one among many’.53
The drama might be one involving a raucous family or an
alliance of close friends – loose analogies of kinship that Bourgeois herself alluded to.
In one narrative she often repeated, she identified the Personages as standing in for
the family and friends that she left behind in France on moving to New York in 1938.
The sculptures were ‘badly missed presences’, she noted, and the Peridot exhibition
was ‘a tangible way of re-creating a missed past’.54
But Bourgeois also stepped away
from such autobiographical statements. Rather than name the sculptures as distinct
identities, she stressed their spatial relationships, how they were ‘the expression, in
abstract terms, of emotions and states of awareness’.55
Bourgeois’s installation relies on a primitivizing notion of sculptural form: each
object’s totemic qualities ensures its distance from the beholder. But Bourgeois also
used the collective staging of sculpture to conjure its otherness.56
Like Brancusi’s
19 David Smith, Photograph
of (left to right) Forging
IV, Forging III, Forging
I (unfinished), Untitled,
Forging IX, Forging XI,
Construction in Rectangles,
Forging II, and Construction
with Forged Neck (all 1955),
Bolton Landing, New York,
c. 1955. Gelatin silver print,
20.3 × 25.2 cm. New York:
The Estate of David Smith. ©
The Estate of David Smith/
Licensed by VAGA, New
York, NY.
© Association of Art Historians 2014 25
David Smith, Photography and Sculpture
studio as ruin or Smith’s Arcadian dock, the gallery became a space to animate a
group of works that registered as dramatically ‘other’. Not tied to a particular place
or location, Bourgeois’ installations emphasized sculpture’s mobility and openness,
while also raising questions about its collective identity.57
That identity is fractured
in Bourgeois’s imagining, shot through with psychic discord so that the group of
sculptures is envisaged as dissonant and broken.
Smith’s photographs of works from his Forging series seem to speak directly to the
Peridot exhibitions, engaging their terms of difference. In an image Smith published
in a 1956 Willard Gallery exhibition catalogue, he staged a group that included the
Forgings, using his signature low vantage point and cropping the photograph just
below the plinth on which he placed his works. Flattened to linear pillars, the works
take on monumental qualities, looming above the space of the beholder. Yet the
photograph also structures a comparison to underscore the differences between
objects, how each one is handmade and unique in size and shape (plate 19).Standing
ninety-one centimetres tall, Untitled (Standing Figure with Phallic Detail) (1955) plays off the
taller Forging XI, which reaches a height of 228 centimetres. The group also contains a
range of shapes: the smooth lines of the Forgings, which Smith made by hammering
and punching hot lengths of steel using an industrial power forge, are contrasted with
Construction with Forged Neck (1955), third from right, and Construction in Rectangles (1955)
on the far right, which the sculptor made by welding disparate parts together.58
In
this photograph, the sculptor demonstrates the breadth of his skill, from forge to
torch, by animating the distinctions in the interplay of objects. The image uses a low
vantage point to flatten the forms into a set of contrasts. Each sculpture appears as an
idiosyncratic thing that belongs to an object-language viewers cannot understand.
In Place of the Public
Together these diverse photographs of works by Smith, Bourgeois, and others
comment on sculpture’s place in the public sphere. That it has a place was far
from certain, an ambivalence revealed by sculptors’ photographs, which question
sculpture’s belonging and collectivity in modernism. Those questions might be
put this way: What does it mean to make public sculpture in the post-war era?
What would such a sculpture look like, if it was meant to be a model of public
collaboration? How would it give voice to notions of belonging and collectivity,
when the idea of a monolithic public was increasingly tied to consumerism and
corporatization? Smith sought a model for sculpture that proposed community as a
tentative possibility; its place in a broader collective would be provisional and open.
Stephen Melville and Margaret Iversen have described Smith’s photographs in
Writing Art History as presenting ‘conversational groups, asking [sculptures] to manifest
among themselves something like the terms they imagine for their audience’.59
What
Melville and Iversen observe in this brief description is how the photographs might
suggest dissonance as a term for public space, reflecting friction in their presentation
of objects. In late modernism, according to this Hegelian model, wholeness, the
ideal ascribed to classical sculpture, is no longer possible given the structural
disconnection of inside and outside, surface and core that Smith’s sculptures register
in their structural vacancy. By modelling incongruity – absence and emptiness –
Smith’s photographs communicated their terms to their public, to mirror the only
collective possible in modernism, one of dispersal and fragmentation.60
The sculptor himself was vocal about the impossibility of public sculpture in
the post-war era. He increasingly expressed dismay at the corporatization of public
art. This was a radical shift from his earlier commitment to public sculpture, which
© Association of Art Historians 2014 26
Sarah Hamill
he envisioned as taking place as a collaboration with architecture. In the early 1940s
Smith wrote a series of essays in which he mapped out a vision for a collaborative giveand-take
between the two media as a model for societal ideals of community. In this
collaboration, sculpture would not be an afterthought – a monument, adornment, or
‘mere billboard’ – in relation to the surrounding structure, but would influence and
instruct architectural design by incorporating steel and iron, the very materials of the
new twentieth-century urban landscape.61
In an essay written for Architectural Record in
1940, Smith underscored what it meant to view sculpture in its architectural surround:
Lines can indicate form by outline, can confine areas, can maintain their own
sculptural import, yet lose nothing by permitting a view of a building or
the landscape through the open areas which may represent the inside of the
sculptural form. To view a building through the branches of a tree destroys
neither the aesthetic value of the tree nor the aesthetic value of the building;
they both bear the added interest of associated objects.62
Smith sketched a scenario in which sculpture and architecture framed each other
in windows or through well-situated branches. The scene’s protagonist, the viewer,
would move from one compositional vantage to another, building a resonant and
interactive picture by juxtaposing views. Conceived visually, the collaboration would
also find spatial footing.
Smith’s ideals were short-lived, however. In 1950 he noted that sculpture
no longer depended ‘upon a setting or continuity for its impact’, and declared its
separation from architecture complete.63
What caused Smith to confirm the split? He
had come to believe architecture a ‘strictly commercial art’, subject to the pressures
of the market and contingent on a building’s function.64
Increasingly ‘complex and
collective’, ‘big’ architecture involved mechanisms of serialization and bureaucracy
that ran counter to Smith’s conception of his sculpture: as a one-on-one sustained
‘direct action in working’ that produced a single and original object.65
Looking back
in 1957, he referred to his earlier hope for a community of sculpture and architecture
as a ‘marvel of idealism’.66
With different aims and motivations, architecture could
only dominate sculpture; the ‘collaboration’ would never be one of equals. In a
lecture he gave at Pratt in 1963, Smith returned to the issue, dealing the final blow:
To get art, architects will have to prepare themselves to take sculpture on its
own independent merits. And they will have to subordinate their own egos
to the extent of permitting the work of sculpture to relate itself to the work
of architecture as one contemporary autonomy to another, in a relationship
of esthetic strength and joint excellence. This is up to the architect, not the
sculptor, and until the architect acquires the needed humility, the two arts
will remain the strangers they have long been to one another.67
These declarations about the failed collaboration of architecture and sculpture go hand
in hand with statements Smith made about the fate of public sculpture in the post-war
years. When he was interviewed by David Sylvester in 1961, he expressed nostalgia for the
1930s and early 1940s as a time of belonging and community: ‘In a sense, we belonged
to society at large. It was the first time that we ever belonged or had recognition from our
own government that we existed.’68
Smith chalked up the shift away from communal
forms of artistic practice to the dearth of public patronage or commissions.69
He also
told Thomas Hess in 1964 that the public was unlikely to welcome his work: ‘I don’t see
© Association of Art Historians 2014 27
David Smith, Photography and Sculpture
it being accepted in present capitalist society, nor in a contemporary socialist society, the
only regards that I get in the way of compliments are from other artists.’70
Here Smith
articulated a shift from a communal artistic identity of the 1930s to a more independent
one entailing withdrawal from the public sphere. Alongside other post-war artists and
theorists, Potts describes how, ‘Smith was forced to conclude that the only viable destiny
for a modern sculpture was as an individual creation that would address the viewer on a
one-to-one basis, and would thus have to be siteless or homeless.’71
Smith used photography in the 1950s and 1960s to frame these concepts of
alienation and distance, independence and withdrawal, by staging his works in
unexpected settings. In his photographs of multiple sculptures as collectives,
the sculptor gave visual form to what he described as the impossibility of
belonging in the post-war era and the failure of public sculpture as a claim to
monumentality. Yet his photographs are not nostalgic, meant to restore the lost
ideals of community and collaboration. Unlike the images of harmony conveyed
by Moore’s 1930s presentations of his works as one with landscape, Smith staged
uneasy relationships between objects and their surroundings. The photographs
posit an alternative space for sculpture that hinges on asymmetry and difference,
suggesting the impossibility of the public monument as a stable model of
communal wholeness. To return to Melville and Iversen’s description of the
‘conversational’ group photographs, they ‘claim a collective audience of a certain
dispersed kind’.72
Paradoxically, even as Smith visualized his sculptures as autonomous from
the here and now, imagining a withdrawal from the public sphere, he did so
in a medium that communicated his sculpture to a wide and heteronomous
audience.73
Smith seized on mechanical reproduction as an alternative venue for
his work, to reach a community he may have imagined as separate from the world
of corporate patronage and the false ideals of monumentality. He circulated his
photographs widely, leaving open the possibility that it was in the reproducible
medium of photography that Smith had found his sculpture’s public life, through
unconventional and provisional channels. Rather than engage with the increasingly
corporate structures of public art, he could use photography to launch his
objects into the public sphere, and do so in a way that suggests an unsettling of
expectations for the solid object.
In a photograph of Tanktotem IV (1953, plate 20) Smith imagined this dislocation
in a new pictorial model by staging a single work in an unconventional setting. The
sculpture is positioned directly on the ground, without a pedestal or supporting
structure. Its three lanky legs rest on the sandy dirt, a space marked by tyre tracks;
these signs of an inhabited, everyday place are brought into view through a crisp
focus. The image presents a picture of sculpture that is difficult to resolve. For
this much is clear: Tanktotem IV is not at home in the dirt driveway. How can it
be, when awkward iron legs and welded tank tops are placed over a tyre track,
a space marked by human – but not sculptural – activities? Yet the sculpture is
also resolutely there, standing in the way. In the photograph, Tanktotem IV looks
like a self-sufficient, independent thing, in the landscape yet removed from it.74
The shallow depth of field isolates the harsh edges of the abstract steel sculpture
from its softened background, repeating the oppositional terms of Smith’s dock
photographs in a one-on-one encounter. The sculpture is imagined to be suspended
between ideas of place and placelessness, dwelling and homelessness. Or, as O’Hara
put it simply to Smith in 1961, struggling to absorb and describe his recent trip to
Bolton Landing: ‘They get to me but I don’t get to them.’75
Sculpture would register
© Association of Art Historians 2014 28
Sarah Hamill
as both proximity and distance, impinging on the space of the beholder yet also
resisting it.
Using photography, Smith framed these elusive, contingent relationships by
presenting his sculptures in unexpected settings and photographing them from
unusually low points of view. Smith’s photographs destabilize objects by questioning
concepts of solidity, belonging, groundedness, and permanence. They do so, moreover,
through the sheer diversity of their approach, as if no single image could stand in for
the work itself. Tanktotem IV is unsettled by the manifold sites in which it appears: on the
dock, in the field, and on the driveway. Seen photographically, it registers as a shifting,
contingent thing that changes according to its setting and point of view.
In the early 1960s, Smith sought to limit his sales, having decided instead to keep
his works together in his fields. He wrote to a collector in 1961, ‘I want to fill my
field with my own work.’76
Smith’s decision has been read as a desire to structure a
place or a home for his works, by making his fields a permanent installation site. But
his photographs tell a different story. They positioned his works in ways that upend
20 David Smith, Photograph of
Tanktotem IV, 1953, c. 1953.
Gelatin silver print, 23.7 × 19.2
cm. New York: The Estate of
David Smith. © The Estate
of David Smith/Licensed by
VAGA, New York, NY.
© Association of Art Historians 2014 29
David Smith, Photography and Sculpture
their connections to site and place.77
The provisional relationships he staged between
objects posed a question about belonging. Modernist objects in Smith’s photographs are
provisional; they are tied to this world while signalling another, separate space. These
qualities rested on photography’s discursive framework, on Smith’s taking charge of
his sculpture’s public life. In photography – a medium that could be reproduced and
widely circulated – Smith found his public, even as he fictionalized his sculpture’s nonbelonging
in an image.
1979, 34.
12	 Alex Potts, ‘Installation and sculpture’, Oxford Art Journal, 24: 2, 2001,
11.
13	 Walter Benjamin, ‘Little history of photography’, in Michael Jennings,
ed., Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings Vol. 2, Cambridge, MA, 1999, 519.
14	 Marian Willard, ‘Letter to David Smith’ (January 1948), Manuscript
Archives, The Estate of David Smith, New York.
15	 David Smith, ‘Letter to Marian Willard’ (February 1948), Manuscript
Archives, The Estate of David Smith, New York.
16	 See Rosalind Krauss, ‘A photo a day: Recording the work of David
Smith’, in David Smith: A Centennial, New York, 2006, 14; and Helen M.
Franc, ‘Letter to Mrs. Krauss’ (2 August, 1966), David Smith Papers,
Museum of Modern Art, Museum Archives.
17	 Even when Krauss returned to the topic of the photographs in 1998,
by then recognizing them as part of Smith’s sculptural project, she
did not discuss the connections between his photographs and her
analyses except to observe their similarities. She noted how the artist’s
photographs shape the totemic qualities that she identified in her
1970s accounts. Rosalind Krauss, ‘David Smith’s “new vision”’, David
Smith: Photographs 1938–1965, New York, 1998. For an analysis of Krauss’s
use of the photographs, see Sarah Hamill, David Smith in Two Dimensions:
Photography and the Matter of Sculpture, Berkeley, CA, forthcoming.
18	 Rosalind Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture, Cambridge, MA, 1977, 157.
19	 The organizers of a 1960 French and Company exhibition echoed
Smith’s photographic stagings by installing clusters of sculptures
directly on the floor.
20	 Hilton Kramer connected Smith to this broader group, writing ‘There
are artists – one thinks of Giacometti in Paris and Henry Moore in
Herefordshire – who are as much authors of their milieux as of their
work; and Smith is one of these.’ Hilton Kramer, ‘The sculpture
of David Smith’ (1960), The Age of the Avant-Garde, 1956–1972, New
Brunswick, NJ, 2009, 323.
21	 Frank O’Hara, ‘David Smith: The color of steel’, Art News, 60,
December 1961, 32–4.
22	 O’Hara, ‘David Smith: The color of steel’, 32.
23	 Ernst Scheidegger photographed Giacometti’s sculpture in the 1950s
and 1960s, and published his photographs in Alberto Giacometti. Schriften,
Fotos, Zeichnungen (1958) and L’atelier d’Alberto Giacometti (1963). Several of
Scheidegger’s photographs were also published in Carola GiedionWelcker,
Contemporary Sculpture: An Evolution in Volume and Space, New York,
1955, 92–5. Describing his working relationship with Giacometti, he
wrote in a 2001 catalogue: ‘On Alberto’s suggestion, I had begun to
photograph his sculptures. . . . I loved to position the sculpture in a
space in such a way that the space itself also affected the photograph.
Alberto valued this type of shot. Very few of my photographs
therefore have a neutral background. . . . Giacometti most liked to
see his sculptures in nature, or in a street. This was not always easy
to do. I loaded the large figures on a truck and the smaller ones in my
car, in search of the fitting surroundings.’ Ernst Scheidegger, Traces of a
Friendship: Alberto Giacometti, Zurich and Frankfurt, 2001, 107.
24	 Smith, ‘The landscape’, David Smith, New York, 1947. Manuscript
Archives, The Estate of David Smith, New York. Republished in Cleve
Gray, ed., 155, David Smith by David Smith, London, 1968.
25	 For a discussion of the theme of the uncanny in modernism, see
Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely,
Cambridge, MA, 1992, 6.
26	 Emily Genauer, ‘Sculpture by moderns on display’, New York Herald
Tribune, 1 February 1953, 16, as cited in Sarah Kianovsky, ‘Annotated
Notes
I wish to thank T. J. Clark, Lisa Florman, Louise Hornby, Chris
Lakey, Jamie Nisbet, Alex Potts, and Anne M. Wagner for their
comments on versions of this essay as well as the anonymous
readers for Art History. I am grateful to audience members at the
Wexner Center for the Arts, the High Museum of Art, Emory
University, and the University of Southern California for their
responses. Generous support from the Jody L. Maxmin fund,
Department of Art, Oberlin College, covered the costs of image
rights and reproductions. I also wish to thank Susan Cooke, from
The Estate of David Smith, for her skilled assistance with many of
the article’s illustrations.
1	 Søren Kierkegaard, Stages on Life’s Way (1845), as quoted in Walter
Benjamin, ‘Convolute I’ The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and
Kevin McLaughlin, Cambridge, MA, 1999, 218.
2	 Alex Potts reads the dock as a pedestal in these photographs. See Alex
Potts, ‘Giacometti and the basis of sculpture’, in Peter Read and Julia
Kelly, eds, Giacometti: Critical Essays, Farnham, 2009, 147.
3	 Clement Greenberg, ‘Review of Exhibitions of Hyman Bloom, David
Smith, and Robert Motherwell’ (Nation, 26 January, 1946), Clement
Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism Volume 2, Chicago, IL, 1988, 53.
4	 See Clement Greenberg, ‘Review of Exhibitions of David Smith,
David Hare, and Mirko’ (Nation, 19 April, 1947), Clement Greenberg: The
Collected Essays and Criticism Volume 2, 140; ‘Present Prospects of American
Painting and Sculpture’ (Horizon, October 1947), Clement Greenberg: The
Collected Essays and Criticism Volume 2, 160; ‘David Smith’ (Art in America,
1956–17), Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism Volume 3,
Chicago, IL, 1995, 275; and ‘Sculpture in Our Time’ (Arts Magazine,
June 1958), Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism Volume 4,
Chicago, IL, 1995, 55.
5	 Anne M. Wagner, ‘David Smith: Heavy metal’, A House Divided: American
Art since 1955, Berkeley, CA, 2012, 114.
6	 Wagner’s word is ‘embody’. See Wagner, ‘David Smith: Heavy metal’,
114.
7	 For accounts of the relationship between Smith and minimalism that
focus on the issue of industry, see Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, ‘Michael
Asher and the conclusion of modern sculpture’, Art Institute of Chicago
Museum Studies, Vol. 10, 1983, 276–95; Hal Foster, ‘The un/making of
sculpture’, (1998) in ed. Hal Foster with Gordon Hughes, Richard Serra,
Cambridge, MA, 2000, 175–200; and Julia Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers:
Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era, Berkeley, CA, 2009.
8	 See, for instance, Rosalind Krauss, Terminal Iron Works: The Sculpture of David
Smith, Cambridge, MA, 1971; E. A. Carmean, David Smith, Washington,
DC, 1982; Stanley Marcus, David Smith: The Sculptor and His Work, Ithaca,
NY, 1983; Karen Wilkin, David Smith, New York, 1984; and Alex Potts,
‘Chapter 4: Modernist sculpture’, The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative,
Modernist, Minimalist, New Haven and London, 2000, 145–77.
9	 Smith, ‘Letter to Marian Willard’ (31 January, 1947), Willard Gallery
Archives, Archives of American Art, Washington, DC.
10	 In a 1998 exhibition catalogue essay, Joan Pachner reintroduced
Smith’s photographs as his own. Joan Pachner, ‘David Smith’s
photographs’, in David Smith; Photographs 1931–1965, New York,
1998. Additional photographs have been published in exhibition
catalogues, including Roxana Marcoci, ed., The Original Copy: Photography
of Sculpture, 1839 to Today, New York, 2010.
11	 Rosalind Krauss, ‘Sculpture in the expanded field’, October, 8, Spring
© Association of Art Historians 2014 30
Sarah Hamill
56	 Alex Potts argues that Bourgeois’s focus on ‘the psychic arena of
encounter between viewer and work’ emphasizes the ‘situation’ of
sculpture, placing her work closer to minimalism. Alex Potts, ‘Louise
Bourgeois: Sculptural confrontations’, Oxford Art Journal, 22: 2, 1999, 40.
See also Alex Potts, ‘Hybrid sculpture’, in Louise Bourgeois, New York, 2007.
57	 Elyse Speaks has argued that the displays ‘created a sense of place the
characteristics of which were broad and contradictory’. Elyse Speaks,
‘Space, gender, sculpture: Bourgeois, Nevelson, and the changing
conditions of sculpture in the 1950s’, Women’s Studies, 40: 8, 2011, 1060.
Accessed 23 January 2012: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00497878.2011.
609416
58	 Smith made the Forgings when he was a visiting artist in residence at
the University of Indiana, Bloomington. Peter Stevens, e-mail to the
author, dated 21 October 2010.
59	 Stephen Melville and Margaret Iversen, ‘Plasticity: The Hegelian
writing of art’, Writing Art History: Disciplinary Departures, Chicago, IL,
2010, 170.
60	 Melville and Iversen, ‘Plasticity: The Hegelian writing of art’, 170.
61	 Smith, ‘Sculpture; Art forms in architecture – new techniques affect
both’ (October 1940), in McCoy, David Smith, 44.
62	 Smith, ‘Sculpture; Art forms in architecture – new techniques affect
both,’ 46.
63	 Smith, ‘For the Metropolitan Art Association, Detroit, Michigan’
(January 1952), Manuscript Archives, The Estate of David Smith, New
York.
64	 Smith, ‘Untitled Note’, Manuscript Archives, The Estate of David
Smith, New York.
65	 Smith, ‘The artist and the architect’ (November 1957), in McCoy,
David Smith, 145.
66	 Smith, ‘The artist and the architect’, 143.
67	 Smith, ‘On Architecture (Lecture at Pratt Institute)’, (7 November
1963). Manuscript Archives, The Estate of David Smith, New York.
68	 Smith, Interview with David Sylvester, June 1961, in McCoy, David
Smith, 168.
69	 According to Andrew Mitchell, Martin Heidegger expressed doubts
about the possibilities of public sculpture in the post-war realm; it
was ‘complicit with the planned order of industrial society’, Mitchell
writes. Yet, as Mitchell notes, for Heidegger, ‘all sculpture is “public”
sculpture’, since it is capable of thematizing art’s role in a place
beyond itself. See Andrew Mitchell, ‘Heidegger among the Sculptors: Body,
Space, and the Art of Dwelling, Stanford, CA, 2010, 36–9.
70	 Smith, ‘The Secret Letter’, 178.
71	 See Potts, The Sculptural Imagination, 162.
72	 Melville and Iversen, ‘Plasticity: The Hegelian writing of art’, 170.
73	 It is a paradox voiced by Theodor Adorno in AestheticTheory, and
described by Alex Potts: ‘According to Adorno, the condition of any
significant work of modern art is radically split between the promise of
autonomy and its existence as social fact. A significant work of art work
simultaneously resists incorporation within the fabric of the culture
from which it emerges, and itself is part of that fabric.’ Potts, ‘Autonomy
in post-war art, quasi-heroic and casual’, OxfordArtJournal,27: 1, 2004, 45.
74	 Photographs taken by Ernst Scheidegger of Alberto Giacometti’s
figures in the Swiss landscape repeat these terms by staging sculpture
in the familiar space of a walking path.
75	 Frank O’Hara, ‘Letter to David Smith’, 17 August, 1961. David Smith
Papers, The Estate of David Smith, New York.
76	 David Smith, ‘Letter to Lois Orswell’ (July 1961) as cited in Michael
Brenson, ‘The fields’, in David Smith; A Centennial, 45. Smith moved his
works to Bolton Landing from his gallery in 1956, having severed
all connection with the Willard Gallery and refused bids from other
galleries. Writing to a friend, he said, ‘if any dealer wants my work,
they can buy.’ Letter to ‘GDT’, 3 June 1956. David Smith Papers, The
Estate of David Smith, New York.
77	 As Alex Potts has observed, Smith’s sculptures related to their
surroundings through a radical separation from it, unlike the
sculpture of some later land artists, which pursued a project of
marking landscape. See Potts, The Sculptural Imagination, 165.
checklist of sculpture (general commentary)’, in David Smith: A Centennial,
356; and Genauer, ‘A Shahn miracle’, New York Herald Tribune, 15 October
1961, section 4, 10, as cited in Kianovsky, ‘Annotated checklist of
sculpture (general commentary)’, in David Smith: A Centennial, 367.
27	 Genauer, ‘A Shahn miracle’, as cited in Kianovsky, ‘Annotated
checklist of sculpture (general commentary)’, in David Smith: A
Centennial, 367.
28	 Sam Hunter, ‘David Smith’s new sculpture’, in David Smith: Recent
Sculpture, New York 1961, unpaginated.
29	 Wagner, ‘David Smith: Heavy metal’, 114.
30	 Kenneth Noland, cited in Candida Smith, The Fields of David Smith, New
York, 1999, 53.
31	 For discussions of Smith’s Spoleto residency, see Rosalind Krauss,
Terminal Iron Works, 34–7; E. A. Carmean, David Smith, 151–3; and Stanley
Marcus, David Smith: The Sculptor and His Work, 137–45.
32	 David Smith, ‘Report on Voltri’, in Garnett McCoy, ed., David Smith,
New York, 1973, 162.
33	 Blake Stimson, The Pivot of the World, Cambridge, MA, 2006, 58.
34	 In addition to other journals and catalogues, they appeared in Cahiers
d’Art in 1929 and Minotaure in 1933.
35	 Potts, The Sculptural Imagination, 133.
36	 For a discussion of timelessness in Brancusi’s sculpture, see Margit
Rowell, ‘Brancusi: Timelessness in a modern mode’, in Friedrich Teja
Bach, Margit Rowell and Ann Temkin, Constantin Brancusi: 1876–1957,
Philadelphia, PA, 1995, 38–49.
37	 The studio contained, as one contemporaneous observer noted, ‘great
blocks of building stone, beams, trunks of trees, boulders and rocks,
and here and there the highlight of a polished bronze’. Paul Morand,
Constantin Brancusi, as cited in Ann Temkin, ‘Brancusi and his American
collectors’, in Bach et al., Constantin Brancusi: 1876–1957, 60.
38	 Jon Wood, Close Encounters: The Sculptor’s Studio in the Age of the Camera, Leeds,
2001, 20–3.
39	 Jon Wood discusses timelessness in the photographs of Brancusi and
Moore. See Jon Wood, ‘A household name: Henry Moore’s studiohomes
and their bearings, 1926–46’, in Jane Beckett and Fiona
Russell, eds, Henry Moore: Critical Essays, Aldershot, 2003, 30 and 34.
40	 Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘Notes (2 December 1900)’, Rodin and Other Prose
Pieces, London, 1986, 74.
41	 Rilke, ‘Notes (2 December 1900)’, Rodin and Other Prose Pieces, 74.
42	 For a discussion of Rilke’s solitary individualism, see Kaja Silverman,
Flesh of My Flesh, Stanford, CA, 2009.
43	 See http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/33.43.36;
accessed 16 September 2013.
44	 Krauss, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, 34.
45	 Krauss, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, 34.
46	 Alex Potts offers a different comparison of Moore’s and Smith’s
photographs. Potts, ‘Giacometti and the basis of sculpture’, 131.
47	 Valentiner, Origins of Modern Sculpture, New York, 1946, 140.
48	 Penelope Curtis and Fiona Russell, ‘Henry Moore and the post-war
British landscape: Monuments ancient and modern’, in Henry Moore:
Critical Essays, 140.
49	 See Smith, ‘Letter to Lucille and Edgar Levy’, November 1950, Edgar
Levy and Lucille Corcos Levy Papers, Archives of American Art.
50	 Bourgeois, ‘An artist’s words’ (1954), in Marie-Laure Bernadac
and Hans Ulrich Obrist, eds, Louise Bourgeois: Destruction of the Father /
Reconstruction of the Father: Writings and Interviews 1923–1997, Cambridge,
MA, 1998, 66. See Sarah Elise Archias, Dagger Child: Louise Bourgeois’s
Primitivism (master’s thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 2001).
51	 Susi Bloch, ‘An interview with Louise Bourgeois’, Art Journal, 35: 4,
Summer 1976, 372.
52	 Bloch, ‘An interview with Louise Bourgeois’, 373.
53	 Bourgeois, ‘An artist’s words’, 66.
54	 Bloch, ‘An interview with Louise Bourgeois’, 373. Mignon Nixon
has described the Personage displays – and attendant sculptures like
Quarantania I – as works of mourning. She writes: ‘It is not that all the
figures are memorials, or even that all are figures from the past, but
that all stand for emotional adversity and the work of overcoming it,
the “mental work” of living itself that is, for [Melanie] Klein, similar
to mourning.’ Mignon Nixon, Fantastic Reality: Louise Bourgeois and a Story of
Modern Art, Cambridge, MA, 2005, 156.
55	 Bourgeois, ‘An artist’s words’, 66.