David Smith 1906-1965

David Smith was one of the most influential American sculptors of the twentieth century, whose use of welded steel transformed the possibilities of modern sculpture. Trained initially as a painter in the late 1920s, Smith was also prolific in drawings and photographs, moving between two and three dimensions and positive and negative space as part of his artistic practice.

Born in Decatur, Indiana, Smith worked briefly as a welder in an automobile factory before he moved to New York in 1926, where he studied at the Art Students League. His early experience with the automobile industry proved formative: he began welding sculpture around 1933 after seeing steel constructions by Pablo Picasso and Julio González. Rather than carving or casting forms, he assembled steel into open, linear structures, allowing space itself to function as an active component in his work. He described this process as “drawing in space.” Smith often painted his sculptures, and both painting and drawing remained integral to his “work stream”.

In 1940, Smith moved to a former farm near Bolton Landing, New York in the Adirondacks where he established his home and studio, Terminal Iron Works. The surrounding landscape became important to his work, providing both a setting and a source of inspiration. Working with fabricated steel, discarded machinery, agricultural implements, and other industrial materials, Smith developed an increasingly expansive vocabulary of abstract forms. His later sculptures often engage directly with their surroundings, their open structures and reflective surfaces changing with light, weather, and viewpoint. 

Smith died in 1965 at the age of fifty-nine, leaving behind a body of work that continues to occupy a central place in the history of American modernism.