August 2023

Tony Smith

Installation view, Tony Smith: New Piece, Wall, One-Two-Three, July 14 – August 18, 2023, Pace Gallery, New York. Photography courtesy Pace Gallery

An in-depth conversation with art historian Christopher Ketcham about the life and career of sculptor Tony Smith—and a new exhibition of three of Smith’s key works at Pace Gallery in New York.

Interview by Dan Golden

Tony Smith (1912-1980) is best known for his abstract sculptures created in the 1960s and 1970s, each a unique fusion of modular geometric forms combined intuitively. Multilayered meaning embedded in the work stems from Smith's wide-ranging passions, including the history of art and architecture, mathematics, science, and Asian philosophy, as well as the writings of James Joyce. Smith studied painting at the Art Students League, New York (1934–36) and attended the New Bauhaus, Chicago (1937–38) before apprenticing with Frank Lloyd Wright (1938–39). For the following two decades, he worked professionally as an architect and held teaching positions at numerous institutions in New York and Vermont. In the early 1960s, Smith turned his focus to sculpture, with his architectural background informing one of his most radical innovations—having his work industrially fabricated. Widely recognized for his large-scale, modular works produced throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Smith was included in the seminal group exhibition Primary Structures at the Jewish Museum, New York, in 1966. His profound achievements in American sculpture have been honored with retrospectives of his work at The Museum of Modern Art, New York (1998); Institut Valencià d’Art Modern (2002); Menil Collection, Houston (2010); and Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2017).

I’d love to start our conversation by learning about your connection to the Tony Smith Estate, and your work for the upcoming Smith catalogue raisonné.

I began to pursue research on Tony Smith while working on my dissertation at MIT, which assessed the urban histories of minimal art. It was in that context that I began working with the Tony Smith Estate, studying their rich archival holdings and learning an immense amount from Sarah Auld, who continues to direct the estate. Smith’s 1967 show in Bryant Park, which was the first public art exhibition organized by the City of New York, was at the core of my narrative. At this initial moment in my research, Smith was a subject of art historical interest—a case study. He connected in direct ways to the reimaging of the postwar city in the 1960s: working as a sculptor, Smith intersected with power brokers of urban planning and policy, including John V. Lindsay, Thomas Hoving, August Heckscher, and Edmund Bacon. Smith’s speculative idea of infrastructural aesthetics and the new scales of sculpture also intersected in compelling ways with the new theories of the highway and city developed by Siegfried Giedion, Kevin Lynch, and Christopher Tunnard.

But what really hooked me was the exhibition of Source in 2012 at Matthew Marks—a work that was also shown to great effect at Pace in 2019. In both places, the sculpture worked. It fully substantiated the aesthetic theory, critical appraisals, and art histories built around Smith’s sculpture since the 1960s. In the presence of Source, I could experience Smith’s novel synthesis of geometry and abstraction and his use of sculpture as a means of claiming and reconfiguring space and altering the relationship between body and sculpture, subject and object. The work is riven with contradictions: the form seemed animated and inert, confining and liberating, mathematical and expressive. It opens a generous space for the body while simultaneously obstructing and negating the existing environment. The idea of sculpture as a sprawling field that could consume the space of the gallery—remains a powerful catalyst for my thought and writing.

In recent years, I have published on Smith’s show in Bryant Park and his speculative conceptualization of sculpture and urban space in Public Art Dialogue. And I have stayed in touch with the Tony Smith Estate and continued to pursue lines of inquiry in their rich archival holdings. In the past several months, I have been working on several aspects of the forthcoming catalogue raisonnés of sculpture and architecture. It has been an exciting and rewarding project to be a part of. I have learned so much about Smith while immersed again in the archive but also in working with a great team of co-authors and editors that Sarah and James Voorhies, editor of the Tony Smith Catalogue Raisonné Project, have assembled. The project considers the breadth and depth of Smith’s work and will assess the continuities, ruptures, and contradictions as Smith worked across decades, media, and discourses. The catalogue raisonnés and supplementary volumes will also help us understand the full breadth of Smith’s work both in context as he intersected with the giants of modern American art and architecture and the continued relevance of his work for contemporary art and architecture. The project has been a privilege to contribute to. And it will be invaluable to have a full accounting of Smith’s sculpture and architecture in one place, particularly given the logistical complexity of mounting large-scale exhibitions of his work.

While sculpture is at the core of my interest, I have been especially excited to contribute to, and even more excited to see, the catalogue raisonné of architecture. This body of Smith’s work has remained relatively unknown. Yet he cut across the vital histories of modern architecture, developing on and critically assessing the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Phillip Johnson, and others. Smith’s architectural designs built into and out from this complex field in original and unexpected ways. And in Smith’s buildings, sketches, and designs, many of which will be published for the first time, you can see him working through these competing visions for urban and suburban modernity. Likewise, the catalogue raisonné project promises to shed new light on Smith’s theorization of urban planning and infrastructural aesthetics, which often emerged in private notes, drawings, and speculative writings. Having this record of Smith’s urban and architectural thought will be invaluable in its own right, of course, but it is doubly so for the insight that it will give into the development of his thought as a sculptor.

Can you give readers a brief introduction to Smith’s work in the context of the art scene of the sixties and seventies?

In the early 1960s, Smith turned away from architecture and began to work almost exclusively as a sculptor and teacher. He had worked as an architect since the late-1930s, but due to several factors, he walked away from the profession and began building sculptures in his backyard in South Orange, NJ, while teaching at several colleges in New York City. In 1961 and ’62, he was incredibly productive, conceptualizing and fabricating many sculptures of enduring significance: Marriage, Night, Tau, Spitball, The Snake is Out, Willy, and Die, just to name a few. However, he was not showing these works, except to friends and colleagues who visited his backyard. Smith remained socially connected to the fraying circles of the New York School and was beginning to make connections to key curators, including Samuel Wagstaff Jr. and Eugene Goossen, with whom Smith taught at Hunter College beginning in 1962. But in the early 1960s, he was developing as a sculptor independently from the overlapping art worlds in New York.

In the mid-1960s, Smith’s works were included in several group exhibitions, which would become central to the emerging discourse of minimalism. In 1964, Wagstaff selected The Elevens Are Up (1963) for Black, White, and Gray at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, CT. The Elevens Are Up is composed of two walls installed in parallel, forming an eight-foot cube with an open corridor through which one could walk. It is also an imposing, obstructive form in the gallery that alters the space of aesthetic experience and the encounter with the mobile body of the viewer, fundamentally breaking with the modernist ideal of autonomy.

We can see a direct line from this early interest to Wall, presently installed at the Pace Gallery, which was conceived in 1964—they share a para-architectural posture, a confrontational presence, and a use of simple geometric form scaled to the body. But we can also see a direct line from The Elevens Are Up to New Piece (1966) and One–Two–Three, two later sculptures in which Smith used more eccentric geometries and opened a sprawling space of sculpture to be in, in the phenomenological and existential sense. Black, White, and Gray was the first public showing of Smith’s work. It was also the first major exhibition in which one could see the ideas of minimalism beginning to cohere. This canonical formation would continue in other group shows in the mid-1960s, many of which also featured Smith’s work, including Primary Structures at The Jewish Museum, organized by Kynaston McShine, and Art of the Real at MoMA in 1968, organized by Goossen. The extended discussions that Smith had with curators like Goossen, Wagstaff, and McShine, as well as Samuel Adams Green and Martin Friedman, were crucial to his developing idea of a new scale of sculpture for the new spaces of postwar modernity.

In the mid-1960s, Smith’s work was also featured in a major solo exhibition, co-hosted by the Wadsworth Atheneum and the ICA in Philadelphia, as well as several shows that mounted his sculptures in public spaces in cities, which, while familiar today, was an entirely novel exhibitionary form at the time. His work was also centered in the theorization and critical appraisal of minimalism, both in a landmark interview with Wagstaff published in Artforum and in Robert Morris’s “Notes on Sculpture” essays. But Smith was always also disconnected from minimalism’s core canon. First, he was older than many of the artists he showed alongside and did not subscribe to minimalism’s orthodoxies. While his work was grounded in pure, basic, and rational geometries, as well as forms of repetition, and positioned as a catalyst for the new aesthetics, it was also excessive, expressive, eccentric, and laden with symbolic meaning. These contradictions of form and content have long made Smith’s work difficult to locate neatly in any readymade art historical grouping.

Perhaps because of these key differences with minimalist polemics, in the late 1960s and early ’70s, Smith was closer to the next generation of artists associated with earthworks, including Robert Smithson and, especially, Michael Heizer. He was also connected socially and institutionally with students at Bennington College, Pratt, and Hunter College, such as Christopher Wilmarth, Patricia Johanson, Robert Swain, Arthur File, and Alice Aycock, among many others. His presence in the classroom was legendary. And Smith’s work grew out of his teaching and his dialogue with students, who sought to work in the gaps between sculpture and architecture.

Tony Smith, One-Two-Three, 1976, steel, painted black, 29 7/8 x 72 1/2 x 42 inches, 51 3/8 x 72 1/2 x 72 1/2 inches, 51 3/8 x 108 1/2 x 72 1/2 inches. © Tony Smith / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Smith originally studied painting at the Art Students League in the 1930s before embarking on a career as an architect and teacher. I’m interested in getting your thoughts on Smith’s transition back to art and the large-scale sculptural work he is known for.

Smith’s path from the Art Students League in the 1930s to his career as a builder and architect to his work as a sculptor is a long, complex, and rich story. There will be much more to learn about these transitions in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné. His story intersects with some of modernism’s extraordinary art and architectural histories.

There are negative reasons that motivated Smith’s turn away from architecture: in 1961, he was involved in a car accident and suffered serious injuries that affected his ability to work on job sites—the hands-on work that he prized as an essential aspect of architectural thought and design; he had also grown tired of compromising his plans to accommodate the whims of clients. But, as Smith turned away from the influence of Wright, his architectural designs had also become more sculptural. While his work remained essentially functional, in projects such as the Bultman Studio (1945) and the Stamos House (1951), we can see Smith playing with form, mass, gravity, volume, and geometry in ways that exceed the basic terms of building. At the same time, he also became increasingly interested in the shape of urban space. By the early and mid-1960s, he was beginning to recognize that sculpture could offer a novel space of experimentation and a critical path into the territories of postwar American modernity—the city, the suburbs, the highway, and the new networks of perception, order, and power that were shaping and reshaping urban life. Smith’s ambitious line of inquiry would be easier to pursue if he did not also have to worry about the design of ductwork, wiring, and finish carpentry. Sculpture could be positioned to obstruct the forms, flows, and mobilities of everyday life in the city. It could reorient the subject to the spaces of everyday life in a way that architecture could not.

Tony Smith circa 1960s. Photo courtesy Tony Smith Archives

Smith apprenticed with Frank Lloyd Wright in the late 1930s, but his sculptural work seems more in tune with mid-century architects like Philip Johnson and Mies van der Rohe.

As an architect, Smith developed on the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, with whom he had studied in the 1930s, before turning to the major postwar modernists, including Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, Marcel Breuer, Phillip Johnson, and Louis Kahn. While working as a sculptor, however, Smith militated against the rigidities and geometries of the International Style and Brutalism that Mies, Breuer, and Le Corbusier were associated with. His work is more closely aligned with the theories of urban perception and participatory urbanism authored by Kevin Lynch and Edmund Bacon. Smith developed and positioned his sculpture to counter the regulative axes of the modernist city—the repeating grids of verticals and horizontals of the curtain wall and the urban plan. For example, the complex geometries of New Piece and the sprawling space of One–Two–Three are aggressive negations of the spatial order of the modernist city and its architectures. Yet they can sit comfortably within urban space—they seem to relate to the city’s architectures as much as the bodies that move through it—disrupting rhythms of urban life and offering a sensorial and experiential rupture. Using an asynchronous grid and non-conforming geometries, Smith built sculptures that could work within and against the spaces shaped by Mies and Johnson and this generation of midcentury architects. You can see and feel that contradiction and negation at Pace Gallery, where the white cube is completely altered by the presence of Smith’s sculptures.

Installation view, Tony Smith: New Piece, Wall, One-Two-Three, July 14 – August 18, 2023, Pace Gallery, New York. Photography courtesy Pace Gallery

Smith was one of the earliest artists to employ industrial fabrication. Can you talk about how he developed this process?

Smith’s turn to industrial fabrication in sculpture was one of the many concrete ways in which we can see him turning away from his approach to architecture. When Smith worked on a building project, he prided himself on the crafts of construction. He learned the building trades in his apprenticeship with Frank Lloyd Wright, working his way up from the manual crafts of bricklaying and carpentry to site management before he established his own firm and began to design. On several of his architectural projects, he built structures by hand, with the help of friends, patrons, and local craftsmen. He had an intimate knowledge of the hands-on work of building, and this way of working—this connection between hand and mind—surely impacted his earliest sculptures, which he also built with the help of friends, students, and carpenters in his backyard with little more than plywood, nails, and black paint.

But Smith always imagined these early works to be mock-ups, ultimately to be fabricated in steel. It was vital that the hand of the artist, embedded in the brushstroke or the rough seam, be eliminated and that the final work appeared as a singular form rather than an object assembled from parts. It was also vital that the meaning of the sculpture cohere in direct experience of the object in space, rather than point insistently back to the artist.

Die was among his first industrially fabricated works, and he landed on the process after seeing a billboard for a bespoke foundry in Orange, NJ. Because Die was a simple geometric form, Smith did not see the need to fabricate a plywood model, following his typical process. After having the idea for a six-foot steel cube, as Smith put it: “I didn’t make a drawing. I just picked up the phone and ordered it.” This is a nearly complete break from the direct, active, and hands-on participation that Smith prized in building. But his turn to industrial fabrication was not permanent. He continued to make full-scale mock-ups of more complex geometries in plywood and paint to test the form and space of sculpture and because these versions were easier to ship to exhibitions. The final, industrially fabricated versions of the same sculptures were often pursued after a work was purchased.

It is worth noting that Smith studied in 1937 at the New Bauhaus in Chicago under the direction of László Moholy-Nagy. Moholy-Nagy had experimented with a similar process of fabrication for his telephone pictures of 1923, which remained in Moholy Nagy’s possession during his time in Chicago. I don’t know if Smith ever saw these works or even knew about them. Regardless, they serve as a key art historical precedent to Smith’s and many other artists’ work with industrial fabricators in the 1960s.

“Smith developed and positioned his sculpture to counter the regulative axes of the modernist city—the repeating grids of verticals and horizontals of the curtain wall and the urban plan.”

—Christopher Ketcham

How should we consider the three works in the Pace exhibition within the context of his larger body of work? New Piece and Wall date from the mid-1960s and One-Two-Three a decade later; while they maintain the same material language and scale, do you see any differences in what is being explored in the works a decade apart?

The Pace show includes three strong works, each with a distinct approach to form, space, and geometry, as well as the viewer’s body and surrounding space. These three basic approaches are sustained throughout Smith’s two decades of work as a sculptor, and there is less of a sense of linear development or hierarchy than formal and spatial experimentation.

Wall of 1964 is an aloof, obstructive, and para-architectural object. It gets in the way, interrupting the open flow of architectural space, disrupting sight lines, and altering paths of mobility. It is a massive rectangular prism fabricated in steel, painted matte black. There are no brushstrokes, and the paint only reflects the ambient light conditions. One cannot see the signified artist or the reflections of self on the surface of the work, so there is no way to get inside the work, to access a real or symbolic interiority, nor is there anything to point outside to some allusive field. One is forced to physically contend with the object in space. It closely related to Smith’s key works of the early 1960s, such as The Elevens Are Up and Die—and this body of work was a catalyst for the phenomenological turn in mid-60s sculpture and aesthetic theory.

New Piece, made two years after Wall, is a masterwork of eccentric geometry and scale. It is rational in form yet unpredictable and expressive in experience; generous in its opening to the body but aggressive in its consumption and negation of surrounding space; it is a massive, solid form, but its stability seems in doubt, and it is difficult to locate a center of gravity. It is obviously inert, but it also seems animated and dynamic. It is an extraordinary object to walk around that is full of surprises, despite our innate knowledge of its shape and form. From some approaches, one can get inside a sculptural space, walk under a leaning wall, get in its shadow; from other faces, New Piece leans dramatically away, becomes unapproachable. Like other works from the early and mid-1960s that employ complex and eccentric geometries, such as Cigarette and Amaryllis, New Piece is a tour de force in the capacity of abstraction to hold contradictions in suspension, particularly in its balance of geometry and expression.

One-Two-Three is characteristic of a later stage of Smith’s work, which he began in the late 1960s. In this trajectory, he deployed multiple permutational forms in a single sculpture to claim a sprawling and territorial field of aesthetic experience. The sculpture establishes a concrete space to be in and a space apart from its surroundings. The grouping of disparate but related objects within a single sculpture complicates boundaries of sculpture, self, and environment. The elements are grounded in Smith’s play with a single modular form—often a tetrahedron or octahedron—and that modular play is evident on the surface of each object. Wandering Rocks, the For series, and Eighty-One More are other key works in this trajectory, and, in all cases, the forms hew lower to the ground, altering one’s field of vision. One-Two-Three is more intimate, contemplative, less aggressive, and confrontational than Wall or New Piece. One can study the permutational geometries from different angles—we can see them from above, for example. They are more approachable, more resolutely scaled to the body, and seem vaguely social. One can get inside the open space of sculpture, where one becomes a mobile, plastic element within the work of art.

The major difference between Wall and New Piece, on the one hand, and One-Two-Three is that the latter concretely incorporates the surrounding space and mobile bodies into the sculpture, which is recast as a field of experience rather than a singular object. But this is not a linear or hierarchical development, such that we can divide Smith’s work into early and late categories. These lines of inquiry were present from the beginning of his work as a sculptor, and they fueled his development over the course of two decades of work.

Installation view, Tony Smith: New Piece, Wall, One-Two-Three, July 14 – August 18, 2023, Pace Gallery, New York. Photography courtesy Pace Gallery

Who made up Smith’s artistic community/who were his immediate peers/friends? Was he close to Donald Judd, Richard Serra, or Frank Stella? Their work feels the most aligned with Smith’s.

Smith’s community and immediate social circle changed significantly over his decades of work as an architect and sculptor. He was older than Judd, Stella, and Serra, so there was an immediate generational gap. In the 1930s and 40s, Smith befriended and worked closely with a small group of architects who occupied concentric circles around Frank Lloyd Wright—Theodore van Fossen and Laurence Cuneo were particularly close, and they often worked in partnership. In the 1950s, Smith became deeply enmeshed in the dense social circles of the New York School. He was particularly close with Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Barnett Newman, and he counted Betty Parsons, Fritz Bultman, and Theodore Stamos as both friends and patrons.

In the 1960s, even though Smith frequently showed his sculpture in the canonical exhibitions of early minimalism, he was not particularly close to the artists associated with that development. For example, Smith taught for years at Hunter College in the same department as Robert Morris, and Morris was a significant early advocate of Smith’s work, championing Die as a catalyst of the new phenomenological aesthetics. But, despite this proximity and mutual respect, they were never close friends. The generational gap may have been an obstacle, although Smith also did not share in the polemics that Morris associated with the best new sculpture, which rejected symbolic meaning or expressive content or the allusive relation of abstract geometries to nature, for example. In this regard, Smith was working more closely in dialogue with Robert Smithson and Michael Heizer, who moved away from the reductive logic of minimalism while also developing on some of its core formal, spatial, and phenomenological conceits.

Regardless, in all three works in the current Pace show, you can see Smith working very closely to Morris—both were developing sculpture with basic geometric forms and strategies of repetition as a catalyst for phenomenological aesthetics. In the 1960s and 70s, Smith sustained enduring friendships with key curators, including Eugene Goossen, Martin Friedman, and Samuel Wagstaff Jr. Likewise, he enjoyed long-term friendships and productive exchanges with many students, including Arthur File, Hans Noë, Patricia Johanson, and Christopher Wilmarth, among others. These relationships had a more significant impact on Smith’s idea of sculpture as it evolved in the 1960s and 70s than his contextual alignment with the core minimalists.

I understand that the exhibition, Primary Structures at the Jewish Museum in 1966, was important for Smith and other artists. What can you tell me about that pivotal exhibition and moment?

Primary Structures was an exhibition of paramount significance in the cohering of the discourse of minimalism and, more broadly, in establishing lines of sculptural inquiry that remain generative today. I would direct readers to James Meyers’ Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties, which includes a good account of the exhibition’s historiographical significance. The Jewish Museum’s own restaging of Primary Structures in 2014 is another important and critical assessment of the art historical stakes of the exhibition.

Primary Structures was a key site of connection in which minimalism, at a nascent stage, could be seen with other and overlapping trajectories of postwar sculpture, particularly hard-edge abstraction, and space-age modernism. The canonical boundaries that have become so rigid and exclusionary over time were considerably more flexible when the show was mounted in 1966. Within a narrow thematic framing, Kynaston McShine, the curator of the exhibition, cut across so many diverse, rich, and complex trajectories of sculpture that were developing across the city and country. McShine selected Smith’s Free Ride for the show. And while Smith was well-known and respected in numerous overlapping circles of New York’s art world, the Primary Structures show was the first time his sculpture was shown in the city. So it was an important introduction for Smith and for the new sculpture.

Installation view, Tony Smith: New Piece, Wall, One-Two-Three, July 14 – August 18, 2023, Pace Gallery, New York. Photography courtesy Pace Gallery

Where do you see a Tony Smith sculpture existing best? Within an architectural space or in nature? Where do you think Tony Smith would want his work to be seen?

Smith was highly attuned to site conditions, but much of his work was not site-specific. He recognized and promoted the distinct spatial effect of his sculpture when installed in different environments. At an early stage, Smith saw the bucolic landscape as the ideal space of installation, where his stark black geometries would contrast with the irregularities of nature. But his work has also shaped our understanding of public art in urban space, where it stands as a sensorial rupture and formal reprieve from the surrounding city.

Many of Smith’s first shows were mounted in dense urban environments, where they were seen to break with the surrounding architectural envelope. In galleries, as we see at Pace, Smith’s large-scale work can be overwhelming, completely altering the existing contours of space and mobility. That is where I love to see Smith’s work because they are inescapable; we are forced to enter into an embodied exchange with the work, to assess terms of scale and mobility, balance and stability, geometry and permutation.

Regardless, Smith’s best sculptures, including the three works shown at Pace, are effective in different types of environments, but their effects in those environments are distinct. What is vital, regardless of the space of installation, is that the audience experiences the works in person—to walk around sculptures like New Piece and Wall, and between the elements of One-Two-Three and assess the impact of sculpture on the environment. Smith was a master of scale and located his work in relation to body, building, and landscape. It is endlessly rewarding to perceive how each sculpture alters and reorganizes one’s movement through space, how our perception is fractured and reoriented as Smith’s stark geometries obstruct and fragment our view of the surrounding environment, or how some works open a territorial field of sculpture to be occupied. The works can be simultaneously exhilarating and contemplative, imposing and intimate, aloof and generous. This complexity of experience can only be hinted at in writing and speaking.

Tony Smith, One-Two-Three, 1976, Photograph: Bryant Park, 2013. Produced by the Art Production Fund in honor of Tony Smith's centennial, © Tony Smith / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo by James Ewing.

Tony Smith
Wall, New Piece, One-Two-Three
Pace Gallery
New York
July 14—August 18, 2023

Tony Smith Foundation
@tonysmithfoundation

Pace Gallery
@pacegallery

Christopher Ketcham is an art historian, writer, and teacher based in Boston. His research focuses on the urban histories of American art in the 20th and 21st centuries, with a particular interest in sculpture, and has been published in Public Art Dialogue, European Journal of American Culture, and elsewhere. He has taught at Massachusetts College of Art and Design and MIT.