Tony Smith: Drawings is a selection of rarely exhibited and early drawings by American artist Tony Smith (1912–1980). The work, executed within a short period of time following his career as an architectural designer, precedes Smith’s emergence as one of the most important sculptors of the mid-twentieth century.
Some 40 drawings, selected from the Smith Estate as well as from private collections, show that Smith was already building a conceptual base inspired by modular order and the unifying, form-follows-function morality of Modern architecture, so-called. Although Smith came to sculpture late in his life, he used the physical space of the paper as a container for mark-making and as a serial unit to build upon. Smith’s interest in mathematics and his friendship with the Abstract Expressionists inform the formal characteristics of the drawings, as in staccato linear hatching, irregular interconnecting forms, and attention to allover composition. Smith’s sensitivity to scale and interest in figure/ground relationships, and the nonobjective modular structures of a number of the drawings in this exhibition forecast his later approach to sculpture.
Smith was born in South Orange, New Jersey, and studied architecture at the New Bauhaus School in Chicago led by László Moholy-Nagy. After working for Frank Lloyd Wright, Smith worked as an architectural designer. In 1945 he moved to New York, where he became a close friend of Barnett Newman, who introduced him to his fellow New York School painters. Jackson Pollock and Clyfford Still were friends and collaborators as Smith transitioned from architecture to painting and drawing and on to monumental architectonic sculpture. Like Still, Smith was interested in the papiers déchirés of Jean Arp. He shared an interest with Pollock in the principles of organic geometric order, harmony, and structural patterns of natural forms propounded by the 19th-century bio-mathematician D'Arcy Thompson.
Curated by Bernice Rose, Chief Curator of The Menil Collection’s Drawing Institute and Study Center; this group of drawings provides a unique lens through which to view the Menil’s collection of Smith’s monumental outdoor sculptures that are integral to the campus and to the collecting history of the de Menils. John de Menil underwrote the fabrication of Smith’s first large-scale sculpture The Elevens Are Up, 1963, fabricated 1970, one of five outdoor works permanently installed on the Menil campus. In 2001, the artist’s estate gave Wall, 1964, fabricated 2000, to the museum in honor of Dominique de Menil.
This exhibition is generously supported by Michael Zilkha and the City of Houston.
Photos: Paul Hester
