THREE YEARS before he died in a car crash in 1965, David Smith was invited to create work for the Due Monde festival in Spoleto, Italy. One or two pieces would have been enough, but given free rein in an abandoned steel factory in Voltri, a district near Genoa, he produced 27 pieces of sculpture in 30 days. The astonished organisers displayed them in Spoleto’s ancient amphitheatre.
Born into a working-class family in Decatur, Indiana, in 1906, Smith studied painting and drawing at the Art Students League in New York. More important for his art, though, was the time he spent as a teenager at a Studebaker car plant, where he learnt to weld, rivet and work a lathe. By the 1930s, inspired by Picasso’s early works in iron, Smith was using an oxyacetylene torch to turn out ground-breaking welded-metal sculptures, the first of their kind in America.
The sturdiness of “Wagon II”, from 1964, belies its lightheartedness; with its mismatched wheels and upright “driver”, it evokes a strange charioteer. The bright yellow “Untitled ” , from the same year, also suggests an artist having fun. Smith chopped heavy-duty steel girders into chunks and mounted them atop comically tiny wheels. At the top, a right-angled steel bracket balances precariously on its tip.
VwalaViola poet
Yeah. An ugly one.
Fiat art.
What, perpetual mediocrity?