His work is crap.
So much of modern art is a complete con.
I’ve never heard of him.
Great job of retroactive cancellation!
I don’t know who this is. A lot of artistic types are not particularly admirable human beings, some are not even close, but I don’t like the idea of cancelling them based on that. Let the art stand or fall based on its merits.
That someone is both talented and an a$$h*le comes as no suprise to Me. It almost seemed a requirement to some of the bigger names of the 20th century. Hemingway was both talented and at the same time a graceless pr*ck.
CC
On a personal note to this story. Back in 1980-81 I was working with sculptor Jim Schmidt in his studio on Greenwich St in lower Manhattan. He lived in the same loft building I was living in. We started a small business building/fabricating sculpture in steel and bronze for other artists. One of the artists we built for was Dorothy Dehner, Smith’s wife and widow. She would bring us the models that were about 18 inches tall and we would scale them up to about 6 feet. They were fabricated out of Corten steel which we had sand blasted to bring out the rust patina.
David Smith is indeed one of the great sculptors of the twentieth century, and I don’t care about his misogyny. One might be able to make a case that the split views of the works echo different sides of his psychology, but I’ll have to read the book.
There are two really cool things that Smith pioneered in sculpture, to echo the concerns of the other great Abstract Expressionists.
(Now I know that many Freepers don’t like abstract art. Just remember this: once the camera was invented, artists didn’t have to be restricted to nit-picky realism. They could explore all kinds of visual possibilities. And, yes, those with degrees in art should definitely know about Smith.)
So, first what he did was to deny predictability. When you look at one of his Cubi pieces, or the Hudson River Landscape, you cannot predict from the front view what it will look like from the side, and vice versa. (Unfortunately, I am not versatile enough to post these images here.) But until Smith, even abstract sculpture could be predictable from one angle to another.
The other thing that is really cool is how his gestures seem to work on many different levels, not just a flat surface, and how they reflect the light and colors of the landscape around the work. Again, if it was easier to post images, I would. This is really best seen in person. His work is at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Museum of Modern Art.
I have some short “lectures” about modernism and Art Appreciation on my profile, and there are some images there, but not much about David Smith.