When art history is written as quickly as it is these days, it has to be rewritten often. We must now revise our accounts of modern American sculpture to include Tony Smith. Only two of his pieces have ever been seen publicly, one, The Elevens, at Samuel J. Wagstaff's 1964 "Black, White and Grey" show at the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, and the other Free Ride, at Kynaston McShine's "Primary Structures" at the Jewish Museum last spring. Now there are...

The sculptor-painter-architect, Tony Smith, born in South Orange, New Jersey in 1912, is one of the best-known unknowns in American art. Most people involved in the art world around New York have met him or know of him. Of the gen­eration of, and a friend of Pollock, Still, Rothko and Newman, he has "always" painted and "al­ways" made sculpture, which he has thought of as a private and purely experimental pursuit. ("I didn't think of them as sculptures but as...

Your exhibition in Bryant Park gave not only gallery-goers but all of New York an opportunity to see your work. Congratulations on that exhibition and on your excel­lent one-man shows in 1966 and 1967 at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Phila­delphia; the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford; the Los Angeles County Museum and the Detroit Institute of Fine Art. Does your early background relate to the work you are now doing?

In her two-part weekend house by the ocean, art gallery director Betty Parsons has found a way to do everything she wants to do when she wants to do it. A painter in her own right, she spends the day, or most of it, painting in her studio—the working half of her retreat. ln the evening, she relaxes with friends in her guesthouse, a quite separate entity. Both houses are perched by the Atlantic near Long Island's Southold, a town Mrs. Par­sons likes for its...

Just as the discoveries of theoretical science are often pre­ceded by practical application within a narrower context, Tony Smith had a complete working command of his formal principles before he turned them to broader, sculptural ends. Around 1960, he was in the unique position of having been, for years, wholly conversant with the newer mathematical ideas, with topology, tetrahedral construction, correspon­dences between natural and pure geometry, and...

The true artist is always in trouble. First, he will have struggled to make personal sense of his impulses to paint or sculpt, enough sense to impel him forward. Nevertheless, he will question the authenticity of what he does. He will look at art for a sign of himself, but will perhaps only uncover his disquieting admiration for what runs counter to his bent or, worse, for what conforms to it too closely to be useful. He will learn the techniques, conventions, traditions, and...

Jane Livingston met with Tony Smith in New York in April 1969 and suggested to him the notion of doing a work for A & T. Smith talked about executing a "soft" suspended sculpture (he used the term pneumatic in describing his intention), using perhaps some sort of inflatable vinyl or plastic in biomorphic configurations. Smith later discussed this idea: I had wanted to do a project that was technical in nature in that I wanted to make a certain type of structure in which all of the compressive elements...

Gallerygoers at this week's sculpture show in Washington's Corcoran Gal­lery will have no trouble finding the exhibit. Once they step inside the sky­lighted atrium they will be in it, sur­rounded by it. and all but overwhelmed by it. Rising around them on spiky legs is an asymmetric network of 43 piers, a black behemoth. 45 ft. long, 33 ft. wide, and 22 ft. high. Its thrusting struc­ture wars against the gallery's Doric columns, seemingly pushing them aside...

Scale is too often considered a synonym for large size. Actually, scale has to do with proportion, and large scale, in sculp­ture, can be inconstant, a relative factor rather than a fixed quality, dependent not only on its internal proportions but on those of the space in which it is placed, the distance from which it is seen. Detail, color, and surface-sensuous elements will also affect its proportions, Robert Morris, among others, has pointed out, as will those factors, such as...

The more things change, the more they remain the same; the more things remain the same, the more significant is the change. A number of recent works of art are like automat lunches where taste plays an unimportant role. A single work contains many pieces each of which contains the same or very similar elements arranged in different orders. The use of modules and interchangeable parts to make variable configurations may reflect the current scientific view of the modular...

There has been a good deal of talk recently about the chang­ing role of the observer in relation to the work of art. Art, as McLuhan would have it, is becoming "cool", requiring more direct participation and involvement on the part of the ob­server, demanding from him a greater degree of "closure", or completion, before the work can be understood as a totality. With the return of the Baroque principle of envelopment, in environmental art and...

Since around 1960, Tony Smith has produced a continually fluid and self-generating network of sculpture based on the concept of a continuous three-dimensional space-lattice and on a standard tetra­hedral (and octahedral) module, the possibilities of which he feels he has barely explored. In the last two years he has worked on a number of commissioned sculptures much larger than anything he has done before, and, simultaneously, on smaller pieces suggested by...

It has been just over a decade since those things Smith described as "black and probably malignant" began to appear on his lawn in South Orange. The longer one sees and experiences Tony Smith's sculpture and painting, the more cryptic and ambiguous they become. Even in the cool esthetic climate of the mid-'60s the first rectilinear pieces asserted more than mere abstract principles of volume and mass. Whether they were deceptively comprehensible...

Labyrinths and mazes are formal and symbolic analogues of a breakdown in intellect and will. They are of the underworld and they fascinate children. While I have seen photographs or drawing of many of these structures, only a few obvious examples remain in my memory: the labyrinths near Lake Moeris in Egypt as described by Herodotus, the so-far legendary one in Crete, the maze at Hampton Court. My own earliest images or impressions of related manifestations were without any...

Unrealized projects are always present, and in any attempt at a summary (particularly at this time of year) they rattle around a bit: the church, the Roosevelt Memorial, Round Mountain Cut, Hubris, Lunar Ammo Dump, and the granite-paved, downtown, square, city block for Minneapolis are as valid as they ever were. The model for Round Mountain Cut will be cast in bronze, and this straightforward scheme will thus assume a Surrealist character not intended in the original...

lt was only after thinking about a square for Minneapolis, especially of the people walking on it, standing singly or in groups, in ways that reminded me of Giacommetti's sculptures, that I recalled my project for the Roosevelt Memorial. The essential link here is that the intention of the square is monumental and dramatic. No one would think of the memorial project in terms of the classical agora, or the Roman forum. Claud Bragdon said that architecture must be...

Tony Smith, the sculptor noted for his monochromatic scale, died of heart failure yesterday at New York Hospital, where he had been in the intesive-care unit since Dec. 14. He was 68 years old and at his death was professor emeritus of art at Hunter College. Mr. Smith, an architect by profession, was a late bloomer in the sculptural field. Though he had been known to the New York art world as a designer, teacher and theorist, he did not make his public debut as a sculptor until...

Tony Smith, a gaunt, bewhiskered, 68-year-old Irishman with an inde­fatigable spirit and a raconteurial manner, began barely two decades ago to populate his backyard in South Orange with person-sized, black-painted, wood, and, occasionally, steel forms with a geometric character. To­day, he is much sought after for public commissions. His towering pieces command attention in major cities across the United States. For Marjorie, a thirty-one-foot high, steel behemoth, whose aspects...

Sometime last year, before Tony Smith's death, Phyllis Tuchman, a young art historian, asked me if I still believed what I wrote in the catalogue introduction for his New Jersey Museums show in 1970. I said, "Certainly, and given what has hap­pened since, more so." She was referring in particular to my opening paragraph, which went: It is no longer simply a matter of opinion that Tony Smith is the most important sculptor to have appeared so far in the second half of this century. When an...

The artists of the first generation New York School, most of whom are known collectively as Abstract Expressionists, were as a group generally well-read or well-informed and in touch with the literary currents of their time. Non-fiction works by Nietzsche, Freud, Jung, and James Frazer combined on their reading lists with the writings of Baudelaire, the French Sym­bolist poets (especially Rimbaud), Herman Melville, André Breton and Garcia Lorca, among others. Although scholars have...

Tony Smith is best known for his large, black modular sculptures from the 1960s and 1970s, such as Die and Smoke. But, while Smith was lauded as a sculptor, he began making these “presences” only during the last twenty years of his career, in 1960, at the age of 48. During the 1940s and 1950s Smith was an architect—or, as he preferred to call himself, a designer. Smith’s sculpture of the 1960s represents the culmination of a lifetime of thought and artistic creation that began in the 1930s. Throughout his life Smith was fascinated by the geometry of nature. This, along with his architectural experience, played a central role in his sculptural development.

Beside the front door of old houses in Apu­lia there is a second one, a door which the dweller passes through only once in his life­ on a bier. Belonging to the natural everyday rituals in the villages of southern Italy, this connection between the bed and the door represents two measures which, in their verti­cal and horizontal opposition, encompass human existence in a single equation of life and death. Why then...

"The pure products of America go crazy," William Carlos Williams, the Paterson, New Jersey doctor/poet warns readers in one of his prismatic odes to the everyday. His was a post-Whitman view of America's democratic vistas, with the ominous shadows fleshed out. Tony Smith, a prodigal son of neighboring South Orange, New Jersey, responded to Whitman's call for a native art of heroic aims and proportions, but he shared Williams's darker vision, as well. He had...

Getting a firm handle on Tony Smith is no easy task, although the Museum of Modern Art certainly tried. This year's big retrospective (comparable in scope to the Rodchenko exhibition running downstairs at the same time) included drawings, paintings and architectural work—an extensive selection of drawings, plans, models and photographs—plus, of course, the scultptures for which Smith is best known. Those sculptures received the bulk of the exhibition's attention. A large number...

Before attending the retrospective of Tony Smith's sculpture at the Institute of Modern Art in Valencia (IVAM) last spring, I had many recollections of the artist's work. My first memorable expe­rience was in Santa Barbara, Califor­nia, in 1968. Smith had agreed to do a selection of his large-scale sculptures as compressed cardboard mock-ups (actual size) that would travel to vari­ous public spaces in cities throughout the United States. Having read about Smith's fantastic new works such as...

Tony Smith's reputation rests on the architecturally scaled black geometric sculptures he made in the 1960s and 1970s. Although largely unknown as an artist until 1964, within three years he was photographed inside the sculpture Smoke for the cover of Time magazine, which dubbed him "Master of the Monumentalists." Owing in part to his newfound fame, Smith began to be offered opportunities to develop grand conceptions. His best-known works, such as Black Box and...

Published in Artforum at the end of 1966, Tony Smith's now-mythic description of a nighttime ride on the still-unfinished New Jersey Turnpike was a touchstone for a generation of artists and architects looking to break from rigid disciplinary categories of sculpture, painting, and architecture, in favor of a broad and still­ undefined practice, whose domain had yet to be determined. The Turnpike comment appeared, not insignificantly, just as Smith made his own abrupt shift from...

Perched on a cluster of sun-bleached rocks that barely pro­trudes from the Guaiba Lake—or river, depending on whom you ask—a former prison for political dissenters and other miscreants steadily erodes, turning from bastion of Brazil's Department of Political and Social Order into a modern-day ruin. The moldering walls are emblazoned with obscene, cryptic and mawkish graffiti; traces of persecution are overlaid by those of teenage assignations and drunken exploits. I debarked...

A visit to LACMA often involves walking through Smoke, Tony Smith’s sprawling sculpture located in the atrium of the Ahmanson Building. Recently, graduate students at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) were asked not to just admire the sculpture but to study, deconstruct, and use it to propose a design for the Hyde Park Branch Library in Los Angeles. Tony Smith (1912–1980) started his career as an architect. He worked as a bricklayer and clerk for Frank Lloyd Wright...

There is a passage in Le Corbusier’s Toward an Architecture of 1923 where he describes how the stones at the Parthenon “were inert in the quarry…unformed” until the arrival of the “great sculptor” who took those stones and arranged “them in this way.” It was at that moment when inert matter became animate form that one could feel instantly the architect’s “unity of intention.” Even or especially if the architect had not altered the shape of the stones, it was felt as though...

On the morning of January 20, 1967, Tony Smith arrived in Bryant Park in Midtown Manhattan to meet a truck full of his stark plywood sculptures, ready for assembly. This was to be an important day for the artist and the city. It was Smith’s first solo exhibition in New York and the first sculpture exhibition organized by the city. It introduced Smith’s work to a broad audience and established a new approach to public space advocated by John Vliet Lindsay, who was...