David Smith and the Language of Memory: The time of sculpture and the time of writing 

David Smith (1906-1965) welded together images that are impossible to forget. He thought deeply about sculpture and memory, imagining sculpture as its own material field in which, as much as in painting, people could always discover more. The power of his images may announce itself immediately but the potentialities of his sculptures reveal themselves slowly and they keep revealing themselves over time. Smith biographer and sculpture critic Michael Brenson reflects on the forms and place of memory in Smith’s sculptural language and on the impact of this language on the understanding -- and on the writing -- of his grand and elusive work. 

Michael Brenson’s David Smith: The Art and Life of a Transformational Sculptor is the first biography of this epochal figure. It follows Smith from his upbringing in the Midwest, to his heady early years in Manhattan, to his decision to establish a permanent studio in Bolton Landing in upstate New York, where he would create many of his most significant works—among them the Cubis, Tanktotems, and Zigs. It explores his at times tempestuous personal life, marked by marriages, divorces, and fallings-out as well as by deep friendships with fellow artists like Helen Frankenthaler and Robert Motherwell. His wife Jean Freas described him as “salty and bombastic, jumbo and featherlight, thin-skinned and Mack Truck. And many more things.” This enormous, contradictory vitality was true of his work as well. He was a bricoleur, a master welder, a painter, a photographer, and a writer, and he entranced critics and attracted admirers wherever he showed his work. With this book, Brenson has contextualized Smith for a new generation and confirmed his singular place in the history of American art.

About Michael Brenson

Michael Brenson was for two decades a member of the sculpture faculty at Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts and he is the author of Visionaries and Outcasts: The NEA, Congress, and the Place of the Visual Artist in America. A former art critic for The New York Times and an eloquent voice on modern and contemporary sculpture, Brenson has been a Getty Scholar, a Bogliasco Fellow, a Clark Fellow, and a Guggenheim Fellow, and he was awarded a Creative Nonfiction Grant from the Whiting Foundation. He has curated exhibitions at MoMA PS1 and the Sculpture Center, and has organized and moderated conferences or panels at the National Gallery of Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Rockefeller Foundation, and New York’s Jewish Museum. He lives in Accord, New York.