Author and critic Michael Brenson offers new insight into sculptor David Smith, an artist he describes as "ferociously resistant to the notion of singular identity." Smith, a pioneer of Abstract Expressionism, did more than any other sculptor of his era to bring the plastic arts to the forefront of the American scene. So groundbreaking and prolific were his contributions to American art that by the time Smith was just forty years old, Clement Greenberg was already calling him “the greatest sculptor this country has produced.”

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.