ABSTRACT
The sculpture of David Smith is one of the most significant achievements of American art, not only at the present moment but in its entire history. Smith is the only American sculptor who brings an ample and fecund oeuvre covering three decades to the history of modern sculpture–the only one, that is, whose work has made a permanent change in sculpture itself. His sculptural method derives, as does all modern constructed sculpture, from the method of collage, and the whole body of his work retains, even at its farthest remove, a family resemblance to Cubism, whose analytic phase gave rise to collage as a genre and a technique. At the beginning of the thirties Smith was painting in an abstract Surrealist style. When Smith abandoned the Surrealist side of his temperament, the Cubist-Constructivist side took over in force and has carried him through the achievements.
