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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 ...
Hal Foster on Eva Hesse and Tony Smith. “Talking with Tony Smith” was occasioned by two shows curated by Samuel Wagstaff Jr., who “culled” the six-page interview “from a summer and fall” of conversations. 2 Although the result is disjointed, this befits a career that moved from architecture to sculpture, as well as an overview that jumps from drawings and models to photographs of ...
2. The reader unfamiliar with Smith’s work as a highly experimental architect is advised to consult Sam Wagstaff’s article, “Talking with Tony Smith,” Artforum, December, 1966. 3. Tony Smith, catalogue of exhibition at the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford and The Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, 1966–67. 4.
OPENINGS: TAFT GREEN. Despite the tone of ambivalence that haunts Tony Smith’s famous account of driving at night on a then-unfinished section of the New Jersey Turnpike, its citation in Michael Fried’s “Art and Objecthood” (1967) serves a strict rhetorical purpose. Fried turns Smith’s concluding words—less a suggestion of what ...
One pleasant surprise of Tony Smith’s retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art (five years ago already!) was the group of paintings known as the “Louisenberg” series, dating from 1953–55, together with a related set begun at the same time but completed earlier and left untitled.
Tony Smith’s sculpture Willy, 1962, and his series of drawings of the cube, in various states of monadic completeness, straddle the boundary between sculpture and architecture, stretching the limits of…
Tony Smith’s work seems to be systematically avoiding these issues and I think 81 More illustrates the character of that avoidance. Stepping into Smith’s piece I had two strong and rather literary responses; first, it felt as if I were on a stage, and second, it was like walking onto a kind of giant game board with the pieces in place.
In one drawing Smith is working out the configuration of one of the paintings, while another shows a series of hexagonal ink figures on a grid of penciled circles. Notes on the first drawing describe his preferred coloration for its shapes, which he sees as making a “door” painting in reference to their acknowledged spatial illusions.
Tony Smith’s Moondog, 1964, consists of extended polyhedral columns (the "legs" are octahedral; the top, tetrahedral) assembled in a structure that, according to the artist, "relates to Japanese and Korean…
Smith’s is a timely subject—the body has become a political battleground, as the various organs of social control fight over it—but her approach has very ancient roots; her representations of internal organs, skin, and bones may remind us of the earliest anatomical models, such as the livers the Babylonians baked in clay squares and studded with prophetic inscriptions.
