On Art

...Smith's exhibition, at the Marlborough Gallery, may well be the greatest of his career...

...eschewing figurative elements, its ambience is mathematical and theoretical...

...They are impatient of "ideas," but very adept at using them for their own purposes...

...Both Smith and Calder began their careers at a time when the great European movements were losing their momentum...

...Calder has not only remained pre-eminent in the sphere of mobile sculpture: He seems to have explicitly postulated most of the possibilities inherent in this genre even when chosing to explore in detail only a few of these himself...

...It includes some of his recent "stabiles"—large, painted steel constructions, which are among his very best works—but its principal interest is in tracing the artist's entire life's work...

...Where Constructivism subgests the laboratory and the drafting board, the Spanish tradition suggests handicraft and free-wheeling improvisation...

...But success of this sort comes, historically, only at the end of something, not at the beginning...

...It is only by comparing the "Voltri-Bolton" series with the work shown at Marlborough that one can grasp the full scope of Smith's current achievement...

...Now it is Smith's distinction to have moved freely in both of these traditions, mastering their peculiar strengths and bringing them into fecund relation with each other...

...My only disappointment in the Guggenheim show, which on the whole is a delight as well as a revelation, is that it cannot physically accommodate more than a few of these stabiles, and the result, for those who do not know, may be to find in Calder's work of the '60s a certain anti-climax...

...But in the early '30s, when he met Léger and Mondrian and joined the Abstraction-Création group, he turned his facility at wire construction—and his abundant, good-humored wit—toward the creation of open-form sculptures that emulated the austere design of the non-objective painting then in the ascendancy among his Parisian artist-friends...

...Using the Italsider woikshop at Voltri, near Genoa...

...Artists like Smith and Calder have, in a sense, preserved the values of European modernism against the destruction, ennui and bogus grandiosity into which the avant garde was falling...

...ON ART By Hilton Kramer Two Masters Among the world's greatest living sculptors—a group that includes Picasso, Giacometti, Gabo, and Moore—the two who are now producing the most compelling new work are both American: David Smith and Alexander Calder...

...One had known about these constructions of the '30s, and seen them reproduced in art histories, but seeing them displayed at the Guggenheim is really a revelation...

...The 10 large stainless steel constructions that are the special feature of the exhibition —the so-called "Cubi" series, each averaging over 100 inches in height —would have occupied most sculptors for a decade...

...Genius is, in the nature of things, unique...

...Yet Smith's quirky and poetic sensibility has broken down the strict boundaries of these traditions, making figurative, foundobject constructions that are as precisely balanced as a mathematical equation, and geometrical constructions that have an almost calligraphic improvision in their structure...

...This volume, called Voltron (distributed by Harry N. Abrams...

...78 pp...

...Where the one aspires to transcend personal experience, the other exalts it...

...They have in common, besides superior gifts and an amazing creative energy, a history of steady artistic production going back 35 years...

...The incredible fact is that they represent only a small part of Smith's output in the last four years...

...The exhibitions both sculptors have brought to New York this fall confirm them as masters of international rank—that is...

...yet it can also afford a certain glimpse into the culture that spawns it, and it certainly does so in the case of both these sculptors, who are American to the core even when trafficking most explicitly in European precedents...

...Its esthetic is cerebral, and its technique resembles an elegant form of engineering...

...Different as they are from each other, they are alike in valuing energy over ideology, in trusting to intuition, technical ingenuity, and expressive freedom rather than a settled esthetic doctrine...

...Calder began, in the late '20s in Paris, as a visual humorist and entertainer...

...Beginning their careers in the late '20s, when American sculpture was in the doldrums, they succeeded in bringing it into the mainstream of the modern movement...

...easily dominating an exposition that included most of the world's leading sculptors...

...Taken together, the Smith and Calder shows offer an unusually attractive profile of the American artistic sensibility...

...These are immense constructions of painted sheet metal cut into stunning silhouettes, often witty in suggesting recognizable motils but always powerful as abstract design...

...Their historic interest firmly establishes Calder in the vanguard of that decade, but what is more surprising is that their intrinsic interest has, if anything, been considerably increased by all the experiments carried on in this realm by other artists in the intervening years...

...By and large, the sculptures reproduced in the Voltron volume are "Spanish," and those in the "Cubi" series at Marlborough more or less Constructivist in their basic geometricity...

...The result, so far as the work shown at Marlborough is concerned, is the most ambitious geometrical sculpture undertaken in this century —a form of abstract art in which the individual geometrical components (solid masses of brightly polished steel) are used as a highly personal form of sculptural calligraphy...

...The characteristic Calder mobile of recent years, with its flat sheets of painted metal cut into Miró-esque leaf patterns, exists in myriad forms and colors, and there is a wonderful collection of them at the Guggenheim...

...But of equal importance, I think—and of far less acclaim, so far as the general public goes—have been the stabiles that Calder has concentrated on in recent years...

...And the technical audacity they brought to this freedom of choice was itself a sign of their cultural detachment from the very precedents they assimilated with such success...

...The Marlborough show also includes about 20 small bronze and painted steel sculptures, but looming even larger in this period have been the works Smith produced in Italy in 1962 and at his upstate New York studio in 1962-63—without doubt, the most spectacular creative effort in modern sculpture...

...Smith indulged in what an Italian critic correctly described as a "creative orgy...

...The truth is, he is at the top of his form right now, and it is in these giant stabiles that his great vigor as an artist shows itself at its purest...

...Modern openform sculpture has, from its beginnings, been divided into two traditions, and it has been rare for a major representative of one to trespass in the creative realm of the other...

...The largest of them is a work called Teodelapio, measuring 58 feet high, which Calder designed for the same 1962 Spoleto exhibition in which Smith participated, and which has remained in that Italian town where it spans a main thoroughfare and easily accommodates the automobile traffic that passes beneath its wide, handsome arc...

...The Calder exhibition, at the Guggenheim Museum, is an event of another sort...

...The "Spanish" tradition, on the other hand—Spanish, because it derives from Picasso and Gonzalez—is basically figurative in orientation, domestic in subject-matter, and empirical in its overall approach...

...From these sculptures, in which slender masses of wire joined brightly colored carved forms (mostly wood), it was a short —but decisive—step to the creation of the mobile: sculpture in which a subtle and exquisite balance between the linear wire-masses and the solid carved forms results in a constant play of sculptural motion...

...15.00), commemorates Smith's extraordinary feat in making, in a single month, 26 large steel sculptures for an outdoor exhibition called "Sculptures in the City" at Spoleto in the summer of 1962...

...As critics have tended lately to categorize Calder as the inventor of the "mobile," and thus to characterize him at something less than his real scope, this retrospective survey is particularly welcome for the way it reveals his full development...

...Given their size, these sculptures are seen to their best advantage in an open landscape—encountering them in the open meadow behind Smith's house at Bolton Landing, with a view of Lake George in the far distance, is a memorable experience—but even in a gallery their power overwhelms...

...The Constructivist tradition, deriving from Gabo, has been distinguished above all for its strict architectural formality...

...as artists who have not only successfully appropriated the principal resources of modernist style, but who have also given that style distinctly new directions...

...If one hesitates to proclaim it as such, it is not, in this case, because of any doubts about the work but simply because Smith is now producing major sculpture at a rate of speed that mocks one's choice of superlatives in describing it...

...The work shown at Marlborough, then, is best understood in relation to these latter works, which have now been published in a handsome oversize edition by the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, where a group of them were shown last winter...

...In this respect, their art symbolizes an American aspiration larger than their own...

...Then, back home in NewYork, and still sustaining the momentum of the "orgy," he continued the series, now known as the "Voltri-Bolton" sculptures, until he had exhausted every nuance of the conception with which it was begun...

...As outsiders, able to choose among the conflicting doctrines of the European avant garde while remaining strictly committed to none, they enjoyed an imaginative freedom available to few of their European counterparts...