Arts and Letters

Although Tony Smith and I taught together at Hunter College for several years, we did not see much of each other until after I stopped teaching, when his later years led him, like me, to large-scale works, many in collaboration with architects or architectural settings. His noble and austere works can be found in many major outdoor locations, often gracing the museums near which they stand, or in association with public spaces and private buildings.

In spite of their purity of geometric form and stark black simplicity, I have always found them uncannily poetic, as mysterious as all those works which transcend their formal components. I am as impressed by this quality in his work as I was recently by a Donatello included in an exhibition of the sculptures of Brunelleschi at the Bargello in Florence. Juxtaposed with a life size poly-chromed wooden crucifixion of Brunelleschi's was one of similar scale and material by Donatello. It was impossible for me not to contrast the moving simplicity and spirit of the latter with the expressive drama of the Brunelleschi, which resembled an actor—Charlton Heston, say—portraying the crucified Christ, while the Donatello was the dying of all men. I spent a long time trying to discover why there was this difference and concluded that, like Michelangelo, Brunelleschi's sculpture never transcends the physical, remaining in the realm of physical culturism. Donatello instead shows man in his entirety, from the physical, through the thoughtful and emotional, to the spiritual universality which can be attained by the classic balance of all these elements.

So I feel Tony Smith attained a nearly spiritual poetry by the same means I detect in Donatello. I know it is due to the precise way in which each form relates to every other to complete a gesture of total harmonious verity. Tony Smith described this process of the classic artist quite accurately. He said, "I use angles that are derived from different solids. When they go together, they do not follow any internal system… you have to take each plane as it comes and find out in what way it will join the other planes." So in the Donatello the plane of each fingernail seems aware not only of what each other fingernail is doing, but also the plane of every other part of the body. In Brunelleschi each part is flinging itself about in its own superficial personal orbit.

Tony Smith was born in South Orange, New Jersey in 1912, and spent much of his childhood in bedridden isolation as a tubercular. His earliest interest was in architecture, which he studied at the "New Bauhaus" in Chicago and with Frank Lloyd Wright. By 1940 he was practicing on his own, and subsequent encounters with many of the "New York School" painters suggested his turning to painting, although he never carried this interest very far. He began to create his minimal type of sculpture while teaching at Hunter. His relatively short career as a sculptor began in 1964 with an exhibition at the Wadsworth Athenaeum in the catalogue of which he was described as "one of the best known unknowns in American art." He did not remain unknown for long after that, and he will surely be accorded an important place in the history of sculpture, where his "Angles" will certainly find themselves in close proximity to Donatello's "Angels." Vale, Caro!