May 16 — late fall 2000 (weather permitting)
The Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden
One of the 20th century's greatest and most influential American sculptors, David Smith (1906-1965), will be the subject of The Metropolitan Museum of Art's year 2000 installation on The Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden. David Smith on the Roof , on view beginning May 16, will be devoted entirely to the welded and burnished stainless steel sculptures the artist created between 1959 and 1965 at the height of his career. The installation, drawn from public and private collections, marks the third consecutive single-artist annual installation on the Roof Garden, a 10,000-square-foot open-air space that offers a spectacular view of Central Park and the Manhattan skyline.
The installation is made possible by the Lita Annenberg Hazen Charitable Trust.
David Smith on the Roof will feature seven of Smith's later works in stainless steel: the anthropomorphic Sentinel V (1959, Sentinel series) from the collection of Candida and Rebecca Smith, the artist's daughters; Cubi X (1963) from the Museum of Modern Art; Cubi XIII (1963) from Princeton University; Cubi XVIII (1964) from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Cubi XXI (1964) from the Lipman Family Foundation Inc.; Cubi XXVII (1965) from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; and Becca (1965), a monumental work of bold simplicity and remarkable grace from the Metropolitan Museum's collection.
Born in 1906 to a telephone engineer and a schoolteacher, Smith was raised in the Midwest and moved to New York City in 1926 at the age of 20, intending to pursue a
career as a painter. He studied at the Art Students League, becoming acquainted with the works of Picasso, Mondrian, Kandinsky, and the Russian Constructivists, before turning
to sculpture in the early 1930s. Profoundly influenced by the welded metal sculptures of Julio González and Picasso — whose work he saw reproduced in the French art magazine Cahiers d'Art — Smith created works of great originality in the 1930s and '40s, constructing compositions from steel and "found" scrap material.
In 1940 Smith moved permanently to a former fox farm near Bolton Landing, New York, a small resort community north of Lake George in the Adirondack mountains. He named his studio there Terminal Iron Works, after a machine shop on the Brooklyn waterfront where he had worked previously, and he installed welding equipment.
In the early 1950s, Smith began to enlarge the size of many of his welded sculptures, making constructions slightly taller than human beings. He also began to work more programmatically in series, first with the Agricolas, welded steel constructions that incorporated parts of farm tools, and then with the Tanktotems, which incorporated circular elements — industrial tank tops — he ordered from a factory. From the late 1950s until his untimely death at age 59, Smith produced the larger constructed works for which he is best known, including the Sentinel, Zig, and Cubi series.
In 1961, at first working with cardboard maquettes he constructed in three dimensions from old liquor cartons, Smith began to compose his stainless steel works not from flat planes but from a stock of volumetric forms he ordered to his specifications from a steel fabricator. There were hollow rectangular boxes, cubes, cylinders, and round, pillow-like shapes. After these welded volumes were in turn welded together into upright sculpture, Smith (or, sometimes, his studio assistant) used an electrically powered carborundum disk to clean the welds into neat edges and inscribe the surfaces of the stainless parts with random marks that Smith likened to paint strokes. The burnished surfaces both absorb and reflect light, so that the appearance of the sculptures change according to the weather and time of day, an effect Smith cherished.
David Smith on the Roof is coordinated by Nan Rosenthal, Consultant, and Anne L. Strauss, Research Associate, in the Department of Modern Art. Exhibition design is by Michael Langley, Exhibition Designer, with graphics by Sue Koch, Senior Graphic Designer.
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The Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden, located atop the Museum's Lila Acheson Wallace Wing, opened to the public in 1987. The annual installations have featured selections of modern sculpture from the Museum's collection and, most recently, presentations of works by the artists Ellsworth Kelly (1998) and Magdalena Abakanowicz (1999).
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Sandwiches and beverage service — including espresso, cappuccino, iced tea, soft drinks, wine, and beer — are available at the Roof Garden daily from 10:00 a.m. until closing.
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May 16, 2000
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