Room 4
Drawing was central to Smith’s practice. In a talk he gave on drawing in 1955, he said: ‘Drawings remain the life force of the artist. Especially is this true for the sculptor, who, of necessity, works in media slow to take realisation.’ Many of Smith’s sculptures started out as chalk drawings on the cement studio floor, onto which he would lay out the metal elements before welding them.
Hieroglyphic scripts and alphabets fascinated Smith, as can be seen in his sculptures The Letter (1950) and 24 Greek Y’s (1950). He also adopted the Greek letters ΔΣ for his initials in signing and titling many of his drawings. In The Letter , a grid of pictograms has been arranged as if written on lined notepaper, with a salutation at the top and a signature at the bottom. Over the years it has been read as a message to his mother, a romantic appeal to his second wife or a tribute to James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, but as in earlier works the exact meaning remains deliberately veiled.
Steel Drawing I, 1945
Steel
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington,
D.C., Gift of Joseph H. Hirshhorn, 1966
The Letter, 1950
Welded steel
Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute, Museum of Art, Utica, New York
24 Greek Y's, 1950
Painted steel
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller Fund
Agricola V, 1952
Steel
Private collection, New York
Room 4: Drawings
Untitled (Virgin Islands), 1933
Ink and wash on paper
The Estate of David Smith, Courtesy Gagosian Gallery
Untitled (Virgin Islands), 1933
Ink on paper
The Estate of David Smith, Courtesy Gagosian Gallery
Untitled (Study for Head as a Still Life), circa 1939
Ink on paper
Private collection, Courtesy of Dorothy Goldeen Art Advisory, Santa
Monica, California
Untitled (Study for Steel Drawing I), 1945
Ink on paper
The Estate of David Smith, Courtesy Gagosian Gallery
Untitled (Study for Hudson River Landscape), 1950
Watercolor, egg ink and ink on paper
Collection of Stephen and Barbara McMurray, Fort Wayne, Indiana
Untitled (Tanktotems), 1953
Ink and gouache on paper
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Gift of Alexis Gregory
Untitled, 1954
Ink on paper
Private Collection
Untitled (Voltri 2), 1962
Egg ink and oil on paper
Collection of Philip D. Dapeer and Sherry Fingarette, Thousand Oaks,
California
