Artist:
Tony Smith
Title:
New Piece
Year:
1966
Adress:
Beverly Hills
www.tonysmithestate.com:
Tony Smith: "This piece is based not upon rectangular prisms nor on tetrahedral lattices but upon modular units made up of components of the rhomboidal dodecahedron. There is a connection with the tetrahedral structures, however, in that the rhomboidal surfaces of this figure are the same as the sections of the others."
www.guggenheim.org:
Anthony Peter Smith, known as Tony Smith, was born on December 23, 1912, in South Orange, New Jersey. At age four he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Rather than be sent away for recovery, he was moved to a prefabricated room that his father built in their backyard, an experience often cited for being highly influential throughout Smith's life. He studied briefly at Fordham University, Bronx, New York, before enrolling at Georgetown University, Washington, D.C., from 1931 to 1932. Smith then returned home to work at his family's factory and take night classes in painting, drawing, and anatomy at the Art Students League, New York.
www.artforum.com:
To take a figurative sculpture as figurative is to look beyond or away from its literal object nature; when a sculpture represents something it asks that we regard its presence as a token of something which is literally absent, and may well be literally nonexistent. But the fact that interests me here is that representation in sculpture always involves an 'elsewhere' which may be a matter of symbolic, narrative, historical, or even literal, context, as in Surrealist uses of the found object, for instance. One thing that abstract sculpture was able to do was to make this 'elsewhere' present within the work itself as a literal space made virtual by the sculpture’s own claim on it. This conversion of literal space into a kind of space that’s accessible only to vision, though not dependent upon any illusion, is what I have called 'pictorialism' in an earlier essay (Artforum, December, 1971).
www.metmuseum.org:
Tony Smith worked as an architect for over twenty years (1938–60), so it is not surprising that he approached sculpture in an architectural manner, as something to be designed with mathematical precision from geometric components. His method was to manipulate numerous small geometric solids that were cut and pasted from cardboard until a satisfactory arrangement emerged. The small cardboard maquette, or sometimes a larger version of it, was then sent to the foundry to be enlarged and cast in steel. The result often startled the artist, as the work loomed to monumental proportions.
www.wikipedia.org:
Anthony Peter Smith (September 23, 1912 – December 26, 1980) was an American sculptor, visual artist, architectural designer, and a noted theorist on art. He is often cited as a pioneering figure in American Minimalist sculpture.
Allied with the minimalist school, Smith worked with simple geometrical modules combined on a three-dimensional grid, creating drama through simplicity and scale. During the 1940s and 1950s Smith became close friends with Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Clyfford Still. His sculpture shows their abstract influence. One of Smith's unrealized architectural projects in 1950 was a plan for a church that was to have painted glass panels designed in collaboration with his friend Pollock.
Tony Smith: "This piece is based not upon rectangular prisms nor on tetrahedral lattices but upon modular units made up of components of the rhomboidal dodecahedron. There is a connection with the tetrahedral structures, however, in that the rhomboidal surfaces of this figure are the same as the sections of the others."
www.guggenheim.org:
Anthony Peter Smith, known as Tony Smith, was born on December 23, 1912, in South Orange, New Jersey. At age four he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Rather than be sent away for recovery, he was moved to a prefabricated room that his father built in their backyard, an experience often cited for being highly influential throughout Smith's life. He studied briefly at Fordham University, Bronx, New York, before enrolling at Georgetown University, Washington, D.C., from 1931 to 1932. Smith then returned home to work at his family's factory and take night classes in painting, drawing, and anatomy at the Art Students League, New York.
www.artforum.com:
To take a figurative sculpture as figurative is to look beyond or away from its literal object nature; when a sculpture represents something it asks that we regard its presence as a token of something which is literally absent, and may well be literally nonexistent. But the fact that interests me here is that representation in sculpture always involves an 'elsewhere' which may be a matter of symbolic, narrative, historical, or even literal, context, as in Surrealist uses of the found object, for instance. One thing that abstract sculpture was able to do was to make this 'elsewhere' present within the work itself as a literal space made virtual by the sculpture’s own claim on it. This conversion of literal space into a kind of space that’s accessible only to vision, though not dependent upon any illusion, is what I have called 'pictorialism' in an earlier essay (Artforum, December, 1971).
www.metmuseum.org:
Tony Smith worked as an architect for over twenty years (1938–60), so it is not surprising that he approached sculpture in an architectural manner, as something to be designed with mathematical precision from geometric components. His method was to manipulate numerous small geometric solids that were cut and pasted from cardboard until a satisfactory arrangement emerged. The small cardboard maquette, or sometimes a larger version of it, was then sent to the foundry to be enlarged and cast in steel. The result often startled the artist, as the work loomed to monumental proportions.
www.wikipedia.org:
Anthony Peter Smith (September 23, 1912 – December 26, 1980) was an American sculptor, visual artist, architectural designer, and a noted theorist on art. He is often cited as a pioneering figure in American Minimalist sculpture.
Allied with the minimalist school, Smith worked with simple geometrical modules combined on a three-dimensional grid, creating drama through simplicity and scale. During the 1940s and 1950s Smith became close friends with Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Clyfford Still. His sculpture shows their abstract influence. One of Smith's unrealized architectural projects in 1950 was a plan for a church that was to have painted glass panels designed in collaboration with his friend Pollock.