Born in 1906, Leon Polk Smith was raised amongst the farms and ranches of Choctaw and Chickasha Native Americans in the territory later annexed by the U.S. as the state of Oklahoma. Moving to New York in 1936, Smith stumbled upon the masterpieces of European Modernism: Jean Arp, Constantin Brancusi, and, most notably, Piet Mondrian. The elegant curves of Arp and Brancusi’s sculptures were irresistible to Smith, but it was the lines of Dutch painter Mondrian that left Smith mesmerised. Whilst the budding artist was not particularly invested in the theories heralded by Mondrian, he responded intensely to the visual impact of his grids and the sublime sense of extension beyond the edge of the canvas. Smith subsequently embarked on a career-long exploration of the combinations and tensions of curves and lines.

In the mid 1950s, Smith produced a series of works inspired by line drawings of baseballs and tennis balls sourced from sporting catalogues. By 1967, Smith's circular explorations introduced additional panels and defined his shaped, multi-part Constellation series of paintings, which are among his most exuberant and inventive compositions. The tondo - a circular canvas - was a breakthrough for Smith, noting that “it was the first t.mes , you see, that I had made an important step myself, or contribution in art” (John Yau, Leon Polk Smith, London 2017, p. 35). The combination of tondos and multi-panelled layouts provided Smith with a means of exceeding the confines of the painter’s canvas, to continue Mondrian’s legacy of transcending the edge of the picture plain. "I was fascinated by the interchange of the positive-negative aspect of [Mondrian’s] paintings with no background," Smith announced in 1966, "I was thrilled to think that if I could liberate this quality which he confined to the rectangle into a free form, that I would be able to express the endless space" (John Yau, Leon Polk Smith, London 2017, p. 47).

Architectural Rhythm encompasses this discovery of the circular canvas, as Smith creates a play between the black architectural lines and the red curved canvas. Smith breaks away from the notion of a fixed canvas, creating a ‘rhythm’ between the two tondos as they converse with one another, but refusing to let the line connect. Similarly, the present work seems to call back to the Bauhaus movement of the 1920s and 1930s; the German style heralded a minimal, balanced combination of structure and colour.

Leon Polk Smith went on to mentor an unofficial group consisting of Ellsworth Kelly and Robert Indiana, alongside others who were neighbors in the Coenties Slip area of New York. There was an affinity among these artists for the expressive power of colour, line, edge and an economy of form; a reductivist vocabulary that employed such devices as scale to produce paintings that were reflexive and bordered on the sculptural.