S tructural, dynamic, and highly balanced, David Smith’s Cloistral Landscape of 1946 embodies the artist’s aesthetic genius. An iconic innovator in modernist twentieth-century sculpture, David Smith dynamically utilized industrial methods and materials to fundamentally reconceive the traditional configurations of three-dimensional space - becoming a pioneer of the sculptural welding technique in America. Emerging from his series of Landscape sculptures executed in 1946, the present work employs abstracted yet recognizable forms that evoke the lush, undulating landscape of the Hudson Valley. With an extensive and illustrious exhibition history, the present work was included at many of Smith’s most pivotal exhibitions, including David Smith: A Centennial at the Guggenheim Museum, New York in 2006. Held in the prestigious collects ion of Geraldine and Harold Alden for over thirty years, the present work exhibits Smith’s mastery of metallurgy and his experimental handling of three-dimensional space and form.
Vividly expressive and dynamically gestural, Cloistral Landscape invokes a delicate web of interlocking arms, arching over a central, broad metal base. Cutting through the innovative open space, a smooth, semi-figurative formation reaches across in sensual, fluid masses. Employing tensile strength of the steel and iron to weld an intricately multidimensional, linear composition of open biomorphic forms, Smith evades the American sculptural tradition of a solid core and well-defined figurative designs.
Among the earliest examples of the artist’s groundbreaking series of Landscape sculptures, which were initiated in 1946 and inspired by the artist’s view of the countryside as seen from the train between Albany and Poughkeepsie, the present work marks a critical turning point in Smith’s career in the formation of his dynamically original artistic language that uniquely combines industry and nature. Utilizing steel and metal to portray the pastoral countryside in the form of two fluid biomorphic structures, Cloistral Landscape portrays a synthesis of Smith’s own history – informed by his views of nature and modernity. Working as a riveter and welder at automotive factories prior to becoming an artist, Smith had the vocational tools to create an artistic channel that manifested the new mechanical age in which he lived. In his signature medium of metal, Smith evoked America's transition in the post-war era from an agricultural society into a metropolitan, industrial leader. Cloistral Landscape critically explores this transition and the dynamic relationship between the progress of American civilization and the purity of the natural world.
Exuding breathtaking formal dexterity, Smith’s sculptures also champion the Cubist sculptural technique of relating two-dimensional forms to three-dimensional space and highlight Smith’s interest in fusing pictorial concerns into sculpture to create what he referred to as ‘drawings in space.’ Beginning his career as a painter, Smith’s work emerged from this essential foundation and was empowered by the intrinsic qualities of his chosen material of steel. Welding metal enabled Smith to create open, linear forms - since iron and steel are easily malleable, his sculptures were able to achieve a brilliant balance of mass and space, creating open frameworks that subverted the monolithic mass of traditional sculpture while simultaneously upholding the metals’ intrinsic durable, brutal qualities. Magnificently capturing Smith’s exceptional craftsmanship and exemplifying his revolutionary understanding of sculpture as “drawing in space”, Cloistral Landscape is an enduring monument to the legacy of one of American postwar art’s most radical sculptural innovators.
