Curated by Carmen Giménez
In 1966, less than a year after David Smith’s death, Clement Greenberg reflected on the artist on whom he had pinned his hopes for the “new sculpture”: “His oeuvre, in all its unevenness and sprawl, in all its bewildering diversity, somehow remains open, unfinished.” With 122 sculptures—from the wiry welded constructions of the ’30s through the later volumetric totems—this exhibition commemorating the centenary of Smith’s birth should mirror that “bewildering diversity.” Dozens of drawings and the artist’s notebooks, which suggest their maker’s thematic and intellectual sympathies, round out the selection. Curated by the Guggenheim’s Carmen Giménez, the show is accompanied by a mammoth scholarly catalogue nearly as heavy as one of Smith’s sculptures.
Travels to the Centre Pompidou, Paris, June 14–Sept.11; Tate Modern, London, Oct. 4, 2006–Jan. 3, 2007.
