Song of the Landscape

David Smith was the sculptor most closely associated with the Abstract Expressionist movement. While in college, he worked one summer as a welder at an automobile factory, where his understanding and love for industrial materials and techniques took root. After moving to New York in 1926, he met the Russian émigré artist John D. Graham who introduced him to the welded sculptures of Julio González and Pablo Picasso, which proved formative to Smith’s artistic practice. In 1932, Smith installed a forge and anvil in his studio at Bolton Landing in the Adirondacks, New York. Stocked with large amounts of raw material, the artist started creating three-dimensional objects from wood, wire, scavenged metal, and other machine parts but soon gravitated to using an oxyacetylene torch to make arguably the first welded steel constructions in America. He conceived of these forged and welded sculptures as drawings in space. Through them, he explored a new spatial reality through the concepts of transparency and weightlessness, in opposition to the traditional method of working from bronze casts.

Song of the Landscape exemplifies his technique of welding together thin rods and other metal pieces to achieve a balanced structural tension between mass and weightlessness. Although the work is mostly abstract, a few descriptive details are recognizable, such as the vine climbing through what appear to be windows. Smith often tried to evoke the beauty he found in the natural surroundings of the Hudson River Valley.