David Smith (1906-1965) worked during the high point of abstract expressionism, primarily but not completely a painting movement, in the 1940s and 1950s, he was thoroughly a sculptor rather than a painter. Press documents make it clear that for the last five years of his life, he worked in a white heat. The seven pieces on exhibition illustrate the brilliance of this very late period; curated by Alexis Lowry, the works of art are slightly taller than the height of people, and demonstrate rounded, organic designs rather than the right-angled planes that dominate the “Cubi” series, made roughly at the same time. The sculptures on show look, at first glance, like marvelous abstractions of the figure, but they stand independent, formally and thematically,  of realism at the same time. Shown together on a higher floor of the Hauser & Wirth Building on West 22nd Street, these works are evidence of  the extraordinary gifts Smith evidenced at the end of his career. Unfortunately, Smith was often the poor relative at the dinner table; its wonderful capacity to be what it is and no more enables the object to a high independence–as a homage to the idea that a thing can remain so without inevitably connecting to realism. Smith’s art here indeed joins in a dialogue with forms suggestive of life, but this is not always so. It can be argued that his forms, late in his life, communicated a self-containment that owed little or nothing to the context surrounding him. 

Modernism, looked at historically, feels more like a painting movement than a three-dimensional one. Smith's final pieces, made after the middle of the century, reify earlier 20th-century insight by making it palpable.  This does not mean that the artist evaded ignoring the surface, which he would cover in paint, in his art. But his focus was on three dimensions.--the size and body of his forms–were very much an advance not only in the shapes of things but also in concepts that understood volume as a presence in its own right. Thus, sculpture, denying the front alone as important, turns into an object whose actuality staggers us a bit–unlike painting, which, when not non-objective, takes on a verisimilitude we understand and accept. Good art pays attention to the gap between the two forms of expression, and volumetric art leads us toward a self-standing realism that does not rely on likeness to make its point. Ninety Som (1961) does look very much like the simplified form of a standing person, with an oval, concave shape for a head, a tallish, narrow stem meant to express the body (lacking discernible limbs), and a rounded pedestal keeping the form off the floor. It is hard to ignore the piece as a highly realistic abstraction, not to mention a work in close conjunction with a consciously painterly surface: dots of orange against a dark brown background. Other works are not so transparently people in their overall gestalt, reaching for shapes not indicative of anything but themselves. So it is true that Smith’s extraordinary architecture rests on a cusp where his visionary, abstract insight has some tendency to refer to what we can understand.

Thus, at the end of his life, Smith found deeply original ways of working. Coming out of the industry–Smith had been a welder in an automobile factory–he became an inspired exponent of the shape of things for their own sake, inevitably linked to the working life that had first formed him.  Unlike words, which inevitably denote meaning and are tied to those meanings, abstract imageries can be freed from the ties of recognition and offered completely in their own right, evading any realist significance. Somehow, Smith never lost his gift of elegance, even as he aligned his persona with the working man. If we look closely at this small but remarkable show, we find Smith both experimented and established his penchant for self-sufficiency in art. The beautiful, measured, and restrained horizontal work called Primo Piano II (1961), which finds an echo in art by the late British sculptor Anthony Caro, has a white support system, with a bar some three or four feet off the ground pedestal holding up, from left to right, a piece two steel white plane connected at their right-angled edges. Other visuals, presented frontally and aligned across the horizontal bar on which they rest, present an amalgam of shapes: a brown teardrop shape, its point attached to the white steel plank resting on poles rising from the ground on either end; and, on the right, a rest to lay a book on, looking much like an open book itself; and, finally, the bowl of a spoon without its handle. It is a marvelous work of art, bridging to the public an advance in conceptual insight, the relations between a part, and the whole; and an awareness of how a sculpture might use the frontal exterior of a painting.