The exhibition, curated by Carmen Giménez, Curator of Twentieth-Century Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, includes more than 100 sculptures dating from 1932 to 1965, in addition to a selection of the artist’s related drawings. Each period of Smith's prolific career is represented by important examples from museums and private collections. Considering his art as a totality, this retrospective provides the opportunity to understand the complexity of Smith’s aesthetic concerns and his impact on the course of American sculpture.

This Resource Unit focuses on various aspects of Smith’s work and provides techniques for exploring both the visual arts and other areas of the curriculum. This online guide contains images that can be downloaded or projected for classroom use. The images may be used for education purposes only and are not licensed for commercial applications of any kind. Before bringing your class to the Guggenheim, we invite you to visit the exhibition, read the guide, and decide which aspects of the exhibition are most relevant to your students. For more information on scheduling a visit for your students, please call 212 423 3637.

This exhibition is organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in collaboration with the Centre Pompidou and Tate Modern.

This exhibition is sponsored by Deutsche Bank.

Additional support is provided by The Henry Luce Foundation.

This exhibition is further made possible by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Dedalus Foundation, Inc. and The Lipman Family Foundation.

David Smith (1906–1965), who would become one of the most influential and innovative American sculptors of the twentieth century, was born in Decatur, Indiana, in 1906. His mother was a schoolteacher and devout Methodist; his father was a telephone engineer and part-time inventor, who fostered in his son a reverence for machinery.

After his family moved to Paulding, Ohio, in 1921, Smith developed an interest in art. Although he spent one year at Ohio University in Athens, Smith felt that the studio art curriculum offered there did not provide the stimulation or approach that he sought. Smith, who was a man of formidable stature, complained, “I wish somebody had taught me to draw in proportion to my own size, to draw as freely and as easily, with the same movements that I dressed myself with, or that I ate with, or worked with in the factory. Instead, I was required to use a little brush, a little pencil, to work on a little area, which put me into a position of knitting—not exactly my forte.” Throughout his lifetime, drawing would remain an important component of his process and expression. In the spring of 1925 he left school. During that summer, he worked as a welder and riveter in South Bend, Indiana, at a Studebaker automobile factory, where his understanding and love for industrial materials and techniques took root. Much of this early training would prove essential to Smith's career as an artist.

Between 1927 and 1932, Smith studied painting at the Art Students League in New York City. He began to incorporate found objects such as shells, bones, wood, and wire into his paintings, adding depth and transforming them into sculptural reliefs. Soon after, inspired by magazine photos of welded sculptures by Julio Gonzáles and Pablo Picasso, Smith began constructing his own welded-steel sculptures. He was also drawn to Surrealism and its underlying concept that the subconscious was the source of creativity. Although never formally trained as a sculptor, his earlier on-the-job training at the automobile factory served him well. Smith began experimenting with constructed sculpture (as opposed to the more traditional ways of creating sculpture by casting in bronze or carving in stone). While traditional materials and techniques were still used in the early twentieth century, sculptors such as Smith were turning to new materials and methods of construction that they thought were more relevant to the industrial and scientific age. By 1934 he had settled into a "studio" at Terminal Iron Works in Brooklyn, where he constructed innovative and remarkably diverse sculpture from used machine parts, scrap metal, and other found objects.

In 1940 Smith moved permanently to Bolton Landing, New York, a small community north of Lake George in the Adirondack mountains. He named his studio there Terminal Iron Works, after the machine shop on the Brooklyn waterfront where he had worked previously, and created what he called a "sculpture farm" in the fields around his house. "My sculpture is part of my world," he once said in an interview. "It's part of my everyday living; it reflects my studio, my house, my trees, the nature of the world I live in." Modern industrial machinery intrigued him. He made sculpture out of previously used, discarded industrial metal, including scraps from old farm equipment. When he used found objects, he integrated them into his work so that their original function was obscured in the over-all design.

In the early 1950s, Smith began to enlarge the size of many of his welded sculptures, making constructions slightly taller than human beings. He also began to create work in series, first with the Agricolas, welded steel constructions that incorporated parts of farm tools, and then with the Tanktotems that incorporated concave and convex elements supplied by industrial boiler tank tops that he ordered from a factory. In 1962, Smith was invited by the Italian government to the town of Voltri, near Genoa, to create a work for The Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto. With a crew of Italian workmen, he constructed in one month not one sculpture, as commissioned, but twenty-seven. These pieces incorporated tongs, wheels, wrenches, and other industrial detritus Smith found on the floor of an abandoned factory in Voltri. After returning from Italy, Smith continued to work at an impressive rate.

In 1961, Smith devoted himself to his last series, entitled Cubi, which comprised 28 monumental, abstract steel sculptures. These celebrated sculptures were composed from a repertoire of stainless steel geometric cubes and cylinders of varying proportions that Smith burnished to a highly reflective surface. He told critic Thomas Hess, “I made them and I polished them in such a way that on a dull day they take on a dull blue, or the color of the sky in the late afternoon sun, the glow, golden like the rays, the colors of nature.”

During the course of his thirty-five-year career, David Smith produced an extraordinary amount of work spanning many approaches: painting, sculptures, drawings, etchings, lithographs, jewelry, ceramics, and photographs. In addition, he wrote extensive accounts of how he saw his art. Smith died May 23, 1965, in an automobile accident near Bennington, Vermont. In 1969, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, organized a major exhibition of his work.