David Roland Smith

David Roland Smith (1906-1965), American sculptor, whose abstract metal constructions were an important and influential development in 20th-century sculpture.

Smith was born March 9, 1906, in Decatur, Indiana. Two years of study at the Art Students League in New York City exposed him to cubism and abstraction, and a job at a Studebaker plant gave him an equally important grounding in practical metalworking. In 1933, inspired by published pictures of iron sculptures by the Spanish artists Pablo Picasso and Julio Gonzales, he produced his first metal sculptures from agricultural machinery parts and various other metal objects. In 1940 he exhibited Medals for Dishonor, 15 reliefs with a strong element of social commentary. During World War II, Smith worked in a locomotive factory, acquiring a lifelong interest in machinery and in large-scale constructions. Many of his sculptures of the 1940s, such as Royal Bird (1948, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota), are grim metaphors for human violence and greed—gaunt skeletal works in which metal rods twisted around central cores assume suggestively organic shapes.

After 1950 Smith's work became more abstract and geometric, as in Star Cage (1950, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis), a delicate and airy assemblage of steel rods and curved metal parts. His late works, such as the Tank Totem, Sentinel, and the Cubi series, were both massive and simple. Many of these sculptures were placed by Smith on the grounds of his farm-studio in Bolton Landing, New York, where the reflections of sunlight on their burnished metal surfaces produced calculated effects. The Cubi works are particularly impressive, consisting of great blocklike polished metal shapes arranged at odd angles on high bases, evoking the “great quiet of stopped machinery.” He died May 24, 1965, in an auto accident near Bennington, Vermont.