Tony Smith (sculptor)

American sculptor, visual artist, architectural designer

Anthony Peter Smith (September 23, 1912 – December 26, 1980) was an American sculptor, visual artist, architectural designer, and a noted theorist on art. He is often cited as a pioneering figure in American Minimalist sculpture.

Smith was born in South Orange, New Jersey, to a waterworks manufacturing family started by his grandfather and namesake, A. P. Smith. Tony contracted tuberculosis around 1916, which lasted through much of elementary school. In the spring and summer of 1931 he attended Fordham University, and in the fall enrolled at Georgetown University. is Black Box was set on the site of the black wood burning stove in the little house he had lived in as a small child, so it functioned as a kind of gravestone. It was deliberately placed on a thin base of two by four inch plywood pieces to call attention to its status as a work of art. In 1962, he made Die, a 6' steel cube that established his reputation as one of the most influential and important artists of his time. The Elevens Are Up (1963) follows formally on Die. Inspired by the two veins on the back of the neck which are accentuated when one has had too much to drink, the sculpture consists of two black steel masses installed face to face, four feet apart. Fabricated in steel and weighing over 12,000 pounds, the later Source (1967) is a monumental sculpture which Smith first exhibited at documenta IV in Kassel, Germany in the summer of 1968. After exhibiting massive, black painted plywood and metal works at several sites across the United States and internationally, Smith was featured on the October 13, 1967 cover of Time with his plywood structure Smoke (1967) enveloping the atrium of the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington. Allied with the minimalist school, Smith worked with simple geometrical modules combined on a three dimensional grid, creating drama through simplicity and scale. During the 1940s and 1950s Smith became close friends with Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Clyfford Still. His sculpture shows their abstract influence. One of Smith's unrealized architectural projects in 1950 was a plan for a church that was to have painted glass panels designed in collaboration with his friend Pollock. Smith also taught at various institutions including New York University, Cooper Union, Pratt Institute, Bennington College, and Hunter College, where he mentored artists such as Pat Lipsky. Smith was asked to teach a sculpture course at the University of Hawaii in Manoa during the summer of 1969. He designed two unrealized works, Haole Crater (a recessed garden) and Hubris, but eventually created The Fourth Sign that was sited on the campus. His Hawaii experience also generated fodder for his "For " series whose initials are friends and artists he met during his time in Manoa. As a leading sculptor in the 1960s and 1970s, Smith is often typically associated with the Minimalist art movement.

Smith's first exhibitions were in 1964, and he had his first one person exhibition in 1966. That same year, was asked to anchor the seminal 1966 show at the Jewish Museum in New York entitled Primary Structures, one of the most important exhibitions of the 1960s. Smith's museum debut as a sculptor of large scale, geometric sculpture was at the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (1966), followed by a nationwide traveling exhibition that began at the Andrew Dickson White House, Cornell University in Ithaca, New York (1968), and a New Jersey–based traveling show organized by the Newark Museum and New Jersey State Council on the Arts (1970). Smith was also included in a Guggenheim International Exhibition, New York (1967); the Venice Biennale (1968); documenta 4, Kassel, Germany (1968); Whitney Annual, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1966, 1970, and 1971); and Whitney Biennial, New York (1973).

Smith's work is included in most leading international public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Menil Collection, Houston; the Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller Empire State Plaza Art Collection, Albany, NY; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark; and the Kröller Müller Museum, Otterlo, the Netherlands. In 2003, the National Gallery of Art in Washington acquired one of four casts of Smith's first steel sculpture, Die, created in 1962 and fabricated in 1968, from Paula Cooper Gallery. Smoke (1967) currently fills the 60 foot high atrium leading into the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Ahmanson Building; the museum purchased the work in 2010. The estate of Tony Smith is currently represented by Pace Gallery in New York.

Smith met his wife, opera singer and actress Jane Lawrence, in New York in 1943. They moved to Los Angeles and were married in Santa Monica, with Tennessee Williams as the only witness. He was the father of artists Chiara "Kiki" Smith, Seton Smith, and the underground actress Beatrice "Bebe" Smith (Seton's twin, who died in 1988). In 1961, Smith was injured in a car accident and subsequently developed polycythemia, a blood condition which produces a large number of red blood cells. His health was always in question and deteriorated until he succumbed to a heart attack at age 68 on December 26, 1980. At the time of his death, he and his family resided in South Orange, New Jersey.