On March 9 of this year, David Smith would have turned one hundred, which explains this spring’s cluster of Smith and Smith-related exhibitions held more or less simultaneously. Of these, “David Smith: A Centennial,” the retrospective at the Guggenheim running through mid-May, is obviously the main event. Hilton Kramer reviewed the exhibition in these pages in March. Certainly it is the most ambitious show and, in many ways, the most exciting, since it brings together a great many of Smith’s best works and displays them elegantly, in often intelligent sequences—if, however, overemphasizing Smith’s early sculptures over his later ones. Fortunately, there are now two smaller shows, at Gagosian Gallery, Chelsea, and Knoedler & Company, to round out our understanding of what a giant Smith was.[1]

Smith’s working life spanned just over three decades: from 1933, when he constructed the first welded metal sculptures ever made in the United States, to 1965, when he died in an automobile accident, aged fifty-nine. Until about 1950, his works were relatively small scale, usually linear, and often brilliant. They are at once obviously indebted to Pablo Picasso, Julio González, and Alberto Giacometti in his Surrealist phase, and very much, stubbornly, Smith’s own. The works for which Smith is best known—the large, frequently polychromed, steel, or burnished stainless steel constructions that established his reputation—were made after1950. These sculptures were unprecedented in the way they simultaneously test the limits of abstractness and remain haunted by the figure. Two-thirds of Smith’s output as