Young Adulthood

• After briefly attending college, Smith returned home to help with the family business during the Depression. He took painting and drawing classes at the Art Student's League in New York and discovered modern literature—particularly James Joyce.
• He studied architecture and worked for Frank Lloyd Wright in the late 1930s.

Tony Smith, Wandering Rocks, 1967

Tony Smith, Moondog, model 1964, fabricated 1998-1999

Tony Smith, Louisenberg, 1953-54/68

Family and Friends

• Smith married the actress and opera singer Jane Lawrence. They had three daughters. The eldest Chiara, nicknamed Kiki, is a well-known contemporary artist.
• American playwright Tennessee Williams was one of Smith's best friends.

Architect and Painter

• In the 1940s, Smith designed private homes based on a modular plan that could be produced industrially. He also designed an artist studio and gallery space.
• He taught design at several schools, including Hunter College and NYU in New York City.
• Smith befriended avant-garde painters in New York—including abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko, Clifford Still, and Barnett Newman.
• He drew and painted from 1934 on. In the 1950s, he made abstract paintings of tightly-packed brightly-colored blobs.

		"My initials are A.P.S. (Anthony P. Smith). I used to kid about their meaning Architecture, Painting and Sculpture. But I wasn't kidding too much; it really felt that way." —Smith in 1966
Hans Namuth, (from left to right: Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, and Tony Smith), 1951

Sculptor

• Smith became frustrated with architectural work as clients made changes to his designs. While recuperating from a serious car accident in 1961, Smith began making small cardboard models for three-dimensional sculptures. He focused on the tetrahedron and the cube.
• In 1962, Smith made his first steel sculpture called Black Box.
• From there, he developed his geometric vocabulary in monumental sculptures that were first fabricated from plywood and covered with black automobile undercoating.
• While many works were produced in steel and placed outdoors in urban plazas, many Tony Smith-sculptures remained in their maquette or inexpensive plywood forms.
• In 1967, Smith made the cover of Time magazine as "Master of the Monumentalists."

Tony Smith, Page from a sketchbook, c. 1951

Tony Smith, The Snake Is Out, model 1962, fabricated 1992

Tony Smith, Untitled, 1962

Important Influences

• The practical skills of tool use and building things that he learned in the family tool making business
• The architectural vision of Frank Lloyd Wright
• The tetrahedral kites, towers, and gliders of Alexander Graham Bell that he read about in National Geographic
• The "human scale" proportions used by architect Le Corbusier

Is he a Minimalist? No!

• Art critics have often included Tony Smith in a group of sculptors known as Minimalists, artists of the 1960s who used simple geometric forms and industrial materials to create large-scale works. Minimalist sculpture is often characterized as austere and unemotional.
• While Smith used geometric solids in his sculpture, Smith's work isn't stiff or static. Its tilting faces and extending branches give it a sense of movement that differentiates it from the straight lines and grids of most Minimalist work.
• Smith wanted his work to be "a conduit for spiritual things." He wrote: "All of my sculpture is on the edge of dreams." His sculpture can be hard to understand because he tried to mix anthropomorphism (human scale and characteristics) with geometric sculpture—this was his way of reaching from earth into the universe for spiritual meaning.

Words to describe Smith's sculpture:

Monumental, grand, spiritual, anthropomorphic, elusive, exploring infinity, geometric, biomorphic, complex, simple, multifaceted.

Smith died in 1980.