David Smith: The Art and Life of a Transformational Sculptor by Michael Brenson. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022, $50.00 (cloth).
WHEN MICHAEL Brenson’s new biography of the sculptor David Smith arrived in the mail, I thought I wasn’t interested. I texted a sculptor friend and offered it to her. Then I started reading and apologetically texted again. Did she mind waiting?
Michael Brenson—himself the son of an abstract expressionist painter, currently a faculty member in sculpture at Bard, and at one time an art critic for the New York Times—writes with the cooperation of the Smith estate, now overseen by Smith’s two daughters. (Smith died in 1965.) The book, over seven hundred pages long, is dense, ambitious, and hard to put down. Brenson is erudite without being pretentious, and one delight of the reading effort is revisiting twentieth-century artists and their worlds. A second pleasure is the way the story stamps and folds the flat tin of the tired epithet “David Smith, great American sculptor” into a dimensional, voluminous person.
Reading the book stirred up personal dust, a stained nostalgia, and perhaps this reaction made my interest particular. My father taught at Bennington College, and so I spent the 1960s in Bennington, Vermont, one of the
