Made of steel and sure to last

In 1969, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum exhibited nearly 100 works by David Smith, the American sculptor who fused the tendencies of Cubism, Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism with the methods, materials, scale and aesthetics of industry. The largest Smith retrospective to date, it was a memorial of sorts, following his death in a car accident just four years earlier. Now the Guggenheim celebrates the 100th anniversary of Smith’s birth with a show of 122 sculptural pieces and 53 related drawings.

The Guggenheim is rarely easy on art or viewers, with its Frank Lloyd Wright-designed rotunda -- a seven-story spiraling ramp rimmed with exhibition alcoves -- and its annex galleries that always feel, well, annexed. But “David Smith: A Centennial,” which continues through May 14, is a staggeringly impressive show. This is because of the fine installation and the fact that many of the works are so compelling as to command the space; in what seems an impossibility at the Guggenheim, you actually forget where you are.

The great-grandson of a blacksmith and son of a schoolteacher and a telephone engineer, Smith grew up playing in Midwestern rail yards and factories. By age 20, after assorted university studies and employment in various metalworking trades, he was in New York, studying painting at the Art Students League. Through a network including his first wife, artist Dorothy Dehner, teachers John Sloan and Jan Matulka, and the artist and intellectual John Graham, Smith learned of early modernists from Europe -- Fauves, Cubists, Constructivists, Surrealists. He also became acquainted with a generation of artists grappling with European influences while trying to define a next phase of modernism in New York. Importantly, Smith learned of the welded steel work -- drawing in space with wire, rod, bar and plate -- of Julio Gonzalez and Pablo Picasso.

In the early 1930s, Smith installed a forge and welding equipment in his studio on the Bolton Landing property he and Dehner purchased in upstate New York. This marked a turning point that is the departure point of the current exhibition.

The show generously accounts for Smith’s works leading up to the early 1950s. These often were more figurative and sometimes narrative. One sees in them the influence of Cubism and Surrealism, particularly that of Joan Miro, as well as the sleek abstraction of Constantin Brancusi and the rough unease of Alberto Giacometti.

One also sees Smith still thinking more like a painter. His small tableaux often appear composed for one vantage point and occasionally are constructed according to the rules of perspective used in making two-dimensional images. Many are like free-standing, double-sided collages, their elements layered together in a shallow slice of vertical space. In the strongest of these, Smith capitalizes on the reversal and reshuffling of the relation between parts resulting from looking at one side or the other. The approach often leads to principally formal ends but occasionally to more charged purposes, as in the 1945 work “False Peace Spectre,” in which the feathers of an abstracted dove hide the hard edges of a bomber’s wing clearly visible from the back side.

Even with more fully three-dimensional works, Smith stayed mostly in an additive mode, connecting numerous pieces, and in some instances literally connecting dots, to explore sensuality, aggression, alienation, spirituality, religion and an enduring fascination with nature.

Smith’s work from the early 1950s on is more industrial in feel, with a constant balance of rawness and finesse. The work also varies more broadly, revealing Smith as the artist he once said tended to think in six different ways at once. Found tools figure more prominently, especially in a series, ongoing from the early ‘50s until his death, known as the “Agricolas.” Large scraps and odd parts become a language unto themselves, as in one of this exhibition’s toughest yet most endearing works, a 1957 tower of I-beam end-cuts stacked on an improvised tricycle titled “Sentinel III.”

A few works in the exhibition deal elegantly in simple repeated motifs, and two 1956 pieces consisting of stacked modular units will drop the jaw of any fan of Minimalism with how they prefigure the work of Donald Judd. An absolute high note of the show is a space containing works known as the “Forgings” from 1955 -- slender, curvy and jiggy totemic forms created by heating and beating heavy steel bar and flat stock.

Invited to create two works for the 1962 Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, Italy, Smith was granted use of five defunct Italian steel factories. One of them, the Voltri factory, became Smith’s studio and the namesake of a series of 27 massive welded assemblages he produced there in just 30 days, improvising with a seemingly endless supply of raw material and old tools.

The series spawned others by the names “Voltri Bolton” and “Volton” after Smith shipped tons of his found industrial treasure back to New York. The series coaxes both human fragility and spiritual and existential wonder out of masses of steel, and like the place where it began, evokes an odd mix of old world and modern.

“Voltri VII,” on loan to the Guggenheim from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., is a masterwork, with its spoked wheels and U-shaped axel supporting a horizontal bar bearing the load of five gently zigzagging vertical elements that inevitably suggest phalluses or bodies writhing or slumping.

The Voltri works are well represented at the Guggenheim, as are works from the “Cubi” series. These began as hollow, mostly box-like forms Smith welded out of stainless steel plate. Stacked up and welded into jumbled, quasi-architectural compositions and then ground with an elegant surface pattern, they pile and reach their way upward with good modernist heroism and aspiration, but they also are infused with doubt and humor. Amid compositions that seem heavy and rickety, individual elements jockey for position, look for alignment, seek strength in numbers, and scramble and pitch in to keep everything from falling apart.

The last 15 years of Smith’s career are well sampled, but they could have been better covered. This is where the Guggenheim’s curator of 20th century art, Carmen Gimenez, who culled from 65 public and private collections, including the Smith estate, to put this show together, nonetheless came up short. Having curated multiple exhibitions that included or focused on the work of Smith, Gimenez knows her subject, but her approach is too heavily weighted toward linking Smith to Europe and early modernism. In the exhibition catalog, she declares a goal of correcting a prevailing tendency to dwell only on Smith’s late work. Gimenez’s goal is no doubt noble, but it ends in an overcompensation that diminishes the surge of productivity and experimentation in Smith’s late years.

Downplayed in this exhibition are works from Smith’s “Zig” series of the early ‘60s, and conspicuously absent are his works of the same period collaged together out of large rings and disks cut from steel plate and painted in solid colors. And missing are “Becca” and “Untitled (Candida),” the two works made of layered stainless steel sheet, stood on edge, that point in the direction Smith was heading at the time of his death.

Perhaps these were unavailable, but if the chances of getting just one of them had been any greater than zero, it would have been worth trading off the resources and efforts involved in securing at least a few of the works from the other end of Smith’s career.

Smith, who insisted on unending experimentation in his practice, commented not long before his death that he intended to continue working hard and addressing new challenges until the day he died. This exhibition almost shows us what he meant.