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In such surroundings, the ultra-simple Free Ride fitted naturally enough. But, as curators and critics who traveled to South Orange soon discovered, the rest of Smith's work was in a totally different class. Far from being impersonal and "cool," his work exuded a life and an almost menacing presence of its own. In December 1966, Hartford's Wadsworth Atheneum and Philadelphia's Institute of Contemporary Art staged Tony Smith's first one-man show—or shows. Samuel Wagstaff, a curator at the Atheneum, decided to put four of Smith's pieces outside because "we felt that we ought to expand into the street." Smith delightedly constructed a new mock-up of Cigarette, double-size. It was a sensation. Next, Smith's works were assembled for a New York outdoor show. The great black forms were, if anything, even more impressive against the new-fallen snow, and Smith rapidly moved from being considered a cool minimalist to the hottest thing in sculpture.
Chimera & Despair. That viewers find themselves curiously moved by his powerful geometry delights Smith. "My own personal feeling," he says, "is that all my sculpture is on the edge of dreams. They come close to the unconscious in spite of their geometry. On one level, my work has clarity. On another, it is chaotic and imagined." The Snake Is Out, for example, coils for 24 ft. along the ground in back of Lincoln Center, bulging in its black skin like some prehistoric reptile. It propels the viewer to circle it and savor its tetrahedrons and octahedrons swelling and flowing. Yet the title, piling allegory upon allusion, comes from John McNulty's Third Avenue Medicine: "The snake is an ordinary little vein . . . that runs along the left temple of a man's head"—and distends when he is drunk.
What makes Tony Smith's work tower above that of his fellow minimalists is the fact that in many respects he is unlike them. He does not value simplicity for its own sake—nor is he a simple man. "I see my pieces," he says, "as aggressors in hostile territory. I think of them as seeds or germs that could spread growth—or disease." Into their creation has gone not only years of architectural experience—which shows in their angular construction and their house-size dimensions—but also years of frustration, of chasing chimeras, tragedy, illness and black despair.
Half a Bottle a Day. On the surface, Smith seems a cheery soul. From his burly, 6-ft., 205-lb. body, conservatively clad figure, pipes a merry, falsetto voice and a wealth of breezy wit. He is an incorrigible flirt—but friends who know him best compare him to St. Anthony and Martin Buber, calling him a kind of tormented saint. Says one of them, the painter Robert Motherwell: "Like myself and Jackson Pollock, he's a Celt. That partly explains his lyricism, his love of talk and drink —and his sense of being a minority."