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Fly in the Ointment. Today, married to the former Jane Lanier Brotherton, a onetime actress known professionally as Jane Lawrence, Smith once again has a house of his own. Jane, along with Kiki, 13, and Twins Bebe and Annie, 12, together with one family cat and several fish, live in the South Orange house where he was born. Tony, on the other hand, lives in a 15-room Georgian mansion in neighboring Orange, which he bought two years ago, together with a bull mastiff named Dutchess, a second family cat—and his 20-canvas collection that includes works by Newman, Pollock and Kline, bought when his friends' works were selling for peanuts 20 years ago.
Jane and the children join Tony for dinner every night, returning in the evening so that the children can attend the South Orange public schools, which the Smiths rate better than the ones in
Orange. And Tony has the freedom and the privacy to wander down to his sparsely furnished basement workroom, which looks very much like a draftsman's workshop with its cardboard models, drawing board, slide rules, and rolls of blueprints.
There is only one small fly in this idyllic esthetic ointment. Tony Smith's income still comes primarily from the $15,000-a-year teaching job at Hunter, and his $5,000 grant from the National Council on the Arts. Despite critical raves, demand for the steel versions of his work is low. In the past 18 months, exactly three Smiths have been contracted for, bringing a total of $44,000.
Big-City Spaces. On the surface, the reason is a simple one. Smith's works must be fabricated individually by commercial firms such as Industrial Welding. According to Smith's dealer, Donald Droll of the Fischbach Gallery, even the simplest works, such as Die, cost as much as $2,000 to produce. Besides, the work is too big and heavy to keep in the house. It is intended for outdoors, for the public to enjoy. Tony Smith is not the only artist to think in terms of outdoor space. Many other sculptors are beginning to create works on a civic scale. Among Tony Smith's fellow monumental sculptors: > Robert Grosvenor, 30, New York-born son of an amateur animal sculptor, builds immense brilliant yellow or red and black cantilevered diagonals, engineering marvels that sometimes hang from the ceiling or wall down to within a foot from the floor. One of his most recent works, destined for Long Island Sound, consists of twin T-shaped towers, constructed of triangular steel beams about eight inches thick and colored a brilliant orange; they are de signed to rise eight feet above the water, held in place by two submerged steel buoyancy tanks.
— Mark di Suvero, 34, a Shanghai-born stablemate of Grosvenor's at the downtown Manhattan Park Place Gallery, constructs giant wood, steel, rubber-tire and rope constructions at his New Jersey junkyard. They are often designed to let viewers ride or swing on them, carry richly evocative titles such as Elohirn Adonai, Stuyvesantseye or Love Makes the World Go 'Round. -David von Schlegall, 47, is a space-age Mainer who fabricates immense wing-shaped constructions and soaring bolts out of shiny aluminum. One of his giant untitled works, supported by an interior space frame, is currently on display outside the Union Carbide building in New York.