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Iron was in his name, of course, and in his family history and his social environment. He was born in Decatur, Ind., in 1906, the descendant of a 19th century blacksmith, and his sculptural language flowed with perfect naturalness out of a childhood in the part-mechanized heart of America. "We used to play on trains and around factories," he recalled. "I played there just like I played in nature, on hills and creeks." Thousands of youngsters, no doubt, could say the same; but art grows out of other art, and what opened the sluices and let Smith's childhood associations flow into a career as a sculptor was seeing photos, not the originals, of the metal sculpture of Picasso and his fellow Spaniard, González, in an art magazine published in the early '30s. Smith had been a painting student in New York City. Working iron, he saw, might have the directness of painting. It was an intrinsically modern material, which had, as he said, "little art history. What associations it possesses are those of this century: power, structure, movement, progress, suspension, destruction, brutality." Smith was not one of those artists, common enough in America, who felt alienated from the machine age.
He was a gargantuan bricoleur, a user-up of discarded things, a collagist in three dimensions. His work touched base with the fundamental modernist movements, seizing and transforming something from each of them. From cubism and constructivism came the planar organization of form and the abstract language; from surrealism, the sense of encounter with a "personage," as basic to his work as it was to Miró's. Given enough found metal, he could launch into runs of astonishing inventiveness, like a jazz virtuoso improvising on a phrase. This happened most notably in 1962, when he was invited to make a sculpture for the Spoleto Festival in Italy. On going there he found, in the nearby town of Voltri, five deserted steel mills, littered with offcuts, sheets, bars and, best of all, a mass of abandoned tools, from calipers and wrynecked tongs to the ponderous, archaic-looking iron wagons and barrows used to run hot forgings from one part of the work floor to another. From these he made 27 sculptures in one month, and then had the leftovers shipped back to the U.S. to complete the Voltri-Bolton series.
Smith's energy made people talk about him as a "monumental" sculptor.
They still do, but today monumental is a husk of a word. In the past ten years, it has decayed to mean nothing more than "very big." American cities are now generously speckled with abstract ironmongery: sculpture that means nothing but is part of the perfunctory etiquette of urban development, most of it larger than it needs to be. Locked in a losing battle with the megacity environment, it manages to look both arrogant and depleted.