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Smith, of course, never went in for such parodies of monumentality, and not one of his major works was the result of a commission. Consequently, his pieces all look as if they were made to the scale of one man. This fact bears on the alertness with which his work addresses the spectator. "Most of my sculpture is personal, needs response in close proximity and the human ratio," he said. Smith wanted to focus the image, make it speak to one pair of eyes, one mind at a time, as precisely and, there being no other word for the moral undercurrent of his work, as earnestly as possible. Hardly any Smith is more than ten feet high or wide. All the work responds willingly to nature. The stainless-steel planes of the Cubis, scribbled with stuttery, glittering lines by the rapid "drawing" of a power grinder, respond better to sunlight or starshine than to the static lighting of a museum. The high color and splashy textures with which he sometimes painted the steel were certainly meant to be seen against the colors of tree, snow or autumn grass.
But under museum conditions, the essential monumentality of Smith's vision remains. Even the biggest pieces, like the disquieting Wagon I (a "personage" consisting of a rectangular helm set on a swollen belly made of two tank ends welded together, all balancing on a huge forged chassis), suggest a sense of the figure and accordingly evoke responses from one's own body. They convey forceful impressions of posture, gesture and attitude. Smith was not in the business of making large iron dolls, and it may be, as various critics have pointed out, that the usual verticality of his sculptures encourages one to read them too readily as effigies of the figure. The same object, horizontal, would not be seen as a recumbent personage or sentinel. But in the end, the body messages of Smith's sculpture do not depend on whether the pieces have "heads" or "legs," as quite a few of them do. They flow from the internal relationships of the forms and from the metaphorical suggestions of tension, flexibility, alertness and so forth that their vivid and deliberate "drawing" evokes.
Steel, as a sculptural material, is imperfectly expressive. It has never been fully able to suggest the pathetic. But it is a marvelous substance for embodying optimistic energy, the direct flow of feeling into untormented substance. All of Smith's best sculpture is an object lesson in what scale means, in the relationship between the sculptured object and the body of the viewer. And it was in his ability to create large steel equivalents for the sensations of the body, unclouded by apparent doubt or fear, that his monumentality as a sculptor lay.