Tony Smith

Place: South Orange

Born: 1912

Death: 1980

Biography:

Anthony Peter Smith was an American sculptor, visual artist, architectural designer, and a noted theorist on art. He is often cited as a pioneering figure in American Minimalist sculpture.
Smith was born in South Orange, New Jersey to a waterworks manufacturing family started by his grandfather and namesake, A. P. Smith. Tony contracted tuberculosis around 1916, which lasted through much of elementary school. In an effort to speed his recovery, protect his immune system, and protect his siblings, his family constructed a one-room prefabricated house in the backyard. He had a full-time nurse and had tutors to keep up with his school work; he sporadically attended Sacred Heart Elementary School in Newark. His medicine came in little boxes which he used to form cardboard constructions. Sometimes he visited the waterworks factory, marveling at the industrial production, machines and fabrication processes.
Smith commuted to St. Francis Xavier High School, a Jesuit high school in New York City. In the spring and summer of 1931 he attended Fordham University, and in the fall enrolled at Georgetown University. Smith was disillusioned with formal education, and returned to New Jersey in January 1932, where, during the Great Depression, he opened a second-hand bookstore in Newark on Broad Street. From 1934 to 1936, he worked days at the family factory and attended evening courses at the Art Students League of New York where he studied anatomy with George Bridgman, drawing and watercolor with George Grosz, and painting with Vaclav Vytlacil. In 1937, he moved to Chicago intending to study architecture at the New Bauhaus, where he readily absorbed the interdisciplinary curriculum but was ultimately disillusioned. The following year, Smith began working for Frank Lloyd Wright's Ardmore Project near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where he began as a carpenter helper and bricklayer, and eventually was named Clerk-of-the-Works. After a brief period with Wright in Taliesin, Wisconsin, Smith worked building the Armstrong house in Ogden Dunes, Indiana. This period ended when his mother fell ill in 1940 and Smith returned to New Jersey. His father died suddenly on December 1 of that year.
In 1940, Smith began his career as an independent architectural designer, which lasted until the early 1960s. He built approximately twenty private homes and envisioned many unrealized projects, such as the 1950 Model Roman Catholic Church, with paintings on glass by Jackson Pollock (1950). His work included homes for many in the art community, including Fritz Bultman (1945), Theodoros Stamos Fred Olsen (1951), and Betty Parsons (1959-60). Despite these successes, the architect-client relationship frustrated Smith enough that he gravitated toward his artwork.
Smith returned to the East Coast after two years in Hollywood, California (1943–45) and began teaching, while developing architectural projects, at the same time as developing various theoretical ideas and painting abstractly. He became a central member of the New York School community, with ties ranging from Gerald Kamrowski to Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko.
He lived in Germany and traveled extensively in Europe from 1953–55, accompanying his wife Jane who was there as an opera singer. There he developed a new group of architectural projects and painted extensively, including the landmark group of Louisenberg paintings (1953–55). Chiara (Kiki) Smith was born in 1954, when they were living in Nuremberg. Twins Beatrice (Bebe) and Seton were born after the family returned to South Orange, in 1955.
Smith taught architecture and design-related classes at the Delahanty Institute (1956–57) and Pratt Institute (1957–59), where he developed Throne (1956). This critical early work developed from a class assignment for students at Pratt to determine the simplest possible three-dimensional joint that could be stacked for more than two levels. Smith enhanced the geometrical solution of four triangular prisms by adding another joint, resulting in a new form with seven triangular prisms enclosing two tetrahedra. After some time passed, he decided that the resulting form was something other than a design exercise, so titled it Throne because the symmetrical abstraction reminded him of the dense volume of an African beaded throne.
Smith joined the faculty at Bennington College, Vermont. In 1960 a class project investigating close-packed cells based on D'Arcy Thompson's book Growth & Form (1918) sparked Smith's search for artistic inspiration in the natural world. The resulting agglomeration of 14-sided tetrakaidecahedrons, the ideally efficient soap-bubble cell, is known as the Bennington Structure. This was the first time Smith saw the impact that enlarged geometric shapes could have as independent but architecturally scaled forms - as sculpture.
While recovering from an automobile accident at home in 1961, Smith started to create small sculptural maquettes using agglomerations of tetrahedrons and octahedrons. By 1962 he was teaching at Hunter College. In this year he created Black Box, his first fabricated steel sculpture. The dense rectangular prism, less than two feet high, developed from a mundane object, a 3 x 5" file card box that Smith saw on the desk of his Eugene Goossen, his colleague and friend. Smith enlarged the proportions of the box five times, like a recent class assignment. He phoned a local fabricator, Industrial Welding, whose billboard he had seen while driving on the New Jersey Turnpike and asked them to deliver it to his suburban home. Although the welders assumed he was crazed, they treated the project with the utmost workmanship and the result was a stunning form to Smith. With this piece, entitled Black Box, Smith had discovered a sculpting process that he continued to hone. Where others saw a pure geometric shape, Smith saw it as a mysterious form. The title alluded to the corrupt administration of New York mayor Jimmy Walker (1926–32), when contractors would drop bribes into a slot in a "black"box. is Black Box was set on the site of the black wood-burning stove in the little house he had lived in as a small child, so it functioned as a kind of gravestone. It was deliberately placed on a thin base of two-by-four inch plywood pieces to call attention to its status as a work of art.

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