David Smith

David Smith

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David Smith was born in 1906 in Decatur, IN. After briefly attending college at Ohio University, the University of Notre Dame, and George Washington University, he moved to New York in 1926, where he studied painting full-time at the Art Students League. During the 1930s he began to focus on sculpture, creating welded constructions using found objects and forged metal. Smith moved permanently to Bolton Landing, in upstate NY, in 1940. Smith died in a car accident near Bennington, VT, in 1965. Major exhibitions of his sculptures, paintings and drawings have been presented in the U.S., Europe and Asia, including retrospectives organized by the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1957); the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (1965), the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (1969); the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart (1978); the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1979); the Hirshhorn Museum,Washington, D.C. (1982); the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (1982); the Sezon Museum of Art, Tokyo (1994); MNCA, Reina Sofia, Madrid (1996); and Storm King Art Center, New York (1997-1999). Most recently, a centennial retrospective organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim (2006) traveled to the Centre Pompidou, Paris, and Tate Modern, London.