Leon Polk Smith
dal 28/4/2006 al 2/6/2006
Segnalato da
28/4/2006
Leon Polk Smith
Jason McCoy Inc., New York
Collages and gouaches from the 1950s
A Centennial Celebration of his Oeuvre Jason McCoy, Inc. is pleased to present Leon
Polk Smith (1906 -1996); Invention: A Centennial Celebration of His Oeuvre,
which focuses on collages and gouaches from the 1950s. This
exhibition marks the first extensive show of Smith’s work at
the gallery since 1996.
Born in 1906, Smith grew up in a farming community of
Choctaw and Chickasaw Native Americans in the territory later
annexed by the Unites States as the state of Oklahoma. He
studied at Oklahoma State College before moving to New York
to pursue graduate study in art education at Columbia
University's Teachers College. That same year, he was
introduced to European Modernism through the work of Jean
Arp, Constantin Brancusi, and Piet Mondrian, among others,
when visiting an exhibition of the A.E. Gallatin Collection at the
Gallery of Living Art, New York University.
Though these artists certainly had an impact on Smith’s work,
his signature style of hard edge abstraction went beyond one
influence. As Carter Ratcliff explained in his catalogue essay
for Smith’s 1996 retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum, there
is a unique “American quality" to Smith’s oeuvre, based on the
artist’s impulse and longing to discover a unique territory for
himself. Whereas the late 1930s and 1940s saw Smith
experiment with Surrealist and Expressionist styles, the
following decade marked the artist’s maturation of a unique
visual formulation. Smith’s hand reflected the freedom of a
draughtsman using a Striper brush. With it, he achieved a
clarity of line that captured all the nuances of a visceral
Expressionism.
From the 1950s on, Smith’s abstract compositions became
increasingly distilled. Two unusual geometric shapes of deeply
saturated hues, characterized by crisp outlines often define
these works. The division of negative and positive space
becomes blurred and the distinction between foreground and
background simply no longer exists. While the clarity and
openness of the compositional structure might bring the actual
landscape of Smith’s childhood and youth to mind, it more
abstractly, provides both artist and viewer with a
transcendental landscape for intimate self-reflection.
Image: Leon Polk Smith, Stretch of Black III, 1961. Collection The National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. Gift of Eleanor Ward.
Jason McCoy, Inc.
41 East 57th Street, 11th floor New York, NY 10022