Spray enamel was a new medium, only recently available on a commercial basis—and one that was associated with industrial manufacturing. There was no precedent for using it as an artistic medium. That would not have deterred Smith, who, though trained as a painter at the Art Students League, would deploy the technical knowledge he absorbed working in automotive and locomotive factories to construct welded metal sculptures. In preparing to make a large sculpture at his home in Bolton Landing, Smith would whitewash rectangular areas on his shop floor, lay out metal fragments and arrange them into a desired composition, and weld them together using an acetylene torch. When the sculpture was raised, the scorched outlines of the shapes were left behind on the white floor, an ephemeral record of Smith’s process.

In the Sprays, Smith adapted this technique to painting. He would develop a large canvas as a kind of palimpsest; the materials he laid out—which could include metal or paper fragments, or organic debris—varied in opacity and size, yielding overlapping planes of different colors and degrees of translucency. Often, he would highlight exposed areas of the canvas by brush with white paint to accentuate tonal contrast. Shapes appear weightless, floating in space, sometimes clustering together and at other times moving apart amidst the sprayed pigments. The result is a shifting sense of spatial depth in an atmosphere that has been likened to a ‘celestial’ expanse or a landscape—associations that are amplified by the grand height of the large Sprays, which measure eight- to nine-feet tall [1].

Smith debuted the large Sprays in New York in Fall 1959 at French & Company, a distinguished Upper East Side gallery that had recently hired Clement Greenberg as an adviser for a new top-floor exhibition space for contemporary art [2]. The Sprays’ imposing heights align them with the monumental scale that had become a defining characteristic of abstract expressionist and color field painting.[3] The Sprays also connect Smith’s painting practice to a new generation of artists who were engaged with issues having to do with the use of found materials (including mass-produced, or readymade, pigments) and mechanical techniques. Indeed, Smith’s Sprays would have seemed at home in the groundbreaking 16 Americans exhibition that opened that December at The Museum of Modern Art, and which featured works by Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Rauschenberg, and Frank Stella. Appropriate to this art-historical moment, one review of the French & Company exhibition lauded the ‘radical’ nature of Smith’s ‘enormous’ canvases, while another critic was bothered by the very features that would drive avant-garde concerns, namely the lack of authorial gesture conventionally signified by the touch of a brush to canvas.[4]

Smith once described his transition to sculpture-making as ‘constructions leaving the canvas.’[5] The Sprays demonstrate Smith’s ability to, inversely, generate a unique and animated body of flat works from a three-dimensional matrix. Smith had investigated the illusionistic effects of transposing volumetric objects to a flat surface in the early 1930s, when he experimented with unconventional photographic techniques. These included double-exposing negatives to produce overlays of patterns and forms, and creating photograms by arranging elements onto photosensitive paper then exposing it to light, leaving ghostly silhouettes where the objects once lay.[6] Smith toggled between mediums and styles at the same time. While making the Sprays on canvas he produced a large number of Sprays on paper the size of a sketchbook page. Despite their small scale, these works bear a close structural resemblance to Smith’s sculptural assemblages, with inherent geometry and gravitational weight toward the bottom of the sheet, where Smith would sometimes suggest a base or horizon line.

In 1963 Smith began a campaign of medium-sized Sprays on canvas in a range of formats and sizes, which can be seen in the second gallery of this exhibition. These paintings were based on arrangements of machine shop templates, with holes for hanging, which can be seen in the final compositions. Recalling his experience working in a Studebaker factory in South Bend, Indiana, Smith once stated that he considered all the parts he manufactured to be ‘abstract,’ their functions obscured by the compartmentalized nature of mass manufacturing.[7] In the medium Sprays, Smith exploited the abstract nature of such elements. The contours of the templates are more clearly defined than the shapes seen in the large Sprays, yet they remain just as enigmatic, assembled into elegantly choreographed compositions against misty, multi-hued backdrops.

[1] Trinkett Clark, ‘The Sprays,’ in The Drawings of David Smith exh. cat. (Washington, D.C.: International Exhibitions Foundation, 1985), 31.
[2] The exhibition, titled David Smith: Paintings and Drawings, took place from September 16-October 10, 1959. It featured twenty-two large Sprays and over thirty of Smith’s calligraphic ink drawings.
[3] Barnett Newman’s canvases, including the large paintings Cathedra and Vir Heroicus Sublimis, had been the subject of the inaugural exhibition at French & Company in Spring 1959.
[4] Emily Genauer, ‘Two Leading Artists Show Radical Change,’ New York Herald Tribune (September 20, 1959), Section 4, 7; Sidney Tillim, ‘Month in Review,’ Arts Magazine 34, no. 1 (October 1959), 49.
[5] David Smith, ‘The Modern Sculptor and His Materials’ (1952) in Susan Cooke ed., David Smith: Collected Writings, Lectures, and Interviews (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018), 157.
[6] For more on relationship of Smith’s photographic practice to the Sprays, see Peter Stevens, ‘Sprays: The Absent Object,’ in David Smith: Sprays (New York: Gagosian Gallery, 2008), 99-103.
[7] David Smith, ‘The Concept is Primary’ (1938-39) in Cooke, 26.