Egyptian Landscape

Expanding across three-dimensional space with a calligraphic elegance, David Smith’s Egyptian Landscape is an outstanding example of the great American sculptor’s works from his early maturity. Executed with the assistance of his second John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and made contemporaneously to some of Smith’s most pivotal achievements, Egyptian Landscape is unique in its masterful integration of green patinated cast bronze and steel elements. Smith exquisitely juxtaposes the two materials, evoking at once the persistence of classical antiquity imbued in the bronze forms and the relentless advance of modernity articulated in the prefabricated steel. As such he evocatively incorporates past and future within the present work to expand the boundaries of postwar sculpture whilst inventing a novel American vernacular.
Egyptian Landscape expands horizontally across space, its three cast-bronze elements held by interlinking linear steel bars. The central bronze element evocatively recalls Alberto Giacometti’s Le Nez, which Smith saw exhibited at Pierre Matisse Gallery in 1947, while simultaneously resembling animalistic artforms from ancient Egypt, most notably figures of the god Anubis. This twofold influence—ancient and modern—expands across the rest of the sculpture whilst encapsulating Smith’s oeuvre writ large.
The artist’s deep knowledge of and respect for his materials parallels and informs the art historical duality embraced in Egyptian Landscape. While his use of cast-bronze denotes the influence of antiquity, the steel elements point toward his working process and his practice’s deep synergies with the advent of modernity. Reflecting on his favored medium, Smith comments, “The material called iron or steel I hold in high respect. What it can do in arriving at form economically, no other material can do. The metal itself possesses little art history. What associations it possesses are those of this century: power, structure, movement, progress, suspension, destruction, brutality” (quoted in D. Anfam, “Vision and Reach: The World is Not Enough” in David Smith: A Centennial, exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2006, p. 20).
Egyptian Landscape also signifies the artist’s synthesis of drawing, painting, and sculpting, exemplifying the concept of “drawing in space.” The present work is one of the last where the artist made a detailed preparatory drawing. For Smith, draftsmanship and sculpture were inextricably linked, and his works challenge the dichotomy established from the Italian Renaissance onward between the painters and sculptors, resolving the paragon by integrating the intellect of painting and the physicality of sculpting together into one artwork. David Anfam celebrates this art historical turning point, announcing how “David Smith’s vision is perhaps the most concerted bid in the twentieth century to grant sculpture the large conceptual empire that a painter can evoke, with the relative ease and some few strokes, upon the microcosmic plane of a canvas” (ibid., p. 17).
Egyptian Landscape encapsulates Smith’s proclamation that sculpture is “as free as the mind, as complex as life” (ibid., p. 18). Eloquently synthesizing antiquity with modernity via its unique integration of bronze and steel, the work also anticipates Smith’s later practice. Perfectly poised and beautifully balanced, Egyptian Landscape unifies Smith’s great skill and intense intellect into a singular form, merging past and present to point toward sculpture’s future possibilities.