Circle 2 Legs

Fusing minimalistic monumentality with poised precision, the great American sculptor David Smith’s Circle 2 Legs stands as one of the most magnificent masterpieces of his late maturity. Radically simplifying his forms from his earlier sculptures, Smith here elaborates upon the most singular motif in the artist’s oeuvre—the circle—which first appears as an organizing form as early as 1933, in Agricola Head. The circle plays an indispensable role in Smith’s sculptural vernacular, emerging as a main compositional motif by the late 1950s and appearing as a discrete series in 1962, the year prior to Circle 2 Legs’s execution, when the artist expressed the import the form had on his artistic vision, stating, “circles have long been a preoccupation, more primary than squares” (D. Smith, quoted in E. A. Carmean, Jr., David Smith., exh. cat., National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1982, p. 131). The persistence of the circle across Smith’s output reveals the shape as a critical aesthetic element unifying his oeuvre and summating his artistic accomplishment.

Following immediately after the Circle series, where Smith posited that the circle itself could dominate sculptural works, the present work expands upon his conceit, elevating the form upon a two-legged pedestal. The art historian Paul Hayes Tucker elucidates how “the circle held special meaning for Smith, making its persistence in the series’ sculptures another mark of his identity. It is a perfect, utopian shape, unbroken, continuous, and eternal, something he yearned for in life as well as in art.” (P.H. Tucker, “Family Matters: David Smith’s Series Sculptures,” in David Smith: A Centennial, exh. cat., Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2006, p. 81). Circle 2 Legs serves as the ultimate artistic accomplishment for Smith, achieving the Euclidean utopia in art that he yearned for in life.

Circle 2 Legs towers over its surroundings, its two steel elements united with a welding joint to create an almost anthropomorphic silhouette. The bottom steel element rises out from the plinth on two leg-like pillars which merge at the midsection. The upper element is a large circle of half-inch steel which Smith hollowed in the middle, creating a thick ring form. This element just barely coincides with the bottom steel form, giving rise to an almost suspended sense of levitation over and above the rest of the sculpture. Casting the barest of shadows over its lower partner, the circle appears detached from the physical environment, levitating on a different plane.

The graceful unity of the work belies the technical feat of its execution. Working with an inherently unwieldy medium, Smith’s years of theoretical and technical training—originating with the long hours logged at a locomotive factory during World War Two—allowed him to wrought beauty from a formerly industrial medium. His masterful welding and fastidious attention to material quality makes his heavy material appear light and promulgates the characteristics inherent to the metal which Smith frequently extolled: “steel has the greatest tensile strength, the most facile working ability, as long as its nature relates to the aesthetic demand,” Smith told Elaine de Kooning in 1951. “Possibly steel is so beautiful because of all the movement associated with it, its strength and function.” (D. Smith, quoted in “Select Writings by David Smith,” in David Smith: Sculptures and Drawings, ed. J. Merkert, exh. cat., Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, 1986, pp. 148-49). Smith utilized an arc welding technique which produced light with such intensity that he was obliged to wear a helmet with dark green eyeglasses so thickly opaque that under normal conditions one could not see through them. Only when the electrode of his welder made contact with the metal would his radius of sight expand to an eight inch radius around his tool; thus, Smith proceeded inch by inch crouched over his sculpture, pouring over every inch of his work with a rarely achieved material intimacy.

Both steel elements are painted: the circular form olive-green paint over an off-white primer layer, the lower element brown paint over the off-white primer. A third of Smith’s corpus after 1960 is painted, mostly in a single color, and the rare examples, such as here, where the artist uses different pigments stresses the separate identities of Circle 2 Legs’s two elements, further emphasizing the removal of the circular form from its lower legs. Smith’s stated rationale for painting his sculptures is protean: “I color them. They are steel, so they have to be protected, so if you have to protect them with a paint coat, make it color.” (D. Smith, quoted in J.E. Penny, Minimalist Sculpture: The Consequences of Artifice, Ph.D. diss., The University of Leeds, 2002, p. 41). The process of painting the steel sculptures was however a meticulous, yearslong endeavor. The in-depth preparation began with Smith grinding, wire brushing, sanding, etching, then applying primer coats with a brush, building up layers of textured paint over the steel surface. Smith then painted his stark white ground over the surface, leaving the sculpture in this state for over a year after placing the work in his famed sculpture fields at Bolton Landing before deciding on the work’s final coloration. Examining Circle 2 Legs outdoors, Smith chose his hues with nature as his collaborator.

Smith conceived Circle 2 Legs working flat, looking down upon his burgeoning composition. Through this viewpoint, the artist determined a singular principle perspective that the work would hold, appearing frontally toward the viewer. His insistence on the singularity of this perspective—“for a sculpture, I don’t see it from five different angles at once. I see one view”—articulates the artist’s revolutionary conception of sculpture in the postwar era, rebelling against the classical notions that a “a good piece of sculpture should be able to roll down a hill” (D. Smith, quoted in E. A. Carmean, Jr., op. cit., p. 45).

This method of working flat and perceiving his work as a singular plane permitted Smith the radical notion of translating painterly concepts such as the picture plane into a three-dimensional vocabulary. E.A. Carmean, Jr. writes how, following this innovation, “the circles, for example, read as if the painted rings of Noland’s targets had been lifted out of their stained canvas support and stood directly in space” (op. cit., p. 46). Noland had been teaching at Bennington College, near Smith’s studio, in 1963, and the two artists became fast friends and mutual influences, meeting frequently to discuss their aesthetic theories. Noland admired the older artist, acclaiming how “David knew more about how to go about working than any other artist I’ve ever known personally; in that sense he was an example for us all” (K. Noland, quoted in op. cit., p. 17).