Painted Landscape (The Love Letter),

1950

David Smith consistently violated deeply entrenched sculptural conventions throughout his career. Influenced by his employment in an automobile factory as well as by his exposure to the welded-iron sculptures of Pablo Picasso and Julio González, Smith was one of the first artists to employ welded steel, a material associated with blue-collar labor, not fine art. He also borrowed elements from the genres of painting and collage, embellishing his sculptures with pigment and assembling works out of disparate, often ready-made scraps and objects.<em> Painted Landscape (The Love Letter)</em> reflects Smith’s dual interests in painting and sculpture, flatness and depth. The work is just barely three-­dimensional, and it begs to be read from the front, as a picture plane. Lacking the mass and solidity of traditional sculpture, it depends instead on an open lattice of attenuated forms that resemble a kind of drawing in space. The sculpture also invites decryption: a humanoid figure serves as the sculpture’s "trunk," and from its six branches Smith attached a number of ambiguous glyphs, including the eponymous love letter, indicated by the incisions made to a flat piece of ruddy steel.