David Smith
Tate Modern, SE1


In America he is ranked among the great home-grown masters and hailed as the Jackson Pollock of sculptors. His hefty constructions are displayed in all the major museums. His Bolton Landing studios are a site of cultural pilgrimage. And it was only about a year ago that one of his pieces broke saleroom records, fetching $27.8 million (£14.7 million), the highest price for any contemporary work sold at auction.

Now, 50 years since a landmark exhibition at MoMA in New York and 100 years since his birth, a touring retrospective of the work of David Smith arrives, via the Guggenheim and the Pompidou Centre, at Tate Modern.

The show prompts one big question. Why is this sculptor, so lauded in his own country, so comparatively unrecognised over here? People who are perfectly familiar with his artistic circle, with such compeers as Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell and Jackson Pollock, are relatively unacquainted with David Smith.

Frances Morris, the Tate Modern curator responsible for the London leg of this exhibition, has a theory. We tend to approach Modernism as an assemblage of “isms”, she suggests, and Smith just won’t fit neatly into any of the categories.

A stroll through the show suggests as much. You can see at a glance how he might connect with major Modernist movements: with Surrealism’s fantasies and improvisatory wanderings, for instance, or with Cubism’s rigorous structural principles, or with Minimalism’s stripped-down geometrical shapes. You can see why the influential art critic Clement Greenberg tried to shoehorn him into art history as an Abstract Expressionist. It was not simply because its practitioners were also his friends. He, in part, shares their passions, explores the same sorts of themes. And, in some senses, his “drawings in space” can be seen as the sculptural wing of this quintessentially painterly movement. Yet, just when you think you have found the right niche, you encounter some contradictory angle, some awkward protuberance, that prevents you from pushing him into the slot.

It is precisely this contrariness that makes Smith’s work so enduringly complicated and, hence, fascinating.

The son of a devout church-going mother (whose strict Methodist principles he commemorates in his 1945 Pillar of Sunday) and an engineer, he worked as a teenager in a Studebaker factory and went on to pioneer production-line techniques in the cultural realm, riveting and welding his sculptures like the cars he once assembled. He remained always inspired by the values he had absorbed as a boy growing up in Decatur, Indiana, where “there must have been 15 makes of automobiles” and “everyone in town was an inventor”.

“I am going to work to the best of my ability to the day I die, challenging what’s given to me,” he declared in 1964; and that is what he did — though he died in a lorry accident the next year.

Now his centennial Tate Modern show offers an overview of his career. Of course, it can’t in any way be exhaustive. Smith was a creature of uncontainable energy. As you move through this show you can almost hear his brain humming like some huge industrial plant. This was the man who produced at least 700 pieces (often working on several simultaneously) in the course of his career, as well as a multitude of drawings, paintings, etchings and photographs. This was the man who dreamt of building a sculpture as big as the locomotives that had thundered across the romanticised landscapes of his youth. This was the man who, on the day that he died, was discussing plans to build a sculpture 100ft tall.

Smith was an embodiment of the American dream, and American views of him tend to seize on that. They tend to pass swiftly over his long apprenticeship to the European Modernists to celebrate his more grandiloquent postwar ambitions. But this Tate Modern show looks at his work from a distinctively European slant.

Gathering together some 100 pieces and displaying them more or less chronologically, it lingers on his early career. As a student at Ohio University he had been a painter but had slowly discovered that “the painting developed into raised levels from the canvas. Gradually the canvas became the base, and the painting was a sculpture.”

In the late 1920s and 1930s, encountering the work of the European masters in magazines (he travelled to Europe only in 1935), he produced series of sculptures that look relatively conventional by Modernist standards. If works by Picasso, González and Giacometti were left alone in a room to breed, the hybridised offspring would probably have looked much like Smith’s rather fiddly early pieces.

It is only in the fifth gallery that the lessons sediment down, and Smith, set free of teaching duties by a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship and financially liberated to invest in the steel that he so loved and whose use as a sculptural material he famously pioneered, starts to work on an expanded scale, producing such pivotal pieces as his 1951 Hudson River Landscape, based on views through a train window, or Australia, referring apparently to Aboriginal cave paintings.

Only in the latter half does this show start to explore the stream of series that came to define him: the Agricolas, for instance, composed primarily of old farm implements, or the Tanktotems, assembled from bits of tanks and boiler parts, or his frenetically produced Voltris, made in 1962 when, invited to Italy for the Spoleto festival, he got so excited about the vast supply of abandoned industrial parts made available to him that he overheated and created 27 sculptures in barely as many days.

All the while, as you wander among these works, you discover contradictions. European traditions counterbalance American freedoms. The figurative and the abstract interplay. Sculpture meets drawing in pieces that, at first, have an obvious back and front view but seem hardly created to be seen from the side. The hard-nosed factory worker meets the lyrical poet who always reminds us that metal can be molten. The urban meets the rural. Industrial materials are worked with craftsman-like skills.

In his famous Bolton Landing farm Smith presented his sculptures hotch-potch, almost like herds of milling animals, amid his fields. Of course, a museum cannot present works in quite the same way — not least because visitors would not be able to negotiate them without damage. It takes tact to transport Smith’s pieces into the architectural environments to which he was outspokenly hostile, and while the Tate does its best, it cannot provide wooded hills and snowscapes. A show on this scale does have lots of other works — and it makes the most of them as it scatters them more randomly around the galleries or uses one piece to frame another to re-create the conversations that Smith wanted.

As a whole, this show pays homage to the stubborn independence that was Smith’s strongest legacy, to the man whom Motherwell described as being “as delicate as Vivaldi and as strong as a Mack truck”.

• David Smith is at Tate Modern, SE1 (020-7887 8888; www.tate.org.uk), from tomorrow until Jan 21. Personage, an exhibition of Smith’s later work, is at Gagosian, WC1 (020-7841 9960; www.gagosian.com), from Thurs to Dec 9