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Detroit News
FEB. 20, 1977

Smith sculpture showcased

By JOY HAKANSON COLBY
News Art Critic

[[image]]
Tony Smith's 'Throwback' 
News Photo - Howard Shirkey 

No U.S. city has a greater stake in Tony Smith's sculpture than Detroit, where his 27-ton "Gracehoper" has become a landmark since it was installed outside the Art Institute in 1972.

This house-sized sculpture (46 feet by 22 1/2 by 23 feet) holds its record as the largest Smith work fabricated in steel. Size aside, it's also one of the artist's most moving works, an oddly menacing yet endearing insect-machine titled from the "Ondt and Gracehoper" parable in James Joyce's "Finnegans Wake."

Smith scholars - and they are numerous since he ranks as one of the 20th century's foremost sculptors - must travel to Detroit to see the full scope of his work. There are two added incentives for visiting the area between now and mid-March: The maquette for his unfinished Federal Building commission in Washington, D.C., displayed at Oakland University's "Art in Architecture" exhibit and a one-man show of sculpture and paintings at the Susanne Hilberry Gallery in Birmingham.

The solo contains 10 sheet steel and cast bronze sculptures done between 1962 and 1976 plus five canvases from the early 1960's.  Although Smith began as a painter before he worked as an architect (with Frank Lloyd Wright) and long before he made his mark as a sculptor in 1964, he has rarely exhibited his hard-edge painting in recent years. 

"There is a relationship between the paintings and sculptures and I wanted to show how they sustain each other," the artist said in a telephone interview from his home in South Orange, N.J. He was prevented from attending his Birmingham opening due to complications from a recent back injury.

Although seemingly minimal, the paintings, like the sculptures, present a range of implications that extend far beyond the manipulation of geometric shapes.

SMITH, WHO teaches at Princeton University, said many of his students travel to Detroit to see the "Gracehoper." The artist regards the work as "intimate rather than monumental because people can move around it, walk under it, go through it."

He said he has always been touched by the fact that the $180,000 cost of the piece was raised by the community. "I feel that Detroit wanted my work and made a great effort to get it," he said.

Smith talked about his titles. His latest sculpture now in Birmingham is the 1976 "Throwback," so called because "it suggests an earlier period of my work a[[text cut off]] not typical of what I've been doing recently."

Because of its size, "Throwback" is displayed outside the gallery in a rather narrow walkway below street level. Although difficult to see in the cramped space, the piece's back-and-forth dialog of tetrahedrons is at once playful and sensuous and the rhythm develops organically as trees or symbols grow.

"Beardwig," with its jutting appendage, also took its title from Joyce's 

Colby on art

"Finnegans Wake." "Moondog" has a dual source: "It's the title of a Miro painting and the working name of a New York street singer, who's been around Radio City Music Hall for years," the sculptor said.

ALTHOUGH MANY artists regard titles as superfluous, Smith selects his carefully to emphasize the many levels of his work. Although he's a master of form and builds from geometric sources, the power of his sculpture lies in its deep metaphoric content.

His Detroit-area exhibit begins chronologically with a small version of the 1962 "Snake Is Up," a piece recently executed 15 feet high for Rice University in Texas, and includes the cast bronze "Source" from 1967, "Generation," "New Piece" and "Black Box," a mysterious container that relates to his big "Die," which was on loan to the Detroit Art Institute for years.

An important part of the Tony Smith legend is his childhood bout with tuberculosis and the long hours he spent in a bare room dominated by a large stove, whose looming blackness etched itself upon his memory and turned the object into "a little god." All Smith's forms descend from a monumental image, often stretched beyond recognition and filled with metaphoric allusions.

Now that the 1960's are history, it's difficult to mistake Smith for the minimalist he never was. That's the message in his current Detroit area solo, which he still hopes to visit before it closes on March 12.

IMAGERY: If the Detroit Artists Market's "Imagery" exhibit (through Feb. 26) were cut down to one painting, it would still be worth the visit to see John Hegarty's "Portrait of Jan Teachman," a glowingly sensual study that balances superb drawing with deft characterization of a high-strung young woman. This painting is also enough to pack Hegarty's sabbatical solo opening today at Wayne State University's Community Arts Gallery

In the Market show, Hegarty gets some strong backing from Patricia Quinlan, who has developed a compelling, photo-rooted portrait style that grows in complexity and interest. 

The other three exhibitors - Elizabeth Hansell, Maggie Citrin, Donald Rowe - haven't arrived at the level set by Hegarty and Quinlan. So the show as a whole plunges raggedly from highs to lows.