Viewing page 22 of 22

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

The Detroit News. Wednesday, January 14, 1981

FOCUS/ART Tony Smith: Monumental, intimate

BY JOY HAKKANSON COLBY
News Special Writer

News of sculptor Tony Smith's recent death at 68 in South Orange, N.J., brings back memories of August 1972, when his 27-ton Gracehoper was installed on the Detroit Instiute of Arts' north lawn. The big work in steel plate measuring 46 by 22 by 23 feet arrived at the museum in six sections. It required a crew of workmen with two cranes and flatbed trucks two days to get the piece in place on four concrete footings.
 
[[image]]
TONY SMITH

Watching this process, the artist observed quietly that he thought of Gracehoper as intimate rather than monumental. "People can walk under it, around it and through it," he explained. "Because the piece is oriented to human activity, I regard it as intimate. I always think of monumental sculpture as just standing around to be looked at."

Smith was a painter and architect before he turned to sculpture. His first major U.S. exhibit at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Conn., was arranged in 1966 by Sam Wagstaff, who came a couple years later to be curator of modern art at the Detroit Institute of Arts. And it was Wagstaff who arranged for Gracehoper to be built in Detroit through private funds, ranging from a $50,000 gift from W. Hawkins Ferry to $5 contributions from Detroiters who wanted their city to be the first in the country to have a large Tony Smith sculpture. Since that time, both Washington, D.C., and Cleveland have acquired major works by Smith.

Smith affectionately called his Detroit sculpture, named for the Ondt and Gracehoper parable in James Joyce's novel Finnegans Wake, "outlandish." He admitted that he was pleased that Detroit had chosen the complex arrangement of polyhedrons over his more ingratiating models for large sculpture. 

His last Detroit solo was at the Susanne Hilberry Gallery, Birmingham, in 1977. He was due in town for the opening but cancelled at the last minute because of illness; he was a diabetic and his health had been precarious for years. Hilberry still has two large sculptures outside her gallery and hopes to do a memorial show soon.

***

New York painter Alice Neel, who will celebrate her 81st birthday this year, is booked for her first one-person exhibit in Michigan next month at the Hilberry Gallery. Her reception will be the afternoon of Feb. 10, a Tuesday. The date was chosen to suit Neel, who plans to be present for her opening and to speak on Feb. 11 at Wayne State University. Her exhibit will include 25 paintings done between 1949 and 1980.

***

Another alternative gallery space is opening up to Detroit artists Jan. 30 in the former Old Print Shop in Hudson's downtown. Store manager John Coe  turned the space over to the Detroit Artists Market, the non-profit gallery at 1452 Randolph, and shows will be selected by Market art director Joy Emery. The official name, she says, will be Detroit Artists Market - Other Space at Hudson's. The first soloist: the irrepressible Kurt Novak, who can be counted on for some wildly wonderful paper constructions. The second show will be a photographic group.

***

Detroit Focus  Gallery, the co-op at 743 Beaubien, has called for entries by Feb. 6 for Paper Work, a show to include anything made on or of paper - drawings, prints, books, photographs, constructions, assemblages, collages. The three-person jury will include Ellen Sharp, who heads the graphic arts department at the Detroit Institute of Arts; Kiichi Usui, curator of Oakland University's Meadow Book Art Gallery; and Caroline Greenwald, an artist from Madison, Wis. Dates for Paper Work are Feb. 14 to March 14.

***

Toledo Museum's distinguished director emeritus has just received another honor: The French government has named Otto Wittmann a commander in the French Order of Arts and Letters in recognition of his "long association with French culture and education." The former director, who retired in 1976, formed Toledo's important  collection of French paintings, sculpture and decorative arts; he's also an officer in the French Legion of Honor, an officer in the Netherlands' Royal Order of Orange Nassau, and a commander in the Italian Order of Merit. 

***

Free and open to the public is Robert J. Wilbert's talk on Ambition and Watercolor Sunday (Jan. 18) at the Birmingham Bloomfield Art Association (BBAA), 1516 South Cranbrook, Birmingham. Wilbert, who heads the painting section at Wayne State University, will speak to the Michigan Watercolor Society; his talk starts at 2 p.m.