Leon Polk Smith: American Painter

An Exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum

"Leon Polk Smith: American Painter," the first comprehensive retrospective of the paintings of an artist who has championed non-objective art for more than half a century, will be presented at The Brooklyn Museum from September 29, 1995 through January 7, 1996.

"Correspondence: Red-Black", 1962
( 455 x 406 / 12 k / jpeg )

Born in 1906, Smith was raised on farms and ranches among a large population of Choctaw and Chickasha Native Americans in the territory later annexed by the U.S. as the state of Oklahoma. He came to New York City in 1936 to study at Columbia University's Teachers' College, and that same year saw masterpieces of European Modernism by Jean Arp, Constantin Brancusi, and Piet Mondrian, among others, from the A.E. Gallatin Collection then on view at the Gallery of Living Art, New York University. The young artist began his career depicting subjects inspired by life in Oklahoma and New York in an amalgam of Surrealist and Expressionist styles.

The power of Brancusi and Mondrian's art was ultimately irresistable to Smith and in 1945 he began to explore the formal problems inherent in the creation of non-objective art. His tribute to Mondrian and New York, Homage to "Victory Boogie Woogie" I (1946), is a white canvas filled with large and small squares. Smith shared Mondrian's affection for New York, writing in 1989, "New York City revealed its physical self to me through the mountains and canyons of the Southwest. There were the ups and downs--the high peaks, the in-betweens, or the canyons, and topped with the great dome. ...I felt the city to be a perfect equation for a great abstraction."

"Black and White Repeat", 1953
( 513 x 380 / 22 k / jpeg )

"Smith didn't simply reinvent one of geometric abstraction's formal devices. He reinvented the purpose of geometric abstraction itself. What had been an attempt to transcend selfhood through line and plane became Smith's effort in the post-war decades to make these basic elements of painting the means of self-definition."

- Carter Ratcliff, from his article, Leon Polk Smith, in the exhibition catalog.

"End Gable", 1972
( 638 x 425 / 17 k / jpeg )

"From the ruins of utopian geometry, Smith built an idea of the future in which he could believe, an idea that defined him not as a function of theory or history, but as an individual--himself. In their independence, his paintings--and their elements, their colors and lines--symbolize the independence he has achieved personally."

- Carter Ratcliff.

"Crossroads Grey", 1978
( 539 x 544 / 11 k / jpeg )