Base for Growing Forms

Description

David Smith belonged to a circle of American artists, including Gorky and Gottlieb, who were exposed to Surrealist ideas before European exiles came to New York. A sense of organic growth, a main concern of Surrealism, infuses Smith’s Growing Forms. This sculpture, sitting on a Brancusi-like base, has been interpreted by Rosalind Kraus as depicting a fetus suspended in a capsule. A totemic image of enclosure and protection, the enwombed yet revealed body of this sculpture was the first of several iterations in Smith’s oeuvre.
(Label copy from exhibition "Dreamscapes: The Surrealist Impulse," August 22 - October 25, 1998)
David Smith belonged to a circle of American artists, including Arshile Gorky (1904–1948) and Adolf Gottlieb (1903–1974), who were experimenting with Surrealist ideas before European artists belonging to that movement emigrated to New York during World War II. Surrealism injected dreams, imagination, fantasy, and chance into rational ways of seeing. A sense of organic growth, a main concern of surrealism, infuses Smith’s "Growing Forms." One critic has interpreted this sculpture as a fetus suspended in a capsule. Through its play of solids and voids, the bodily form here speaks of enclosure and protection as well as openness and vulnerability.
(A. Dixon, 20th Century Gallery installation, June 1999)