LEON POLK SMITH (1906-1996) Torn Drawings, 1965 (Folio) folio of (10) facsimiles, ed. 36/450 signed and edition to frontispiece: Leon Polk Smith/ no. 36; published by Chalette, New York
Leon Polk Smith (American, 1906-1996) Untitled (Abstract Composition), 1959, torn paper collage, signed and dated. Framed. Size: 5.5'' x 4'', 14 x 10 cm (collage); 16.25'' x 13.25'', 41 x 34 cm (frame). Provenance: Private NY Estate; Acquired from Washburn Gallery, New York in 2008.
Vintage American modenist print by Leon Polk Smith (1906 - 1996). Signed. Framed. Measuring 12 by 18 inches overall and 8.5 by 13.5 painting alone. Please see all images for condition. Size is measured and written on the back of the painting. The first size is the overall size, the second size is the image size. For detailed condition questions please text 617-835-2496
Leon Polk Smith 1906 - 1996 Correspondence Bright Lights signed, titled and dated 1968 (on the reverse) oil on canvas diameter: 23 ½ in. 59.7 cm. Executed in 1968.
American, 1906-1996 Untitled, 1945 Signed and dated Leon P. Smith 45 (ll) Ink and gouache on paper 12 1/4 x 10 1/4 inches (31.1 x 26 cm) Provenance: Private collection, New York (Framed: 22 1/8 x 20 1/8 x 3/4 inches) Sheet is laid to a cardboard support. Frame is inaccessible, work not examined out of frame. No apparent tears, creases or losses to sheet.
American, 1906-1996 Untitled, 1944 Signed and dated Leon P. Smith 44 (lr) Ink and mixed media on paper 22 x 16 1/2 inches (56 x 42 cm) Provenance: Private collection, New York (Framed: 28 5/8 x 22 1/12 x 1 1/2 inches) Sheet is hinged to backing along sides, reverse not accessible. Outer edges are uneven, with small losses and dark discoloration. Paper is brittle and flakes easily. The work was restored in 2013 and a copy of the restorer's report is available upon request. The upper left and right corners have been repaired and reinforced after a fall, in addition to other issues addressed by the restorer.
Oil painting on cardstock depicting a orange, yellow and black forms attributed to Leon Polk Smith (Native American, 1906-1996). Hand signed lower right and dated 1960. Measures 14 3/4" x 10 7/8". Note: handling wear, creases upper right.
Leon Polk Smith Werkubersicht/Work-Overview C 1987 lithograph in colors on BFK Rives image: 23.375 dia in (59 cm) sheet: 46.375 h x 31.875 w in (118 x 81 cm) Signed, dated and numbered to lower edge '9/90 1949-1987 LPS'. This work is number 9 from the edition of 90 published by the artist. Provenance: Private Collection, California This work will ship from Los Angeles, California.
Leon Polk Smith Untitled (from the Volair Constellation Series) 1975 screenprint in colors on BFK Rives image: 37 h x 25.5 w in (94 x 65 cm) sheet: 41 h x 29.5 w in (104 x 75 cm) Signed and numbered to lower edge '10/80 LPS'. Titled to verso 'Hommage to the Constellations'. This work is number 10 from the edition of 80. This work will ship from Los Angeles, California.
Leon Polk Smith (1906-1996) Two Plates, from Volair Constellation (2 works), 1975 Two screenprints in colors on Rives BFK paper, each initialed in pencil and numbered 16/80 and 31/80, respectively, each the full sheet, each framed. (2 works) each sheet 41 1/8 x 29 1/2in (105 x 75.5cm)
Leon Polk Smith Six works from the Torn Drawings portfolio 1965 lithograph in colors mounted to paper 15 h x 11 w in (38 x 28 cm) Signed and numbered to colophon 'Leon Polk Smith 305'. This partial portfolio of six works is number 305 from the edition of 450 published by Galerie Chalette, New York. Sold with original slipcase. This work will ship from Los Angeles, California.
Leon Polk Smith Plate from Werkubersicht 1947-1976 1987 screenprint in colors on BFK Rives image: 22 dia in (56 cm) sheet: 46.5 h x 31.75 w in (118 x 81 cm) Signed, dated and numbered to lower edge '9/90 1947-1987 LPS'. This work is number 9 from the edition of 90. This work will ship from Los Angeles, California.
Werkübersicht. 1947/1987. Farbserigrafie auf Velin. Am unteren Blattrand mit ligiertem Monogramm, datiert und nummeriert: 1947/1987, e.a. 24 (aus einer Auflage von 90). Blattmaß: 118,4 x 81 cm. Zustand: Partiell kleine Fleckchen, leichte Altersspuren, Lichtränder, leicht gebräunt.
Leon Polk Smith (Cherokee, 1906-1996) Volair Constellation, 1975 color serigraph, artist's proof signed and dated lower right: Leon Polk Smith 75 editioned lower left: Artist's Proof
Leon Polk Smith (Cherokee, 1906-1996) Volair Constellation, 1975 color serigraph, artist's proof signed and dated lower right: Leon Polk Smith 75 editioned lower left: Artist's Proof
Leon Polk Smith Torn Drawings 1965 lithograph in colors mounted to paper sheet (each): 14.875 h x 11 w in (38 x 28 cm) portfolio: 15.125 h x 11.125 w x .125 d in (38 x 28 x 0 cm) Signed and numbered to colophon 'Leon Polk Smith 86'. This complete set of ten works is number 86 from the edition of 450 published by Galerie Chalette, New York. This work will ship from Chicago, Illinois.
Leon Polk Smith, 1906 to 1996, an acrylic on canvas painting depicting an abstract geometric composition in bright yellow, purple, black and white colors, 1985. Signed and dated lower right, additionally signed on the backside. Note: Known for geometric, hard-edge abstraction, Leon Polk Smith was born in 1906 and raised on a farm in Indian territory among the Choctaw Indians before Oklahoma became a state. In 1936, he went to New York City and was exposed to European modernism. He was particularly influenced by Jean Arp, Constantin Brancusi and Piet Mondrian and also by the city itself. Smiths work is included in the permanent collections of numerous museums including the Guggenheim, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the National Gallery of Art. One of a kind artwork. American Fine Art, Modernist Paintings And Wall Decor Collectibles.
Smith, Leon Polk (American, 1906-1996), Torn Drawings, 1965, number 86 of 450 copies, signed by the artist on the colophon, Galerie Chalette, complete portfolio with 10 color lithographs of various sizes, tipped-in to sheets 15 x 11 inches, housed in blue paper portfolio, printed by Daniel Jacomet. Provenance: from the estate of Leon and Jane Arkus. Leon was the Director of the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, from 1969 to 1980.
Artist: Leon Polk Smith, American (1906 - 1996) Title: Werkubersicht/Work-Overview I Year: 1987 Medium: Screenprint, signed, numbered, and dated in pencil Edition: 90/90 Size: 46.5 x 32 in. (118.11 x 81.28 cm) Printer: Editions Hoffman, Germany Publisher: Editions Hoffman, Germany Description: An original hand-signed and numbered Screenprint from the Werkubersicht/Work-Overview Portfolio. Leon Polk Smith is credited with the founding of the hard-edge art movement and was greatly influenced by Mondrian.
Leon Polk Smith Black, Red and Blue 1960 oil on panel 11 h x 7.5 w in (28 x 19 cm) Signed and dated to lower right 'LPS '60'. Provenance: Collection of Robert Jamieson | Important Private Collection This work will ship from Los Angeles, California.
Leon Polk Smith Torn Drawings 1965 lithograph in color affixed to paper mount sheet (each): 15 h x 11 w in (38 x 28 cm) Signed and numbered to colophon 'Leon Polk Smith No. 325'. This complete portfolio of ten works is number 325 from the edition of 450 printed by Daniel Jacomet, Paris and published by Galerie Chalette, New York. Sold with original slipcase and two additional drawings by the artist. Signed and dated to each drawing '3-19-68 Leon Smith' and 'LPS 3-19-68'. Inscribed to one work 'Done for Lawrence'. Provenance: Estate of Lawrence Alloway (one drawing) | Acquired in 2014 by the present owner This work will ship from Chicago, Illinois.
Artist: Leon Polk Smith, American (1906 - 1996) Title: Werk Ubersicht/Work-Overview F Year: 1987 Medium: Screenprint, signed, numbered, and dated in pencil Edition: 90/90 Size: 46.5 x 32 in. (118.11 x 81.28 cm) Printer: Editions Hoffman, Germany Publisher: Editions Hoffman, Germany Description: An original hand-signed and numbered Screenprint from the Werk Ubersicht/Work-Overview Portfolio. Leon Polk Smith is credited with the founding of the hard-edge art movement and was greatly influenced by Mondrian.
Leon Polk Smith (American, 1906-1996) Painting. Red on Black 1956 painting. Oil on canvas painting laid down on plywood. Inscribed on the reverse Leon Polk Smith 1956 and also repeated in pencil. Measures 25.75 inches high, 16 inches wide. The painting is from the personal collection of Leon Polk Smith's partner and assistant, Robert Jamieson. A signed letter of provenance from Leon Polk Smith's life partner and assistant, Robert Jamieson (1926-2020) will be included with the painting along with a Leon Polk Smith exhibition catalog and photo of Leon in his New York studio. In good condition. From AskArt: The power in the art of Brancusi and Mondrian had an early and profound effect on Leon Polk Smith who became one of the leading American non-objective color-field precisionists. Smith's success lied in his ability to create works which had a simple, colorful hard-edge presence. His strongest examples of these artistic tenets can be found in his Constellation Series, beginning in 1967. Native American born artist Leon Polk Smith came to New York City, at 30 years of age, in 1936 to study at Columbia University's Teachers' College. 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 irresistible to Smith, and in 1945, he began to explore the formal problems inherent in the creation of non-objective art. 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." The New York experience was a turning point, and he never looked back. His genius in extending the boundaries of the available geometric tenants truly took hard-edge minimalism to the next level. His free-hand approach, use of diagonals and circles and the abandonment of the European geometricians' grids would "re-invent the purpose of geometric abstraction”. Smith's work is including in the permanent collections of numerous museums including the Guggenheim, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the National Gallery of Art. LEON POLK SMITH - Addison Parks, 1985; Courtesy ARTS Magazine Leon Polk Smith admits to being one of the twice born; art too claims its converts. Seated in his New York apartment, which also hosts his studio, he speaks softly and serenely of the life art has shared with him. The air is surprisingly fresh and relaxed, it doesn't feel like New York. His living room is cool and bright from a crossfire of east and west exposures, high up they overlook Union Square on one side and face a cathedral of water towers on the other. Only Smith's paintings dress the walls, and they light the room with an elegance which is betrayed only by their jaunty and jubilant spirit. He explains that while he is an ardent art enthusiast, all of his ideas come from his own works, and they serve him well by being where he can look at them. He speaks with a gently rhythmic but a touch crusty southwestern accent, and there is still a shadow of the rugged frontier about him, which can be traced back to his work. I discovered art my last year in college ... 1934. Having grown up in Oklahoma and having been older than the state, there wasn't much art there. So I was still younger than I was at college age, and I had never seen an original painting. I don't think I knew anyone very well who even had art in their vocabulary. And it's quite by accident that I discovered art. That last year, I was in a building I had never been in before, walking down the hall, looking into the rooms as I passed. . . and this room had students and they were painting and drawing. And somehow that fascinated me immediately. I thought: I wish I could do that. And l went in and asked the instructor if I could come in and work for the rest of the term. He said yes. I think I realized very quickly that I had always been an artist, and that that was what I wanted. That I would always keep it for myself, that I would never prostitute it, or do anything with it just for money. I had prepared to be a teacher. When I started school, I said, I want to be a teacher, and it never entered my mind.... Even after I discovered art, and said I was going to be an artist, I knew that to make a living I would do what had been my first choice, which was teaching. I taught for about twenty-five years. After I finished college, and taught one year, I came to New York in 1936 to study at Columbia ... get my Masters ... education and psychology. I knew I wasn't going to start selling paintings (he laughs). Paintings didn't start selling to somehow support me until about 1957. That's when I stopped teaching. From the awesome horizontality of the Oklahoma plains to New York's concrete peaks and valleys, Smith's one preoccupation has been space. From the late thirties through the early fifties it was the Constructivist space of Mondrian which dominated his scope: pure rectilinear abstraction with a parity of positive and negative form. Like many others working under the mast of Constructivism, Smith was looking for the next step up, a stage further in the evolution. Some painters pursued lyrical abstraction, but these solutions sat too self-centered to excite him. So he pushed on. When I discovered this thing in 1954, dividing a canvas into two areas, painting in two colors, I did about twelve to fifteen tondos before I was able to carry the idea over into the rectangle. Because I discovered the idea on a circular format, you know I must have told you about seeing this athletic catalog ... the illustrations that were done that were pencil drawings rather than photographs, of a baseball, tennis ball, football ... that came into my studio, that was in the mail. I don't know why it was sent to me ... found myself going through the catalog ... looking through the drawings. I certainly was not interested in any of them as a baseball or a basketball, but I was looking. And I thought, what the hell am I doing this for, why am I looking at this ? And a little voice says, because that's what you're looking for ... that excited me and l knew immediately what it meant. I rushed into my studio, got some paper and a compass and started drawing circles and dividing them up. Then I had to start inventing my own break up. I was inspired. Because that presented what was I looking for? When Mondrian died, I think 1945, people said he had hit a dead end, or a stone wall and I said I don't think so. There is no such thing as a stone wall except in one's mind. I said to myself, I think it would be wonderful to use his great discovery of the interchange of elements of form and space, or background-- foreground, although he only used it at a direct angle or a straight line--if one could find a way of using that in curvilinear form-and that's what I was looking for, all through the forties ... I certainly wouldn't have gone to an athletic catalog to find it, but that's where I found it. Of course the shapes and lines were very limited, and immediately had to start finding my own, which I did. But then that created a space there that I had never seen in painting before. It was flat and at the same time it was curved. It was like a sphere. The planes seemed to move in every direction, as space does. And so I thought, maybe that is because that's on the tondo. I've got to find out if that is true or not. I've got to do some on a rectangle to see if the form and the space still moved in every direction. And it did. So it was exciting to do a painting on a rectangle that seemed to have a curved sur-face. It was the first time, you see, that I had made an important step myself, or contribution in art. Color and shape are the converging planes which form the fulcrum over which Smith see-saws his space. They form the language of which he is a master. Color and shape are his domain; the crossbars of his scope; his words. With them he writes poetry; poems which magnificently sweep their time and space into a single gesture. In space there is no up or down; up here is down there on the other side of the globe. Smith enlarged the concept of space in painting to meet with the twentieth century, everything moves at a diagonal. He first started experimenting with this in the rectilinear Constructivism of the forties; he implied lines which moved diagonally between points. Later he exposed the diagonals and still maintained a vocabulary of implied lines. Both are central to his dialogue, especially today. In the multiple panels Smith takes the concept of positive/negative parity one step further. He invites the surrounding space into the experience, and activates it into an equal exchange. The painting becomes a point of departure - a runway into space. We sense the awe in this work, and wonder. These latest paintings are of a dimension so large, so fast and so deep, they tower like futurist space machines, seeming to pulsate on the threshold of infinity. Smith constantly talks of excitement as though it were an essential. He has a faith in what art can do, and be, and this is supremely evident in his work; so much so that with it he restores even our doubt in the doubt intrinsic to both. . . . isn't it simply wonderful to be able to paint? That's what I wanted to do. Now I can - It's something I would pay to do, if I were able to, if I had to.
Leon Polk Smith (American, 1906-1996) Print. Title - Form Space Blue Trapezoid Serigraph. Signed lower left in pencil 81/90 and 1964 -1987. Signed lower right in pencil LPS signature. The serigraph on wove paper has the impressed Creysse France watermark. Measures 46.5 inches high, 31.78 inches wide. In good condition. The serigraph print is from the personal collection and estate of Leon Polk Smith's life partner and assistant, Robert Jamieson (1926-2020). A letter of provenance from Leon Polk Smith's life partner and assistant, Robert Jamieson will be included with the serigraph, along with a LPS exhibition catalog and photo of Leon in his New York studio. From AskArt: The power in the art of Brancusi and Mondrian had an early and profound effect on Leon Polk Smith who became one of the leading American non-objective color-field precisionists. Smith's success lied in his ability to create works which had a simple, colorful hard-edge presence. His strongest examples of these artistic tenets can be found in his Constellation Series, beginning in 1967. Native American born artist Leon Polk Smith came to New York City, at 30 years of age, in 1936 to study at Columbia University's Teachers' College. 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 irresistible to Smith, and in 1945, he began to explore the formal problems inherent in the creation of non-objective art. 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." The New York experience was a turning point, and he never looked back. His genius in extending the boundaries of the available geometric tenants truly took hard-edge minimalism to the next level. His free-hand approach, use of diagonals and circles and the abandonment of the European geometricians' grids would "re-invent the purpose of geometric abstraction”. Smith's work is including in the permanent collections of numerous museums including the Guggenheim, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the National Gallery of Art. LEON POLK SMITH - Addison Parks, 1985; Courtesy ARTS Magazine Leon Polk Smith admits to being one of the twice born; art too claims its converts. Seated in his New York apartment, which also hosts his studio, he speaks softly and serenely of the life art has shared with him. The air is surprisingly fresh and relaxed, it doesn't feel like New York. His living room is cool and bright from a crossfire of east and west exposures, high up they overlook Union Square on one side and face a cathedral of water towers on the other. Only Smith's paintings dress the walls, and they light the room with an elegance which is betrayed only by their jaunty and jubilant spirit. He explains that while he is an ardent art enthusiast, all of his ideas come from his own works, and they serve him well by being where he can look at them. He speaks with a gently rhythmic but a touch crusty southwestern accent, and there is still a shadow of the rugged frontier about him, which can be traced back to his work. "I discovered art my last year in college ... 1934. Having grown up in Oklahoma and having been older than the state, there wasn't much art there. So it was still younger than I at college age, and I had never seen an original painting. I don't think I knew anyone very well who even had art in their vocabulary. And it's quite by accident that I discovered art. That last year, I was in a building I had never been in before, walking down the hall, looking into the rooms as I passed. . . and this room had students and they were painting and drawing. And somehow that fascinated me immediately. I thought: I wish I could do that. And l went in and asked the instructor if I could come in and work for the rest of the term. He said yes. I think I realized very quickly that I had always been an artist, and that that was what I wanted. That I would always keep it for myself, that I would never prostitute it, or do anything with it just for money. I had prepared to be a teacher. When I started school, I said, I want to be a teacher, and it never entered my mind.... Even after I discovered art, and said I was going to be an artist, I knew that to make a living I would do what had been my first choice, which was teaching. I taught for about twenty-five years. After I finished college, and taught one year, I came to New York in 1936 to study at Columbia ... get my Masters ... education and psychology. I knew I wasn't going to start selling paintings (he laughs). Paintings didn't start selling to somehow support me until about 1957. That's when I stopped teaching. " From the awesome horizontality of the Oklahoma plains to New York's concrete peaks and valleys, Smith's one preoccupation has been space. From the late thirties through the early fifties it was the Constructivist space of Mondrian which dominated his scope: pure rectilinear abstraction with a parity of positive and negative form. Like many others working under the mast of Constructivism, Smith was looking for the next step up, a stage further in the evolution. Some painters pursued lyrical abstraction, but these solutions sat too self-centered to excite him. So he pushed on. "When I discovered this thing in 1954, of dividing a canvas into two areas, painting in two colors, I did about twelve to fifteen tondos before I was able to carry the idea over into the rectangle. Because I discovered the idea on a circular format, you know I must have told you about seeing this athletic catalog ... the illustrations that were done that were pencil drawings rather than photographs, of a baseball, tennis ball, football ... that came into my studio, that was in the mail. I don't know why it was sent to me ... found myself going through the catalog ... looking through the drawings. certainly was not interested in any of them as a baseball or a basketball, but I was looking. And I thought, what the hell am I doing this for, why am I looking at this ? And a little voice says, because that's what you're looking for ... that excited me and l knew immediately what it meant. I rushed into my studio, got some paper and a compass and started drawing circles and dividing them up. Then l had to start inventing my own break up. I was inspired. Because that presented what was I looking for? When Mondrian died, I think 1945, people said he had hit a dead end, or a stone wall and I said I don't think so. There is no such thing as a stone wall except in one's mind. I said to myself, I think it would be wonderful to use his great discovery of the interchange of elements of form and space, or background-- foreground, although he only used it at a direct angle or a straight line--if one could find a way of using that in curvilinear form-and that's what I was looking for, all through the forties ... I certainly wouldn't have gone to an athletic catalog to find it, but that's where I found it. Of course the shapes and lines were very limited, and immediately had to start finding my own, which I did. But then that created a space there that I had never seen in painting before. It was flat and at the same time it was curved. It was like a sphere. The planes seemed to move in every direction, as space does. And so I thought, maybe that is because that's on the tondo. I've got to find out if that is true or not. I've got to do some on a rectangle to see if the form and the space still moved in every direction. And it did. So it was exciting to do a painting on a rectangle that seemed to have a curved sur-face. It was the first time, you see that I had made an important step myself, or contribution in art. Color and shape are the converging planes which form the fulcrum over which Smith see-saws his space. They form the language of which he is a master. Color and shape are his domain, the crossbars of his scope - his words. With them he writes poetry; poems which magnificently sweep their time and space into a single gesture. In space there is no up or down; up here is down there on the otherside of the globe. Smith enlarged the concept of space in painting to meet with the twentieth century, everything moves at a diagonal. He first started experimenting with this in the rectilinear Constructivism of the forties - he implied lines which moved diagonally between points. Later he exposed the diagonals and still maintained a vocabulary of implied lines. Both are central to his dialogue, especially today. In the multiple panels Smith takes the concept of positive/negative parity one step further. He invites the surrounding space into the experience, and activates it into an equal exchange. The painting becomes a point of departure - a runway into space. We sense the awe in this work, and wonder. These latest paintings are of a dimension so large, so fast and so deep, they tower like futurist space machines, seeming to pulsate on the threshold of infinity. Smith constantly talks of excitement as though it were an essential. He has a faith in what art can do, and be, and this is supremely evident in his work; so much so that with it he restores even our doubt in the doubt intrinsic to both. . . . lsn't it simply wonderful to be able to paint? That's what l wanted to do. Now I can - It's something I would pay to do, if I were able to, if I had to.
Leon Polk Smith (American, 1906-1996) Print. Title - Black and White Repeat. Signed lower left in pencil 68 /90 - 1952 - 1987. Signed lower right in pencil LPS. The serigraph on wove paper print has the impressed Creysse France watermark. Measures 46.5 inches high, 32 inches wide. In good condition. The serigraph print is from the personal collection and estate of Leon Polk Smith’s life partner and assistant, Robert Jamieson (1926-2020). A letter of provenance from Leon Polk Smith's life partner and assistant, Robert Jamieson will be included with the serigraph, along with a LPS exhibition catalog and photo of Leon in his New York studio. From AskArt: The power in the art of Brancusi and Mondrian had an early and profound effect on Leon Polk Smith who became one of the leading American non-objective color-field precisionists. Smith's success lied in his ability to create works which had a simple, colorful hard-edge presence. His strongest examples of these artistic tenets can be found in his Constellation Series, beginning in 1967. Native American born artist Leon Polk Smith came to New York City, at 30 years of age, in 1936 to study at Columbia University's Teachers' College. 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 irresistible to Smith, and in 1945, he began to explore the formal problems inherent in the creation of non-objective art. 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." The New York experience was a turning point, and he never looked back. His genius in extending the boundaries of the available geometric tenants truly took hard-edge minimalism to the next level. His free-hand approach, use of diagonals and circles and the abandonment of the European geometricians' grids would "re-invent the purpose of geometric abstraction”. Smith's work is including in the permanent collections of numerous museums including the Guggenheim, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the National Gallery of Art. LEON POLK SMITH - Addison Parks, 1985; Courtesy ARTS Magazine Leon Polk Smith admits to being one of the twice born; art too claims its converts. Seated in his New York apartment, which also hosts his studio, he speaks softly and serenely of the life art has shared with him. The air is surprisingly fresh and relaxed, it doesn't feel like New York. His living room is cool and bright from a crossfire of east and west exposures, high up they overlook Union Square on one side and face a cathedral of water towers on the other. Only Smith's paintings dress the walls, and they light the room with an elegance which is betrayed only by their jaunty and jubilant spirit. He explains that while he is an ardent art enthusiast, all of his ideas come from his own works, and they serve him well by being where he can look at them. He speaks with a gently rhythmic but a touch crusty southwestern accent, and there is still a shadow of the rugged frontier about him, which can be traced back to his work. "I discovered art my last year in college ... 1934. Having grown up in Oklahoma and having been older than the state, there wasn't much art there. So it was still younger than I at college age, and I had never seen an original painting. I don't think I knew anyone very well who even had art in their vocabulary. And it's quite by accident that I discovered art. That last year, I was in a building I had never been in before, walking down the hall, looking into the rooms as I passed. . . and this room had students and they were painting and drawing. And somehow that fascinated me immediately. I thought: I wish I could do that. And l went in and asked the instructor if I could come in and work for the rest of the term. He said yes. I think I realized very quickly that I had always been an artist, and that that was what I wanted. That I would always keep it for myself, that I would never prostitute it, or do anything with it just for money. I had prepared to be a teacher. When I started school, I said, I want to be a teacher, and it never entered my mind.... Even after I discovered art, and said I was going to be an artist, I knew that to make a living I would do what had been my first choice, which was teaching. I taught for about twenty-five years. After I finished college, and taught one year, I came to New York in 1936 to study at Columbia ... get my Masters ... education and psychology. I knew I wasn't going to start selling paintings (he laughs). Paintings didn't start selling to somehow support me until about 1957. That's when I stopped teaching. " From the awesome horizontality of the Oklahoma plains to New York's concrete peaks and valleys, Smith's one preoccupation has been space. From the late thirties through the early fifties it was the Constructivist space of Mondrian which dominated his scope: pure rectilinear abstraction with a parity of positive and negative form. Like many others working under the mast of Constructivism, Smith was looking for the next step up, a stage further in the evolution. Some painters pursued lyrical abstraction, but these solutions sat too self-centered to excite him. So he pushed on. "When I discovered this thing in 1954, of dividing a canvas into two areas, painting in two colors, I did about twelve to fifteen tondos before I was able to carry the idea over into the rectangle. Because I discovered the idea on a circular format, you know I must have told you about seeing this athletic catalog ... the illustrations that were done that were pencil drawings rather than photographs, of a baseball, tennis ball, football ... that came into my studio, that was in the mail. I don't know why it was sent to me ... found myself going through the catalog ... looking through the drawings. certainly was not interested in any of them as a baseball or a basketball, but I was looking. And I thought, what the hell am I doing this for, why am I looking at this ? And a little voice says, because that's what you're looking for ... that excited me and l knew immediately what it meant. I rushed into my studio, got some paper and a compass and started drawing circles and dividing them up. Then l had to start inventing my own break up. I was inspired. Because that presented what was I looking for? When Mondrian died, I think 1945, people said he had hit a dead end, or a stone wall and I said I don't think so. There is no such thing as a stone wall except in one's mind. I said to myself, I think it would be wonderful to use his great discovery of the interchange of elements of form and space, or background-- foreground, although he only used it at a direct angle or a straight line--if one could find a way of using that in curvilinear form-and that's what I was looking for, all through the forties ... I certainly wouldn't have gone to an athletic catalog to find it, but that's where I found it. Of course the shapes and lines were very limited, and immediately had to start finding my own, which I did. But then that created a space there that I had never seen in painting before. It was flat and at the same time it was curved. It was like a sphere. The planes seemed to move in every direction, as space does. And so I thought, maybe that is because that's on the tondo. I've got to find out if that is true or not. I've got to do some on a rectangle to see if the form and the space still moved in every direction. And it did. So it was exciting to do a painting on a rectangle that seemed to have a curved sur-face. It was the first time, you see that I had made an important step myself, or contribution in art. Color and shape are the converging planes which form the fulcrum over which Smith see-saws his space. They form the language of which he is a master. Color and shape are his domain, the crossbars of his scope - his words. With them he writes poetry; poems which magnificently sweep their time and space into a single gesture. In space there is no up or down; up here is down there on the otherside of the globe. Smith enlarged the concept of space in painting to meet with the twentieth century, everything moves at a diagonal. He first started experimenting with this in the rectilinear Constructivism of the forties - he implied lines which moved diagonally between points. Later he exposed the diagonals and still maintained a vocabulary of implied lines. Both are central to his dialogue, especially today. In the multiple panels Smith takes the concept of positive/negative parity one step further. He invites the surrounding space into the experience, and activates it into an equal exchange. The painting becomes a point of departure - a runway into space. We sense the awe in this work, and wonder. These latest paintings are of a dimension so large, so fast and so deep, they tower like futurist space machines, seeming to pulsate on the threshold of infinity. Smith constantly talks of excitement as though it were an essential. He has a faith in what art can do, and be, and this is supremely evident in his work; so much so that with it he restores even our doubt in the doubt intrinsic to both. . . . lsn't it simply wonderful to be able to paint? That's what l wanted to do. Now I can - It's something I would pay to do, if I were able to, if I had to.
Leon Polk Smith (American, 1906-1996) Print. Title - Sunrise Orange on Black serigraph. Signed LPS lower right, lower left in pencil 49/90 1962 - 1987. Measures 46.5 inches high, 32 inches wide. The serigraph on wove paper has the impressed Creysse France watermark.In good condition. The serigraph is from the personal collection and estate of Leon Polk Smith’s life partner and assistant, Robert Jamieson (1926-2020). From AskArt: The power in the art of Brancusi and Mondrian had an early and profound effect on Leon Polk Smith who became one of the leading American non-objective color-field precisionists. Smith's success lied in his ability to create works which had a simple, colorful hard-edge presence. His strongest examples of these artistic tenets can be found in his Constellation Series, beginning in 1967. Native American born artist Leon Polk Smith came to New York City, at 30 years of age, in 1936 to study at Columbia University's Teachers' College. 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 irresistible to Smith, and in 1945, he began to explore the formal problems inherent in the creation of non-objective art. 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." The New York experience was a turning point, and he never looked back. His genius in extending the boundaries of the available geometric tenants truly took hard-edge minimalism to the next level. His free-hand approach, use of diagonals and circles and the abandonment of the European geometricians' grids would "re-invent the purpose of geometric abstraction”. Smith's work is including in the permanent collections of numerous museums including the Guggenheim, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the National Gallery of Art. LEON POLK SMITH - Addison Parks, 1985; Courtesy ARTS Magazine Leon Polk Smith admits to being one of the twice born; art too claims its converts. Seated in his New York apartment, which also hosts his studio, he speaks softly and serenely of the life art has shared with him. The air is surprisingly fresh and relaxed, it doesn't feel like New York. His living room is cool and bright from a crossfire of east and west exposures, high up they overlook Union Square on one side and face a cathedral of water towers on the other. Only Smith's paintings dress the walls, and they light the room with an elegance which is betrayed only by their jaunty and jubilant spirit. He explains that while he is an ardent art enthusiast, all of his ideas come from his own works, and they serve him well by being where he can look at them. He speaks with a gently rhythmic but a touch crusty southwestern accent, and there is still a shadow of the rugged frontier about him, which can be traced back to his work. "I discovered art my last year in college ... 1934. Having grown up in Oklahoma and having been older than the state, there wasn't much art there. So it was still younger than I at college age, and I had never seen an original painting. I don't think I knew anyone very well who even had art in their vocabulary. And it's quite by accident that I discovered art. That last year, I was in a building I had never been in before, walking down the hall, looking into the rooms as I passed. . . and this room had students and they were painting and drawing. And somehow that fascinated me immediately. I thought: I wish I could do that. And l went in and asked the instructor if I could come in and work for the rest of the term. He said yes. I think I realized very quickly that I had always been an artist, and that that was what I wanted. That I would always keep it for myself, that I would never prostitute it, or do anything with it just for money. I had prepared to be a teacher. When I started school, I said, I want to be a teacher, and it never entered my mind.... Even after I discovered art, and said I was going to be an artist, I knew that to make a living I would do what had been my first choice, which was teaching. I taught for about twenty-five years. After I finished college, and taught one year, I came to New York in 1936 to study at Columbia ... get my Masters ... education and psychology. I knew I wasn't going to start selling paintings (he laughs). Paintings didn't start selling to somehow support me until about 1957. That's when I stopped teaching. " From the awesome horizontality of the Oklahoma plains to New York's concrete peaks and valleys, Smith's one preoccupation has been space. From the late thirties through the early fifties it was the Constructivist space of Mondrian which dominated his scope: pure rectilinear abstraction with a parity of positive and negative form. Like many others working under the mast of Constructivism, Smith was looking for the next step up, a stage further in the evolution. Some painters pursued lyrical abstraction, but these solutions sat too self-centered to excite him. So he pushed on. "When I discovered this thing in 1954, of dividing a canvas into two areas, painting in two colors, I did about twelve to fifteen tondos before I was able to carry the idea over into the rectangle. Because I discovered the idea on a circular format, you know I must have told you about seeing this athletic catalog ... the illustrations that were done that were pencil drawings rather than photographs, of a baseball, tennis ball, football ... that came into my studio, that was in the mail. I don't know why it was sent to me ... found myself going through the catalog ... looking through the drawings. certainly was not interested in any of them as a baseball or a basketball, but I was looking. And I thought, what the hell am I doing this for, why am I looking at this ? And a little voice says, because that's what you're looking for ... that excited me and l knew immediately what it meant. I rushed into my studio, got some paper and a compass and started drawing circles and dividing them up. Then l had to start inventing my own break up. I was inspired. Because that presented what was I looking for? When Mondrian died, I think 1945, people said he had hit a dead end, or a stone wall and I said I don't think so. There is no such thing as a stone wall except in one's mind. I said to myself, I think it would be wonderful to use his great discovery of the interchange of elements of form and space, or background-- foreground, although he only used it at a direct angle or a straight line--if one could find a way of using that in curvilinear form-and that's what I was looking for, all through the forties ... I certainly wouldn't have gone to an athletic catalog to find it, but that's where I found it. Of course the shapes and lines were very limited, and immediately had to start finding my own, which I did. But then that created a space there that I had never seen in painting before. It was flat and at the same time it was curved. It was like a sphere. The planes seemed to move in every direction, as space does. And so I thought, maybe that is because that's on the tondo. I've got to find out if that is true or not. I've got to do some on a rectangle to see if the form and the space still moved in every direction. And it did. So it was exciting to do a painting on a rectangle that seemed to have a curved sur-face. It was the first time, you see that I had made an important step myself, or contribution in art. Color and shape are the converging planes which form the fulcrum over which Smith see-saws his space. They form the language of which he is a master. Color and shape are his domain, the crossbars of his scope - his words. With them he writes poetry; poems which magnificently sweep their time and space into a single gesture. In space there is no up or down; up here is down there on the otherside of the globe. Smith enlarged the concept of space in painting to meet with the twentieth century, everything moves at a diagonal. He first started experimenting with this in the rectilinear Constructivism of the forties - he implied lines which moved diagonally between points. Later he exposed the diagonals and still maintained a vocabulary of implied lines. Both are central to his dialogue, especially today. In the multiple panels Smith takes the concept of positive/negative parity one step further. He invites the surrounding space into the experience, and activates it into an equal exchange. The painting becomes a point of departure - a runway into space. We sense the awe in this work, and wonder. These latest paintings are of a dimension so large, so fast and so deep, they tower like futurist space machines, seeming to pulsate on the threshold of infinity. Smith constantly talks of excitement as though it were an essential. He has a faith in what art can do, and be, and this is supremely evident in his work; so much so that with it he restores even our doubt in the doubt intrinsic to both. . . . lsn't it simply wonderful to be able to paint? That's what l wanted to do. Now I can - It's something I would pay to do, if I were able to, if I had to.
Leon Polk Smith (American, 1906-1996) Lithograph. Orange Black Circle Lithograph Print. Signed lower right Leon Polk Smith. Signed Artists proof lower left. Measures 25.25 inches high, 25.25 inches wide. Frame measures 26 inches high, 26 inches wide. In good condition, with toning. The lithograph is from the personal collection and estate of Leon Polk Smith's life partner and assistant, Robert Jamieson (1926-2020). A letter of provenance from Robert Jamieson will be included with the print along with a LPS exhibition catalog and photo of Leon in his New York studio. From AskArt: The power in the art of Brancusi and Mondrian had an early and profound effect on Leon Polk Smith who became one of the leading American non-objective color-field precisionists. Smith's success lied in his ability to create works which had a simple, colorful hard-edge presence. His strongest examples of these artistic tenets can be found in his Constellation Series, beginning in 1967. Native American born artist Leon Polk Smith came to New York City, at 30 years of age, in 1936 to study at Columbia University's Teachers' College. 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 irresistible to Smith, and in 1945, he began to explore the formal problems inherent in the creation of non-objective art. 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." The New York experience was a turning point, and he never looked back. His genius in extending the boundaries of the available geometric tenants truly took hard-edge minimalism to the next level. His free-hand approach, use of diagonals and circles and the abandonment of the European geometricians' grids would "re-invent the purpose of geometric abstraction”. Smith's work is including in the permanent collections of numerous museums including the Guggenheim, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the National Gallery of Art. LEON POLK SMITH - Addison Parks, 1985; Courtesy ARTS Magazine Leon Polk Smith admits to being one of the twice born; art too claims its converts. Seated in his New York apartment, which also hosts his studio, he speaks softly and serenely of the life art has shared with him. The air is surprisingly fresh and relaxed, it doesn't feel like New York. His living room is cool and bright from a crossfire of east and west exposures, high up they overlook Union Square on one side and face a cathedral of water towers on the other. Only Smith's paintings dress the walls, and they light the room with an elegance which is betrayed only by their jaunty and jubilant spirit. He explains that while he is an ardent art enthusiast, all of his ideas come from his own works, and they serve him well by being where he can look at them. He speaks with a gently rhythmic but a touch crusty southwestern accent, and there is still a shadow of the rugged frontier about him, which can be traced back to his work. "I discovered art my last year in college ... 1934. Having grown up in Oklahoma and having been older than the state, there wasn't much art there. So it was still younger than I at college age, and I had never seen an original painting. I don't think I knew anyone very well who even had art in their vocabulary. And it's quite by accident that I discovered art. That last year, I was in a building I had never been in before, walking down the hall, looking into the rooms as I passed. . . and this room had students and they were painting and drawing. And somehow that fascinated me immediately. I thought: I wish I could do that. And l went in and asked the instructor if I could come in and work for the rest of the term. He said yes. I think I realized very quickly that I had always been an artist, and that that was what I wanted. That I would always keep it for myself, that I would never prostitute it, or do anything with it just for money. I had prepared to be a teacher. When I started school, I said, I want to be a teacher, and it never entered my mind.... Even after I discovered art, and said I was going to be an artist, I knew that to make a living I would do what had been my first choice, which was teaching. I taught for about twenty-five years. After I finished college, and taught one year, I came to New York in 1936 to study at Columbia ... get my Masters ... education and psychology. I knew I wasn't going to start selling paintings (he laughs). Paintings didn't start selling to somehow support me until about 1957. That's when I stopped teaching. " From the awesome horizontality of the Oklahoma plains to New York's concrete peaks and valleys, Smith's one preoccupation has been space. From the late thirties through the early fifties it was the Constructivist space of Mondrian which dominated his scope: pure rectilinear abstraction with a parity of positive and negative form. Like many others working under the mast of Constructivism, Smith was looking for the next step up, a stage further in the evolution. Some painters pursued lyrical abstraction, but these solutions sat too self-centered to excite him. So he pushed on. "When I discovered this thing in 1954, of dividing a canvas into two areas, painting in two colors, I did about twelve to fifteen tondos before I was able to carry the idea over into the rectangle. Because I discovered the idea on a circular format, you know I must have told you about seeing this athletic catalog ... the illustrations that were done that were pencil drawings rather than photographs, of a baseball, tennis ball, football ... that came into my studio, that was in the mail. I don't know why it was sent to me ... found myself going through the catalog ... looking through the drawings. certainly was not interested in any of them as a baseball or a basketball, but I was looking. And I thought, what the hell am I doing this for, why am I looking at this ? And a little voice says, because that's what you're looking for ... that excited me and l knew immediately what it meant. I rushed into my studio, got some paper and a compass and started drawing circles and dividing them up. Then l had to start inventing my own break up. I was inspired. Because that presented what was I looking for? When Mondrian died, I think 1945, people said he had hit a dead end, or a stone wall and I said I don't think so. There is no such thing as a stone wall except in one's mind. I said to myself, I think it would be wonderful to use his great discovery of the interchange of elements of form and space, or background-- foreground, although he only used it at a direct angle or a straight line--if one could find a way of using that in curvilinear form-and that's what I was looking for, all through the forties ... I certainly wouldn't have gone to an athletic catalog to find it, but that's where I found it. Of course the shapes and lines were very limited, and immediately had to start finding my own, which I did. But then that created a space there that I had never seen in painting before. It was flat and at the same time it was curved. It was like a sphere. The planes seemed to move in every direction, as space does. And so I thought, maybe that is because that's on the tondo. I've got to find out if that is true or not. I've got to do some on a rectangle to see if the form and the space still moved in every direction. And it did. So it was exciting to do a painting on a rectangle that seemed to have a curved sur-face. It was the first time, you see that I had made an important step myself, or contribution in art. Color and shape are the converging planes which form the fulcrum over which Smith see-saws his space. They form the language of which he is a master. Color and shape are his domain, the crossbars of his scope - his words. With them he writes poetry; poems which magnificently sweep their time and space into a single gesture. In space there is no up or down; up here is down there on the otherside of the globe. Smith enlarged the concept of space in painting to meet with the twentieth century, everything moves at a diagonal. He first started experimenting with this in the rectilinear Constructivism of the forties - he implied lines which moved diagonally between points. Later he exposed the diagonals and still maintained a vocabulary of implied lines. Both are central to his dialogue, especially today. In the multiple panels Smith takes the concept of positive/negative parity one step further. He invites the surrounding space into the experience, and activates it into an equal exchange. The painting becomes a point of departure - a runway into space. We sense the awe in this work, and wonder. These latest paintings are of a dimension so large, so fast and so deep, they tower like futurist space machines, seeming to pulsate on the threshold of infinity. Smith constantly talks of excitement as though it were an essential. He has a faith in what art can do, and be, and this is supremely evident in his work; so much so that with it he restores even our doubt in the doubt intrinsic to both. . . . lsn't it simply wonderful to be able to paint? That's what l wanted to do. Now I can - It's something I would pay to do, if I were able to, if I had to.
Leon Polk Smith (American, 1906-1996) Lithograph. Yellow Turquoise Circle Lithograph Print. Signed lower right Leon Polk Smith. Signed lower left Artist's Proof. Measures 25.25 inches high, 25.25 inches wide. Kulicke frame measures 26 inches high, 26 inches wide. In good condition. Slight waffling to paper, but otherwise the print is in good condition. The lithograph is from the personal collection and estate of Leon Polk Smith's life partner and assistant, Robert Jamieson (1926-2020). A letter of provenance from Robert Jamieson will be included with the print along with a LPS exhibition catalog and photo of Leon in his New York studio. From AskArt: The power in the art of Brancusi and Mondrian had an early and profound effect on Leon Polk Smith who became one of the leading American non-objective color-field precisionists. Smith's success lied in his ability to create works which had a simple, colorful hard-edge presence. His strongest examples of these artistic tenets can be found in his Constellation Series, beginning in 1967. Native American born artist Leon Polk Smith came to New York City, at 30 years of age, in 1936 to study at Columbia University's Teachers' College. 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 irresistible to Smith, and in 1945, he began to explore the formal problems inherent in the creation of non-objective art. 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." The New York experience was a turning point, and he never looked back. His genius in extending the boundaries of the available geometric tenants truly took hard-edge minimalism to the next level. His free-hand approach, use of diagonals and circles and the abandonment of the European geometricians' grids would "re-invent the purpose of geometric abstraction”. Smith's work is including in the permanent collections of numerous museums including the Guggenheim, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the National Gallery of Art. LEON POLK SMITH - Addison Parks, 1985; Courtesy ARTS Magazine Leon Polk Smith admits to being one of the twice born; art too claims its converts. Seated in his New York apartment, which also hosts his studio, he speaks softly and serenely of the life art has shared with him. The air is surprisingly fresh and relaxed, it doesn't feel like New York. His living room is cool and bright from a crossfire of east and west exposures, high up they overlook Union Square on one side and face a cathedral of water towers on the other. Only Smith's paintings dress the walls, and they light the room with an elegance which is betrayed only by their jaunty and jubilant spirit. He explains that while he is an ardent art enthusiast, all of his ideas come from his own works, and they serve him well by being where he can look at them. He speaks with a gently rhythmic but a touch crusty southwestern accent, and there is still a shadow of the rugged frontier about him, which can be traced back to his work. "I discovered art my last year in college ... 1934. Having grown up in Oklahoma and having been older than the state, there wasn't much art there. So it was still younger than I at college age, and I had never seen an original painting. I don't think I knew anyone very well who even had art in their vocabulary. And it's quite by accident that I discovered art. That last year, I was in a building I had never been in before, walking down the hall, looking into the rooms as I passed. . . and this room had students and they were painting and drawing. And somehow that fascinated me immediately. I thought: I wish I could do that. And l went in and asked the instructor if I could come in and work for the rest of the term. He said yes. I think I realized very quickly that I had always been an artist, and that that was what I wanted. That I would always keep it for myself, that I would never prostitute it, or do anything with it just for money. I had prepared to be a teacher. When I started school, I said, I want to be a teacher, and it never entered my mind.... Even after I discovered art, and said I was going to be an artist, I knew that to make a living I would do what had been my first choice, which was teaching. I taught for about twenty-five years. After I finished college, and taught one year, I came to New York in 1936 to study at Columbia ... get my Masters ... education and psychology. I knew I wasn't going to start selling paintings (he laughs). Paintings didn't start selling to somehow support me until about 1957. That's when I stopped teaching. " From the awesome horizontality of the Oklahoma plains to New York's concrete peaks and valleys, Smith's one preoccupation has been space. From the late thirties through the early fifties it was the Constructivist space of Mondrian which dominated his scope: pure rectilinear abstraction with a parity of positive and negative form. Like many others working under the mast of Constructivism, Smith was looking for the next step up, a stage further in the evolution. Some painters pursued lyrical abstraction, but these solutions sat too self-centered to excite him. So he pushed on. "When I discovered this thing in 1954, of dividing a canvas into two areas, painting in two colors, I did about twelve to fifteen tondos before I was able to carry the idea over into the rectangle. Because I discovered the idea on a circular format, you know I must have told you about seeing this athletic catalog ... the illustrations that were done that were pencil drawings rather than photographs, of a baseball, tennis ball, football ... that came into my studio, that was in the mail. I don't know why it was sent to me ... found myself going through the catalog ... looking through the drawings. certainly was not interested in any of them as a baseball or a basketball, but I was looking. And I thought, what the hell am I doing this for, why am I looking at this ? And a little voice says, because that's what you're looking for ... that excited me and l knew immediately what it meant. I rushed into my studio, got some paper and a compass and started drawing circles and dividing them up. Then l had to start inventing my own break up. I was inspired. Because that presented what was I looking for? When Mondrian died, I think 1945, people said he had hit a dead end, or a stone wall and I said I don't think so. There is no such thing as a stone wall except in one's mind. I said to myself, I think it would be wonderful to use his great discovery of the interchange of elements of form and space, or background-- foreground, although he only used it at a direct angle or a straight line--if one could find a way of using that in curvilinear form-and that's what I was looking for, all through the forties ... I certainly wouldn't have gone to an athletic catalog to find it, but that's where I found it. Of course the shapes and lines were very limited, and immediately had to start finding my own, which I did. But then that created a space there that I had never seen in painting before. It was flat and at the same time it was curved. It was like a sphere. The planes seemed to move in every direction, as space does. And so I thought, maybe that is because that's on the tondo. I've got to find out if that is true or not. I've got to do some on a rectangle to see if the form and the space still moved in every direction. And it did. So it was exciting to do a painting on a rectangle that seemed to have a curved sur-face. It was the first time, you see that I had made an important step myself, or contribution in art. Color and shape are the converging planes which form the fulcrum over which Smith see-saws his space. They form the language of which he is a master. Color and shape are his domain, the crossbars of his scope - his words. With them he writes poetry; poems which magnificently sweep their time and space into a single gesture. In space there is no up or down; up here is down there on the otherside of the globe. Smith enlarged the concept of space in painting to meet with the twentieth century, everything moves at a diagonal. He first started experimenting with this in the rectilinear Constructivism of the forties - he implied lines which moved diagonally between points. Later he exposed the diagonals and still maintained a vocabulary of implied lines. Both are central to his dialogue, especially today. In the multiple panels Smith takes the concept of positive/negative parity one step further. He invites the surrounding space into the experience, and activates it into an equal exchange. The painting becomes a point of departure - a runway into space. We sense the awe in this work, and wonder. These latest paintings are of a dimension so large, so fast and so deep, they tower like futurist space machines, seeming to pulsate on the threshold of infinity. Smith constantly talks of excitement as though it were an essential. He has a faith in what art can do, and be, and this is supremely evident in his work; so much so that with it he restores even our doubt in the doubt intrinsic to both. . . . lsn't it simply wonderful to be able to paint? That's what l wanted to do. Now I can - It's something I would pay to do, if I were able to, if I had to.
Leon Polk Smith (American, 1906-1996) Lithograph. Purple and White Hard-edge Color Lithograph Print. Signature lower right Leon Polk Smith. Edition lower left 20/20. The Plexiglass box frame measures 30 inches high, 21 inches wide. In good condition. The painting is from the personal collection and estate of Leon Polk Smith's life partner and assistant, Robert Jamieson (1926-2020). A letter of provenance from Robert Jamieson will be included with the lithograph along with a LPS exhibition catalog and photo of Leon in his New York studio. From AskArt: The power in the art of Brancusi and Mondrian had an early and profound effect on Leon Polk Smith who became one of the leading American non-objective color-field precisionists. Smith's success lied in his ability to create works which had a simple, colorful hard-edge presence. His strongest examples of these artistic tenets can be found in his Constellation Series, beginning in 1967. Native American born artist Leon Polk Smith came to New York City, at 30 years of age, in 1936 to study at Columbia University's Teachers' College. 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 irresistible to Smith, and in 1945, he began to explore the formal problems inherent in the creation of non-objective art. 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." The New York experience was a turning point, and he never looked back. His genius in extending the boundaries of the available geometric tenants truly took hard-edge minimalism to the next level. His free-hand approach, use of diagonals and circles and the abandonment of the European geometricians' grids would "re-invent the purpose of geometric abstraction”. Smith's work is including in the permanent collections of numerous museums including the Guggenheim, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the National Gallery of Art. LEON POLK SMITH - Addison Parks, 1985; Courtesy ARTS Magazine Leon Polk Smith admits to being one of the twice born; art too claims its converts. Seated in his New York apartment, which also hosts his studio, he speaks softly and serenely of the life art has shared with him. The air is surprisingly fresh and relaxed, it doesn't feel like New York. His living room is cool and bright from a crossfire of east and west exposures, high up they overlook Union Square on one side and face a cathedral of water towers on the other. Only Smith's paintings dress the walls, and they light the room with an elegance which is betrayed only by their jaunty and jubilant spirit. He explains that while he is an ardent art enthusiast, all of his ideas come from his own works, and they serve him well by being where he can look at them. He speaks with a gently rhythmic but a touch crusty southwestern accent, and there is still a shadow of the rugged frontier about him, which can be traced back to his work. "I discovered art my last year in college ... 1934. Having grown up in Oklahoma and having been older than the state, there wasn't much art there. So it was still younger than I at college age, and I had never seen an original painting. I don't think I knew anyone very well who even had art in their vocabulary. And it's quite by accident that I discovered art. That last year, I was in a building I had never been in before, walking down the hall, looking into the rooms as I passed. . . and this room had students and they were painting and drawing. And somehow that fascinated me immediately. I thought: I wish I could do that. And l went in and asked the instructor if I could come in and work for the rest of the term. He said yes. I think I realized very quickly that I had always been an artist, and that that was what I wanted. That I would always keep it for myself, that I would never prostitute it, or do anything with it just for money. I had prepared to be a teacher. When I started school, I said, I want to be a teacher, and it never entered my mind.... Even after I discovered art, and said I was going to be an artist, I knew that to make a living I would do what had been my first choice, which was teaching. I taught for about twenty-five years. After I finished college, and taught one year, I came to New York in 1936 to study at Columbia ... get my Masters ... education and psychology. I knew I wasn't going to start selling paintings (he laughs). Paintings didn't start selling to somehow support me until about 1957. That's when I stopped teaching. " From the awesome horizontality of the Oklahoma plains to New York's concrete peaks and valleys, Smith's one preoccupation has been space. From the late thirties through the early fifties it was the Constructivist space of Mondrian which dominated his scope: pure rectilinear abstraction with a parity of positive and negative form. Like many others working under the mast of Constructivism, Smith was looking for the next step up, a stage further in the evolution. Some painters pursued lyrical abstraction, but these solutions sat too self-centered to excite him. So he pushed on. "When I discovered this thing in 1954, of dividing a canvas into two areas, painting in two colors, I did about twelve to fifteen tondos before I was able to carry the idea over into the rectangle. Because I discovered the idea on a circular format, you know I must have told you about seeing this athletic catalog ... the illustrations that were done that were pencil drawings rather than photographs, of a baseball, tennis ball, football ... that came into my studio, that was in the mail. I don't know why it was sent to me ... found myself going through the catalog ... looking through the drawings. certainly was not interested in any of them as a baseball or a basketball, but I was looking. And I thought, what the hell am I doing this for, why am I looking at this ? And a little voice says, because that's what you're looking for ... that excited me and l knew immediately what it meant. I rushed into my studio, got some paper and a compass and started drawing circles and dividing them up. Then l had to start inventing my own break up. I was inspired. Because that presented what was I looking for? When Mondrian died, I think 1945, people said he had hit a dead end, or a stone wall and I said I don't think so. There is no such thing as a stone wall except in one's mind. I said to myself, I think it would be wonderful to use his great discovery of the interchange of elements of form and space, or background-- foreground, although he only used it at a direct angle or a straight line--if one could find a way of using that in curvilinear form-and that's what I was looking for, all through the forties ... I certainly wouldn't have gone to an athletic catalog to find it, but that's where I found it. Of course the shapes and lines were very limited, and immediately had to start finding my own, which I did. But then that created a space there that I had never seen in painting before. It was flat and at the same time it was curved. It was like a sphere. The planes seemed to move in every direction, as space does. And so I thought, maybe that is because that's on the tondo. I've got to find out if that is true or not. I've got to do some on a rectangle to see if the form and the space still moved in every direction. And it did. So it was exciting to do a painting on a rectangle that seemed to have a curved sur-face. It was the first time, you see that I had made an important step myself, or contribution in art. Color and shape are the converging planes which form the fulcrum over which Smith see-saws his space. They form the language of which he is a master. Color and shape are his domain, the crossbars of his scope - his words. With them he writes poetry; poems which magnificently sweep their time and space into a single gesture. In space there is no up or down; up here is down there on the otherside of the globe. Smith enlarged the concept of space in painting to meet with the twentieth century, everything moves at a diagonal. He first started experimenting with this in the rectilinear Constructivism of the forties - he implied lines which moved diagonally between points. Later he exposed the diagonals and still maintained a vocabulary of implied lines. Both are central to his dialogue, especially today. In the multiple panels Smith takes the concept of positive/negative parity one step further. He invites the surrounding space into the experience, and activates it into an equal exchange. The painting becomes a point of departure - a runway into space. We sense the awe in this work, and wonder. These latest paintings are of a dimension so large, so fast and so deep, they tower like futurist space machines, seeming to pulsate on the threshold of infinity. Smith constantly talks of excitement as though it were an essential. He has a faith in what art can do, and be, and this is supremely evident in his work; so much so that with it he restores even our doubt in the doubt intrinsic to both. . . . lsn't it simply wonderful to be able to paint? That's what l wanted to do. Now I can - It's something I would pay to do, if I were able to, if I had to.
Leon Polk Smith (American, 1906-1996) Lithograph. Title - Black and White Lithograph (Z). Signed lower right Leon Polk Smith. Signed Artist's Proof lower left. Art Lending Service, Museum of Modern Art label on the reverse. Measures 30.3 inches high, 22.5 inches wide. Plexiglass box frame. In good condition aside from a tiny spot of moisture at bottom right. The lithograph is from the personal collection and estate of Leon Polk Smith's life partner and assistant, Robert Jamieson (1926-2020). A letter of provenance from Robert Jamieson will be included with the print along with a LPS exhibition catalog and photo of Leon in his New York studio. In good condition. From AskArt: The power in the art of Brancusi and Mondrian had an early and profound effect on Leon Polk Smith who became one of the leading American non-objective color-field precisionists. Smith's success lied in his ability to create works which had a simple, colorful hard-edge presence. His strongest examples of these artistic tenets can be found in his Constellation Series, beginning in 1967. Native American born artist Leon Polk Smith came to New York City, at 30 years of age, in 1936 to study at Columbia University's Teachers' College. 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 irresistible to Smith, and in 1945, he began to explore the formal problems inherent in the creation of non-objective art. 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." The New York experience was a turning point, and he never looked back. His genius in extending the boundaries of the available geometric tenants truly took hard-edge minimalism to the next level. His free-hand approach, use of diagonals and circles and the abandonment of the European geometricians' grids would "re-invent the purpose of geometric abstraction”. Smith's work is including in the permanent collections of numerous museums including the Guggenheim, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the National Gallery of Art. LEON POLK SMITH - Addison Parks, 1985; Courtesy ARTS Magazine Leon Polk Smith admits to being one of the twice born; art too claims its converts. Seated in his New York apartment, which also hosts his studio, he speaks softly and serenely of the life art has shared with him. The air is surprisingly fresh and relaxed, it doesn't feel like New York. His living room is cool and bright from a crossfire of east and west exposures, high up they overlook Union Square on one side and face a cathedral of water towers on the other. Only Smith's paintings dress the walls, and they light the room with an elegance which is betrayed only by their jaunty and jubilant spirit. He explains that while he is an ardent art enthusiast, all of his ideas come from his own works, and they serve him well by being where he can look at them. He speaks with a gently rhythmic but a touch crusty southwestern accent, and there is still a shadow of the rugged frontier about him, which can be traced back to his work. "I discovered art my last year in college ... 1934. Having grown up in Oklahoma and having been older than the state, there wasn't much art there. So it was still younger than I at college age, and I had never seen an original painting. I don't think I knew anyone very well who even had art in their vocabulary. And it's quite by accident that I discovered art. That last year, I was in a building I had never been in before, walking down the hall, looking into the rooms as I passed. . . and this room had students and they were painting and drawing. And somehow that fascinated me immediately. I thought: I wish I could do that. And l went in and asked the instructor if I could come in and work for the rest of the term. He said yes. I think I realized very quickly that I had always been an artist, and that that was what I wanted. That I would always keep it for myself, that I would never prostitute it, or do anything with it just for money. I had prepared to be a teacher. When I started school, I said, I want to be a teacher, and it never entered my mind.... Even after I discovered art, and said I was going to be an artist, I knew that to make a living I would do what had been my first choice, which was teaching. I taught for about twenty-five years. After I finished college, and taught one year, I came to New York in 1936 to study at Columbia ... get my Masters ... education and psychology. I knew I wasn't going to start selling paintings (he laughs). Paintings didn't start selling to somehow support me until about 1957. That's when I stopped teaching. " From the awesome horizontality of the Oklahoma plains to New York's concrete peaks and valleys, Smith's one preoccupation has been space. From the late thirties through the early fifties it was the Constructivist space of Mondrian which dominated his scope: pure rectilinear abstraction with a parity of positive and negative form. Like many others working under the mast of Constructivism, Smith was looking for the next step up, a stage further in the evolution. Some painters pursued lyrical abstraction, but these solutions sat too self-centered to excite him. So he pushed on. "When I discovered this thing in 1954, of dividing a canvas into two areas, painting in two colors, I did about twelve to fifteen tondos before I was able to carry the idea over into the rectangle. Because I discovered the idea on a circular format, you know I must have told you about seeing this athletic catalog ... the illustrations that were done that were pencil drawings rather than photographs, of a baseball, tennis ball, football ... that came into my studio, that was in the mail. I don't know why it was sent to me ... found myself going through the catalog ... looking through the drawings. certainly was not interested in any of them as a baseball or a basketball, but I was looking. And I thought, what the hell am I doing this for, why am I looking at this ? And a little voice says, because that's what you're looking for ... that excited me and l knew immediately what it meant. I rushed into my studio, got some paper and a compass and started drawing circles and dividing them up. Then l had to start inventing my own break up. I was inspired. Because that presented what was I looking for? When Mondrian died, I think 1945, people said he had hit a dead end, or a stone wall and I said I don't think so. There is no such thing as a stone wall except in one's mind. I said to myself, I think it would be wonderful to use his great discovery of the interchange of elements of form and space, or background-- foreground, although he only used it at a direct angle or a straight line--if one could find a way of using that in curvilinear form-and that's what I was looking for, all through the forties ... I certainly wouldn't have gone to an athletic catalog to find it, but that's where I found it. Of course the shapes and lines were very limited, and immediately had to start finding my own, which I did. But then that created a space there that I had never seen in painting before. It was flat and at the same time it was curved. It was like a sphere. The planes seemed to move in every direction, as space does. And so I thought, maybe that is because that's on the tondo. I've got to find out if that is true or not. I've got to do some on a rectangle to see if the form and the space still moved in every direction. And it did. So it was exciting to do a painting on a rectangle that seemed to have a curved sur-face. It was the first time, you see that I had made an important step myself, or contribution in art. Color and shape are the converging planes which form the fulcrum over which Smith see-saws his space. They form the language of which he is a master. Color and shape are his domain, the crossbars of his scope - his words. With them he writes poetry; poems which magnificently sweep their time and space into a single gesture. In space there is no up or down; up here is down there on the otherside of the globe. Smith enlarged the concept of space in painting to meet with the twentieth century, everything moves at a diagonal. He first started experimenting with this in the rectilinear Constructivism of the forties - he implied lines which moved diagonally between points. Later he exposed the diagonals and still maintained a vocabulary of implied lines. Both are central to his dialogue, especially today. In the multiple panels Smith takes the concept of positive/negative parity one step further. He invites the surrounding space into the experience, and activates it into an equal exchange. The painting becomes a point of departure - a runway into space. We sense the awe in this work, and wonder. These latest paintings are of a dimension so large, so fast and so deep, they tower like futurist space machines, seeming to pulsate on the threshold of infinity. Smith constantly talks of excitement as though it were an essential. He has a faith in what art can do, and be, and this is supremely evident in his work; so much so that with it he restores even our doubt in the doubt intrinsic to both. . . . lsn't it simply wonderful to be able to paint? That's what l wanted to do. Now I can - It's something I would pay to do, if I were able to, if I had to.
Leon Polk Smith (American, 1906-1996) Four artist signed 1961 Painted Rocks. Decorated with black geometric and linear shapes on top. Leon hand-painted these rocks that he collected on his walks along the shoreline of Long Island Sound near his home in Shoreham, NY. Brown circle - Signed LP '61. Measures 3.25 high, 2.25 inches wide. Black Curves - Signed LPS '61. Measures 3.1 inches high, 2.8 inches wide. Ribbon - LPS '61 3 inches high, 2.75 inches wide. Measures 3 inches high, 2.75 inches wide. Brown/Beige - Signed S.'61. Measures 2.25 inches high, 1.75 inches wide. The 4 artist rocks are being sold together as one lot. The painted rock collection is from the personal collection and estate of Leon Polk Smith's life partner and assistant, Robert Jamieson (1926-2020). Each smooth, oval-shaped rock is painted with a geometric or organic shape on the top and signed and dated by Smith on the bottom. It is believed that they were intended to be given as gifts or tokens of friendship to Smith's acquaintances - a beautiful and original sentiment. Smith gathered the rocks along the shore of the Long Island Sound, near his and Jamieson's home in Shoreham, N.Y. As an artist, Smith was known for revolutionizing the limits of a canvas and playing with shapes, so it is not surprising that he viewed these rocks as potential canvasses for the bold shapes that characterize his work. Both Smith's life and art can be described as wonderfully vibrant. Born in 1906 in Indian Territory, what is now Oklahoma, Smith eventually found his way to New York to study at the Teacher's College at Columbia University. He discovered a love of art during school, but chose to paint only as a hobby while he worked as a teacher for nearly 25 years. In a 1985 interview with Addison Parks for ARTS Magazine, Smith said, - I think I realized very quickly that I had always been an artist, and that that was what I wanted. That I would always keep it for myself, that I would never prostitute it, or do anything with it just for money. This desire to maintain the integrity of his work is what kept Smith from becoming a full- time professional artist for the earlier part of his life. Smith developed his true identity and style as an artist in the 1950s, when he was inspired by the divided spaces on baseballs and tennis balls pictured in a sports equipment catalog that was randomly delivered to his home. This unexpected inspiration culminated in a career that spectacularly explored space and color. Addison Parks writes of Smith's work, - Still, more than anything else, more than its power to define our space and time, which is so tremendous it is sometimes hard to deal with, it is the poetry of color and shape in this work that makes it mean so much. Although simple in premise and execution, Smith's painted rocks are nevertheless an extension of the - poetry of color and shape that Parks refers to. They are a fun exploration of the juxtaposition between primitive and sophisticated, organic and geometric that characterizes Smith's style. From AskArt: The power in the art of Brancusi and Mondrian had an early and profound effect on Leon Polk Smith who became one of the leading American non-objective color-field precisionists. Smith's success lied in his ability to create works which had a simple, colorful hard-edge presence. His strongest examples of these artistic tenets can be found in his Constellation Series, beginning in 1967. Native American born artist Leon Polk Smith came to New York City, at 30 years of age, in 1936 to study at Columbia University's Teachers' College. 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 irresistible to Smith, and in 1945, he began to explore the formal problems inherent in the creation of non-objective art. 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." The New York experience was a turning point, and he never looked back. His genius in extending the boundaries of the available geometric tenants truly took hard-edge minimalism to the next level. His free-hand approach, use of diagonals and circles and the abandonment of the European geometricians' grids would "re-invent the purpose of geometric abstraction”. Smith's work is including in the permanent collections of numerous museums including the Guggenheim, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the National Gallery of Art. LEON POLK SMITH - Addison Parks, 1985; Courtesy ARTS Magazine Leon Polk Smith admits to being one of the twice born; art too claims its converts. Seated in his New York apartment, which also hosts his studio, he speaks softly and serenely of the life art has shared with him. The air is surprisingly fresh and relaxed, it doesn't feel like New York. His living room is cool and bright from a crossfire of east and west exposures, high up they overlook Union Square on one side and face a cathedral of water towers on the other. Only Smith's paintings dress the walls, and they light the room with an elegance which is betrayed only by their jaunty and jubilant spirit. He explains that while he is an ardent art enthusiast, all of his ideas come from his own works, and they serve him well by being where he can look at them. He speaks with a gently rhythmic but a touch crusty southwestern accent, and there is still a shadow of the rugged frontier about him, which can be traced back to his work. "I discovered art my last year in college ... 1934. Having grown up in Oklahoma and having been older than the state, there wasn't much art there. So it was still younger than I at college age, and I had never seen an original painting. I don't think I knew anyone very well who even had art in their vocabulary. And it's quite by accident that I discovered art. That last year, I was in a building I had never been in before, walking down the hall, looking into the rooms as I passed. . . and this room had students and they were painting and drawing. And somehow that fascinated me immediately. I thought: I wish I could do that. And l went in and asked the instructor if I could come in and work for the rest of the term. He said yes. I think I realized very quickly that I had always been an artist, and that that was what I wanted. That I would always keep it for myself, that I would never prostitute it, or do anything with it just for money. I had prepared to be a teacher. When I started school, I said, I want to be a teacher, and it never entered my mind.... Even after I discovered art, and said I was going to be an artist, I knew that to make a living I would do what had been my first choice, which was teaching. I taught for about twenty-five years. After I finished college, and taught one year, I came to New York in 1936 to study at Columbia ... get my Masters ... education and psychology. I knew I wasn't going to start selling paintings (he laughs). Paintings didn't start selling to somehow support me until about 1957. That's when I stopped teaching. " From the awesome horizontality of the Oklahoma plains to New York's concrete peaks and valleys, Smith's one preoccupation has been space. From the late thirties through the early fifties it was the Constructivist space of Mondrian which dominated his scope: pure rectilinear abstraction with a parity of positive and negative form. Like many others working under the mast of Constructivism, Smith was looking for the next step up, a stage further in the evolution. Some painters pursued lyrical abstraction, but these solutions sat too self-centered to excite him. So he pushed on. "When I discovered this thing in 1954, of dividing a canvas into two areas, painting in two colors, I did about twelve to fifteen tondos before I was able to carry the idea over into the rectangle. Because I discovered the idea on a circular format, you know I must have told you about seeing this athletic catalog ... the illustrations that were done that were pencil drawings rather than photographs, of a baseball, tennis ball, football ... that came into my studio, that was in the mail. I don't know why it was sent to me ... found myself going through the catalog ... looking through the drawings. certainly was not interested in any of them as a baseball or a basketball, but I was looking. And I thought, what the hell am I doing this for, why am I looking at this ? And a little voice says, because that's what you're looking for ... that excited me and l knew immediately what it meant. I rushed into my studio, got some paper and a compass and started drawing circles and dividing them up. Then l had to start inventing my own break up. I was inspired. Because that presented what was I looking for? When Mondrian died, I think 1945, people said he had hit a dead end, or a stone wall and I said I don't think so. There is no such thing as a stone wall except in one's mind. I said to myself, I think it would be wonderful to use his great discovery of the interchange of elements of form and space, or background-- foreground, although he only used it at a direct angle or a straight line--if one could find a way of using that in curvilinear form-and that's what I was looking for, all through the forties ... I certainly wouldn't have gone to an athletic catalog to find it, but that's where I found it. Of course the shapes and lines were very limited, and immediately had to start finding my own, which I did. But then that created a space there that I had never seen in painting before. It was flat and at the same time it was curved. It was like a sphere. The planes seemed to move in every direction, as space does. And so I thought, maybe that is because that's on the tondo. I've got to find out if that is true or not. I've got to do some on a rectangle to see if the form and the space still moved in every direction. And it did. So it was exciting to do a painting on a rectangle that seemed to have a curved sur-face. It was the first time, you see that I had made an important step myself, or contribution in art. Color and shape are the converging planes which form the fulcrum over which Smith see-saws his space. They form the language of which he is a master. Color and shape are his domain, the crossbars of his scope - his words. With them he writes poetry; poems which magnificently sweep their time and space into a single gesture. In space there is no up or down; up here is down there on the otherside of the globe. Smith enlarged the concept of space in painting to meet with the twentieth century, everything moves at a diagonal. He first started experimenting with this in the rectilinear Constructivism of the forties - he implied lines which moved diagonally between points. Later he exposed the diagonals and still maintained a vocabulary of implied lines. Both are central to his dialogue, especially today. In the multiple panels Smith takes the concept of positive/negative parity one step further. He invites the surrounding space into the experience, and activates it into an equal exchange. The painting becomes a point of departure - a runway into space. We sense the awe in this work, and wonder. These latest paintings are of a dimension so large, so fast and so deep, they tower like futurist space machines, seeming to pulsate on the threshold of infinity. Smith constantly talks of excitement as though it were an essential. He has a faith in what art can do, and be, and this is supremely evident in his work; so much so that with it he restores even our doubt in the doubt intrinsic to both. . . . lsn't it simply wonderful to be able to paint? That's what l wanted to do. Now I can - It's something I would pay to do, if I were able to, if I had to.
Leon Polk Smith (American, 1906-1996) Orange and Black Triangles Hard-edge Painting. Watercolor painting is on heavy cardstock. Signed Leon Polk Smith lower right and dated ‘84. Measures 14.1 inches high, 20 .1 inches wide. Brushed aluminum frame measures 14.5 inches high, 21.5 inches wide. The painting is from the personal collection and estate of Leon Polk Smith's life partner and assistant, Robert Jamieson (1926-2020). A letter of provenance from Robert Jamieson will be included with the painting along with a LPS exhibition catalog and photo of Leon in his New York studio. In good condition. From AskArt: The power in the art of Brancusi and Mondrian had an early and profound effect on Leon Polk Smith who became one of the leading American non-objective color-field precisionists. Smith's success lied in his ability to create works which had a simple, colorful hard-edge presence. His strongest examples of these artistic tenets can be found in his Constellation Series, beginning in 1967. Native American born artist Leon Polk Smith came to New York City, at 30 years of age, in 1936 to study at Columbia University's Teachers' College. 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 irresistible to Smith, and in 1945, he began to explore the formal problems inherent in the creation of non-objective art. 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." The New York experience was a turning point, and he never looked back. His genius in extending the boundaries of the available geometric tenants truly took hard-edge minimalism to the next level. His free-hand approach, use of diagonals and circles and the abandonment of the European geometricians' grids would "re-invent the purpose of geometric abstraction”. Smith's work is including in the permanent collections of numerous museums including the Guggenheim, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the National Gallery of Art. LEON POLK SMITH - Addison Parks, 1985; Courtesy ARTS Magazine Leon Polk Smith admits to being one of the twice born; art too claims its converts. Seated in his New York apartment, which also hosts his studio, he speaks softly and serenely of the life art has shared with him. The air is surprisingly fresh and relaxed, it doesn't feel like New York. His living room is cool and bright from a crossfire of east and west exposures, high up they overlook Union Square on one side and face a cathedral of water towers on the other. Only Smith's paintings dress the walls, and they light the room with an elegance which is betrayed only by their jaunty and jubilant spirit. He explains that while he is an ardent art enthusiast, all of his ideas come from his own works, and they serve him well by being where he can look at them. He speaks with a gently rhythmic but a touch crusty southwestern accent, and there is still a shadow of the rugged frontier about him, which can be traced back to his work. "I discovered art my last year in college ... 1934. Having grown up in Oklahoma and having been older than the state, there wasn't much art there. So it was still younger than I at college age, and I had never seen an original painting. I don't think I knew anyone very well who even had art in their vocabulary. And it's quite by accident that I discovered art. That last year, I was in a building I had never been in before, walking down the hall, looking into the rooms as I passed. . . and this room had students and they were painting and drawing. And somehow that fascinated me immediately. I thought: I wish I could do that. And l went in and asked the instructor if I could come in and work for the rest of the term. He said yes. I think I realized very quickly that I had always been an artist, and that that was what I wanted. That I would always keep it for myself, that I would never prostitute it, or do anything with it just for money. I had prepared to be a teacher. When I started school, I said, I want to be a teacher, and it never entered my mind.... Even after I discovered art, and said I was going to be an artist, I knew that to make a living I would do what had been my first choice, which was teaching. I taught for about twenty-five years. After I finished college, and taught one year, I came to New York in 1936 to study at Columbia ... get my Masters ... education and psychology. I knew I wasn't going to start selling paintings (he laughs). Paintings didn't start selling to somehow support me until about 1957. That's when I stopped teaching. " From the awesome horizontality of the Oklahoma plains to New York's concrete peaks and valleys, Smith's one preoccupation has been space. From the late thirties through the early fifties it was the Constructivist space of Mondrian which dominated his scope: pure rectilinear abstraction with a parity of positive and negative form. Like many others working under the mast of Constructivism, Smith was looking for the next step up, a stage further in the evolution. Some painters pursued lyrical abstraction, but these solutions sat too self-centered to excite him. So he pushed on. "When I discovered this thing in 1954, of dividing a canvas into two areas, painting in two colors, I did about twelve to fifteen tondos before I was able to carry the idea over into the rectangle. Because I discovered the idea on a circular format, you know I must have told you about seeing this athletic catalog ... the illustrations that were done that were pencil drawings rather than photographs, of a baseball, tennis ball, football ... that came into my studio, that was in the mail. I don't know why it was sent to me ... found myself going through the catalog ... looking through the drawings. certainly was not interested in any of them as a baseball or a basketball, but I was looking. And I thought, what the hell am I doing this for, why am I looking at this ? And a little voice says, because that's what you're looking for ... that excited me and l knew immediately what it meant. I rushed into my studio, got some paper and a compass and started drawing circles and dividing them up. Then l had to start inventing my own break up. I was inspired. Because that presented what was I looking for? When Mondrian died, I think 1945, people said he had hit a dead end, or a stone wall and I said I don't think so. There is no such thing as a stone wall except in one's mind. I said to myself, I think it would be wonderful to use his great discovery of the interchange of elements of form and space, or background-- foreground, although he only used it at a direct angle or a straight line--if one could find a way of using that in curvilinear form-and that's what I was looking for, all through the forties ... I certainly wouldn't have gone to an athletic catalog to find it, but that's where I found it. Of course the shapes and lines were very limited, and immediately had to start finding my own, which I did. But then that created a space there that I had never seen in painting before. It was flat and at the same time it was curved. It was like a sphere. The planes seemed to move in every direction, as space does. And so I thought, maybe that is because that's on the tondo. I've got to find out if that is true or not. I've got to do some on a rectangle to see if the form and the space still moved in every direction. And it did. So it was exciting to do a painting on a rectangle that seemed to have a curved sur-face. It was the first time, you see that I had made an important step myself, or contribution in art. Color and shape are the converging planes which form the fulcrum over which Smith see-saws his space. They form the language of which he is a master. Color and shape are his domain, the crossbars of his scope - his words. With them he writes poetry; poems which magnificently sweep their time and space into a single gesture. In space there is no up or down; up here is down there on the otherside of the globe. Smith enlarged the concept of space in painting to meet with the twentieth century, everything moves at a diagonal. He first started experimenting with this in the rectilinear Constructivism of the forties - he implied lines which moved diagonally between points. Later he exposed the diagonals and still maintained a vocabulary of implied lines. Both are central to his dialogue, especially today. In the multiple panels Smith takes the concept of positive/negative parity one step further. He invites the surrounding space into the experience, and activates it into an equal exchange. The painting becomes a point of departure - a runway into space. We sense the awe in this work, and wonder. These latest paintings are of a dimension so large, so fast and so deep, they tower like futurist space machines, seeming to pulsate on the threshold of infinity. Smith constantly talks of excitement as though it were an essential. He has a faith in what art can do, and be, and this is supremely evident in his work; so much so that with it he restores even our doubt in the doubt intrinsic to both. . . . lsn't it simply wonderful to be able to paint? That's what l wanted to do. Now I can - It's something I would pay to do, if I were able to, if I had to.
Leon Polk Smith (American, 1906-1996) Folding Screen Maquette Painting. The double-sided maquette painting (black and white) on one side and (red and black) on the other. The maquette most likely was a study for a large scale folding screen. Oil painting is on heavy cardstock. Signed lower right LPS ‘60. Measures 14 inches high, 8.5 inches wide. The maquette painting is from the personal collection and estate of Leon Polk Smith's life partner and assistant, Robert Jamieson (1926-2020). A letter of provenance from Robert Jamieson will be included with the painting along with a LPS exhibition catalog and photo of Leon in his New York studio. In good condition. From AskArt: The power in the art of Brancusi and Mondrian had an early and profound effect on Leon Polk Smith who became one of the leading American non-objective color-field precisionists. Smith's success lied in his ability to create works which had a simple, colorful hard-edge presence. His strongest examples of these artistic tenets can be found in his Constellation Series, beginning in 1967. Native American born artist Leon Polk Smith came to New York City, at 30 years of age, in 1936 to study at Columbia University's Teachers' College. 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 irresistible to Smith, and in 1945, he began to explore the formal problems inherent in the creation of non-objective art. 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." The New York experience was a turning point, and he never looked back. His genius in extending the boundaries of the available geometric tenants truly took hard-edge minimalism to the next level. His free-hand approach, use of diagonals and circles and the abandonment of the European geometricians' grids would "re-invent the purpose of geometric abstraction”. Smith's work is including in the permanent collections of numerous museums including the Guggenheim, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the National Gallery of Art. LEON POLK SMITH - Addison Parks, 1985; Courtesy ARTS Magazine Leon Polk Smith admits to being one of the twice born; art too claims its converts. Seated in his New York apartment, which also hosts his studio, he speaks softly and serenely of the life art has shared with him. The air is surprisingly fresh and relaxed, it doesn't feel like New York. His living room is cool and bright from a crossfire of east and west exposures, high up they overlook Union Square on one side and face a cathedral of water towers on the other. Only Smith's paintings dress the walls, and they light the room with an elegance which is betrayed only by their jaunty and jubilant spirit. He explains that while he is an ardent art enthusiast, all of his ideas come from his own works, and they serve him well by being where he can look at them. He speaks with a gently rhythmic but a touch crusty southwestern accent, and there is still a shadow of the rugged frontier about him, which can be traced back to his work. "I discovered art my last year in college ... 1934. Having grown up in Oklahoma and having been older than the state, there wasn't much art there. So it was still younger than I at college age, and I had never seen an original painting. I don't think I knew anyone very well who even had art in their vocabulary. And it's quite by accident that I discovered art. That last year, I was in a building I had never been in before, walking down the hall, looking into the rooms as I passed. . . and this room had students and they were painting and drawing. And somehow that fascinated me immediately. I thought: I wish I could do that. And l went in and asked the instructor if I could come in and work for the rest of the term. He said yes. I think I realized very quickly that I had always been an artist, and that that was what I wanted. That I would always keep it for myself, that I would never prostitute it, or do anything with it just for money. I had prepared to be a teacher. When I started school, I said, I want to be a teacher, and it never entered my mind.... Even after I discovered art, and said I was going to be an artist, I knew that to make a living I would do what had been my first choice, which was teaching. I taught for about twenty-five years. After I finished college, and taught one year, I came to New York in 1936 to study at Columbia ... get my Masters ... education and psychology. I knew I wasn't going to start selling paintings (he laughs). Paintings didn't start selling to somehow support me until about 1957. That's when I stopped teaching. " From the awesome horizontality of the Oklahoma plains to New York's concrete peaks and valleys, Smith's one preoccupation has been space. From the late thirties through the early fifties it was the Constructivist space of Mondrian which dominated his scope: pure rectilinear abstraction with a parity of positive and negative form. Like many others working under the mast of Constructivism, Smith was looking for the next step up, a stage further in the evolution. Some painters pursued lyrical abstraction, but these solutions sat too self-centered to excite him. So he pushed on. "When I discovered this thing in 1954, of dividing a canvas into two areas, painting in two colors, I did about twelve to fifteen tondos before I was able to carry the idea over into the rectangle. Because I discovered the idea on a circular format, you know I must have told you about seeing this athletic catalog ... the illustrations that were done that were pencil drawings rather than photographs, of a baseball, tennis ball, football ... that came into my studio, that was in the mail. I don't know why it was sent to me ... found myself going through the catalog ... looking through the drawings. certainly was not interested in any of them as a baseball or a basketball, but I was looking. And I thought, what the hell am I doing this for, why am I looking at this ? And a little voice says, because that's what you're looking for ... that excited me and l knew immediately what it meant. I rushed into my studio, got some paper and a compass and started drawing circles and dividing them up. Then l had to start inventing my own break up. I was inspired. Because that presented what was I looking for? When Mondrian died, I think 1945, people said he had hit a dead end, or a stone wall and I said I don't think so. There is no such thing as a stone wall except in one's mind. I said to myself, I think it would be wonderful to use his great discovery of the interchange of elements of form and space, or background-- foreground, although he only used it at a direct angle or a straight line--if one could find a way of using that in curvilinear form-and that's what I was looking for, all through the forties ... I certainly wouldn't have gone to an athletic catalog to find it, but that's where I found it. Of course the shapes and lines were very limited, and immediately had to start finding my own, which I did. But then that created a space there that I had never seen in painting before. It was flat and at the same time it was curved. It was like a sphere. The planes seemed to move in every direction, as space does. And so I thought, maybe that is because that's on the tondo. I've got to find out if that is true or not. I've got to do some on a rectangle to see if the form and the space still moved in every direction. And it did. So it was exciting to do a painting on a rectangle that seemed to have a curved sur-face. It was the first time, you see that I had made an important step myself, or contribution in art. Color and shape are the converging planes which form the fulcrum over which Smith see-saws his space. They form the language of which he is a master. Color and shape are his domain, the crossbars of his scope - his words. With them he writes poetry; poems which magnificently sweep their time and space into a single gesture. In space there is no up or down; up here is down there on the otherside of the globe. Smith enlarged the concept of space in painting to meet with the twentieth century, everything moves at a diagonal. He first started experimenting with this in the rectilinear Constructivism of the forties - he implied lines which moved diagonally between points. Later he exposed the diagonals and still maintained a vocabulary of implied lines. Both are central to his dialogue, especially today. In the multiple panels Smith takes the concept of positive/negative parity one step further. He invites the surrounding space into the experience, and activates it into an equal exchange. The painting becomes a point of departure - a runway into space. We sense the awe in this work, and wonder. These latest paintings are of a dimension so large, so fast and so deep, they tower like futurist space machines, seeming to pulsate on the threshold of infinity. Smith constantly talks of excitement as though it were an essential. He has a faith in what art can do, and be, and this is supremely evident in his work; so much so that with it he restores even our doubt in the doubt intrinsic to both. . . . lsn't it simply wonderful to be able to paint? That's what l wanted to do. Now I can - It's something I would pay to do, if I were able to, if I had to.
Leon Polk Smith (American, 1906-1996) Folding Screen Maquette Painting. The double-sided maquette painting (black and orange) on one side and (red and black) on the other, most likely was a study for a large scale folding screen. Oil painting is on heavy cardstock. Unsigned. Measures 5.5 inches high, 11 inches wide. The painting is from the personal collection and estate of Leon Polk Smith's life partner and assistant, Robert Jamieson (1926-2020). A letter of provenance from Robert Jamieson will be included with the maquette, along with a LPS exhibition catalog and photo of Leon in his New York studio. In good condition. From AskArt: The power in the art of Brancusi and Mondrian had an early and profound effect on Leon Polk Smith who became one of the leading American non-objective color-field precisionists. Smith's success lied in his ability to create works which had a simple, colorful hard-edge presence. His strongest examples of these artistic tenets can be found in his Constellation Series, beginning in 1967. Native American born artist Leon Polk Smith came to New York City, at 30 years of age, in 1936 to study at Columbia University's Teachers' College. 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 irresistible to Smith, and in 1945, he began to explore the formal problems inherent in the creation of non-objective art. 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." The New York experience was a turning point, and he never looked back. His genius in extending the boundaries of the available geometric tenants truly took hard-edge minimalism to the next level. His free-hand approach, use of diagonals and circles and the abandonment of the European geometricians' grids would "re-invent the purpose of geometric abstraction”. Smith's work is including in the permanent collections of numerous museums including the Guggenheim, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the National Gallery of Art. LEON POLK SMITH - Addison Parks, 1985; Courtesy ARTS Magazine Leon Polk Smith admits to being one of the twice born; art too claims its converts. Seated in his New York apartment, which also hosts his studio, he speaks softly and serenely of the life art has shared with him. The air is surprisingly fresh and relaxed, it doesn't feel like New York. His living room is cool and bright from a crossfire of east and west exposures, high up they overlook Union Square on one side and face a cathedral of water towers on the other. Only Smith's paintings dress the walls, and they light the room with an elegance which is betrayed only by their jaunty and jubilant spirit. He explains that while he is an ardent art enthusiast, all of his ideas come from his own works, and they serve him well by being where he can look at them. He speaks with a gently rhythmic but a touch crusty southwestern accent, and there is still a shadow of the rugged frontier about him, which can be traced back to his work. "I discovered art my last year in college ... 1934. Having grown up in Oklahoma and having been older than the state, there wasn't much art there. So it was still younger than I at college age, and I had never seen an original painting. I don't think I knew anyone very well who even had art in their vocabulary. And it's quite by accident that I discovered art. That last year, I was in a building I had never been in before, walking down the hall, looking into the rooms as I passed. . . and this room had students and they were painting and drawing. And somehow that fascinated me immediately. I thought: I wish I could do that. And l went in and asked the instructor if I could come in and work for the rest of the term. He said yes. I think I realized very quickly that I had always been an artist, and that that was what I wanted. That I would always keep it for myself, that I would never prostitute it, or do anything with it just for money. I had prepared to be a teacher. When I started school, I said, I want to be a teacher, and it never entered my mind.... Even after I discovered art, and said I was going to be an artist, I knew that to make a living I would do what had been my first choice, which was teaching. I taught for about twenty-five years. After I finished college, and taught one year, I came to New York in 1936 to study at Columbia ... get my Masters ... education and psychology. I knew I wasn't going to start selling paintings (he laughs). Paintings didn't start selling to somehow support me until about 1957. That's when I stopped teaching. " From the awesome horizontality of the Oklahoma plains to New York's concrete peaks and valleys, Smith's one preoccupation has been space. From the late thirties through the early fifties it was the Constructivist space of Mondrian which dominated his scope: pure rectilinear abstraction with a parity of positive and negative form. Like many others working under the mast of Constructivism, Smith was looking for the next step up, a stage further in the evolution. Some painters pursued lyrical abstraction, but these solutions sat too self-centered to excite him. So he pushed on. "When I discovered this thing in 1954, of dividing a canvas into two areas, painting in two colors, I did about twelve to fifteen tondos before I was able to carry the idea over into the rectangle. Because I discovered the idea on a circular format, you know I must have told you about seeing this athletic catalog ... the illustrations that were done that were pencil drawings rather than photographs, of a baseball, tennis ball, football ... that came into my studio, that was in the mail. I don't know why it was sent to me ... found myself going through the catalog ... looking through the drawings. certainly was not interested in any of them as a baseball or a basketball, but I was looking. And I thought, what the hell am I doing this for, why am I looking at this ? And a little voice says, because that's what you're looking for ... that excited me and l knew immediately what it meant. I rushed into my studio, got some paper and a compass and started drawing circles and dividing them up. Then l had to start inventing my own break up. I was inspired. Because that presented what was I looking for? When Mondrian died, I think 1945, people said he had hit a dead end, or a stone wall and I said I don't think so. There is no such thing as a stone wall except in one's mind. I said to myself, I think it would be wonderful to use his great discovery of the interchange of elements of form and space, or background-- foreground, although he only used it at a direct angle or a straight line--if one could find a way of using that in curvilinear form-and that's what I was looking for, all through the forties ... I certainly wouldn't have gone to an athletic catalog to find it, but that's where I found it. Of course the shapes and lines were very limited, and immediately had to start finding my own, which I did. But then that created a space there that I had never seen in painting before. It was flat and at the same time it was curved. It was like a sphere. The planes seemed to move in every direction, as space does. And so I thought, maybe that is because that's on the tondo. I've got to find out if that is true or not. I've got to do some on a rectangle to see if the form and the space still moved in every direction. And it did. So it was exciting to do a painting on a rectangle that seemed to have a curved sur-face. It was the first time, you see that I had made an important step myself, or contribution in art. Color and shape are the converging planes which form the fulcrum over which Smith see-saws his space. They form the language of which he is a master. Color and shape are his domain, the crossbars of his scope - his words. With them he writes poetry; poems which magnificently sweep their time and space into a single gesture. In space there is no up or down; up here is down there on the otherside of the globe. Smith enlarged the concept of space in painting to meet with the twentieth century, everything moves at a diagonal. He first started experimenting with this in the rectilinear Constructivism of the forties - he implied lines which moved diagonally between points. Later he exposed the diagonals and still maintained a vocabulary of implied lines. Both are central to his dialogue, especially today. In the multiple panels Smith takes the concept of positive/negative parity one step further. He invites the surrounding space into the experience, and activates it into an equal exchange. The painting becomes a point of departure - a runway into space. We sense the awe in this work, and wonder. These latest paintings are of a dimension so large, so fast and so deep, they tower like futurist space machines, seeming to pulsate on the threshold of infinity. Smith constantly talks of excitement as though it were an essential. He has a faith in what art can do, and be, and this is supremely evident in his work; so much so that with it he restores even our doubt in the doubt intrinsic to both. . . . lsn't it simply wonderful to be able to paint? That's what l wanted to do. Now I can - It's something I would pay to do, if I were able to, if I had to.
Leon Polk Smith (American, 1906-1996) Painting. Title - Black Red and Blue Painting. Oil on masonite painting. Leon Polk Smith referred to this format as his Shields. Signed lower right LPS '60. Measures 11 inches high, 7.5 inches wide. Unframed. The painting is from the personal collection of Leon Polk Smith's life partner and assistant, Robert Jamieson (1926-2020). A signed letter of provenance from Robert Jamieson will be included with the painting along with a Leon Polk Smith exhibition catalog and photo of Leon in his New York studio. In good condition. From AskArt: The power in the art of Brancusi and Mondrian had an early and profound effect on Leon Polk Smith who became one of the leading American non-objective color-field precisionists. Smith's success lied in his ability to create works which had a simple, colorful hard-edge presence. His strongest examples of these artistic tenets can be found in his Constellation Series, beginning in 1967. Native American born artist Leon Polk Smith came to New York City, at 30 years of age, in 1936 to study at Columbia University's Teachers' College. 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 irresistible to Smith, and in 1945, he began to explore the formal problems inherent in the creation of non-objective art. 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." The New York experience was a turning point, and he never looked back. His genius in extending the boundaries of the available geometric tenants truly took hard-edge minimalism to the next level. His free-hand approach, use of diagonals and circles and the abandonment of the European geometricians' grids would "re-invent the purpose of geometric abstraction”. Smith's work is including in the permanent collections of numerous museums including the Guggenheim, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the National Gallery of Art. LEON POLK SMITH - Addison Parks, 1985; Courtesy ARTS Magazine Leon Polk Smith admits to being one of the twice born; art too claims its converts. Seated in his New York apartment, which also hosts his studio, he speaks softly and serenely of the life art has shared with him. The air is surprisingly fresh and relaxed, it doesn't feel like New York. His living room is cool and bright from a crossfire of east and west exposures, high up they overlook Union Square on one side and face a cathedral of water towers on the other. Only Smith's paintings dress the walls, and they light the room with an elegance which is betrayed only by their jaunty and jubilant spirit. He explains that while he is an ardent art enthusiast, all of his ideas come from his own works, and they serve him well by being where he can look at them. He speaks with a gently rhythmic but a touch crusty southwestern accent, and there is still a shadow of the rugged frontier about him, which can be traced back to his work. "I discovered art my last year in college ... 1934. Having grown up in Oklahoma and having been older than the state, there wasn't much art there. So it was still younger than I at college age, and I had never seen an original painting. I don't think I knew anyone very well who even had art in their vocabulary. And it's quite by accident that I discovered art. That last year, I was in a building I had never been in before, walking down the hall, looking into the rooms as I passed. . . and this room had students and they were painting and drawing. And somehow that fascinated me immediately. I thought: I wish I could do that. And l went in and asked the instructor if I could come in and work for the rest of the term. He said yes. I think I realized very quickly that I had always been an artist, and that that was what I wanted. That I would always keep it for myself, that I would never prostitute it, or do anything with it just for money. I had prepared to be a teacher. When I started school, I said, I want to be a teacher, and it never entered my mind.... Even after I discovered art, and said I was going to be an artist, I knew that to make a living I would do what had been my first choice, which was teaching. I taught for about twenty-five years. After I finished college, and taught one year, I came to New York in 1936 to study at Columbia ... get my Masters ... education and psychology. I knew I wasn't going to start selling paintings (he laughs). Paintings didn't start selling to somehow support me until about 1957. That's when I stopped teaching. " From the awesome horizontality of the Oklahoma plains to New York's concrete peaks and valleys, Smith's one preoccupation has been space. From the late thirties through the early fifties it was the Constructivist space of Mondrian which dominated his scope: pure rectilinear abstraction with a parity of positive and negative form. Like many others working under the mast of Constructivism, Smith was looking for the next step up, a stage further in the evolution. Some painters pursued lyrical abstraction, but these solutions sat too self-centered to excite him. So he pushed on. "When I discovered this thing in 1954, of dividing a canvas into two areas, painting in two colors, I did about twelve to fifteen tondos before I was able to carry the idea over into the rectangle. Because I discovered the idea on a circular format, you know I must have told you about seeing this athletic catalog ... the illustrations that were done that were pencil drawings rather than photographs, of a baseball, tennis ball, football ... that came into my studio, that was in the mail. I don't know why it was sent to me ... found myself going through the catalog ... looking through the drawings. certainly was not interested in any of them as a baseball or a basketball, but I was looking. And I thought, what the hell am I doing this for, why am I looking at this ? And a little voice says, because that's what you're looking for ... that excited me and l knew immediately what it meant. I rushed into my studio, got some paper and a compass and started drawing circles and dividing them up. Then l had to start inventing my own break up. I was inspired. Because that presented what was I looking for? When Mondrian died, I think 1945, people said he had hit a dead end, or a stone wall and I said I don't think so. There is no such thing as a stone wall except in one's mind. I said to myself, I think it would be wonderful to use his great discovery of the interchange of elements of form and space, or background-- foreground, although he only used it at a direct angle or a straight line--if one could find a way of using that in curvilinear form-and that's what I was looking for, all through the forties ... I certainly wouldn't have gone to an athletic catalog to find it, but that's where I found it. Of course the shapes and lines were very limited, and immediately had to start finding my own, which I did. But then that created a space there that I had never seen in painting before. It was flat and at the same time it was curved. It was like a sphere. The planes seemed to move in every direction, as space does. And so I thought, maybe that is because that's on the tondo. I've got to find out if that is true or not. I've got to do some on a rectangle to see if the form and the space still moved in every direction. And it did. So it was exciting to do a painting on a rectangle that seemed to have a curved sur-face. It was the first time, you see that I had made an important step myself, or contribution in art. Color and shape are the converging planes which form the fulcrum over which Smith see-saws his space. They form the language of which he is a master. Color and shape are his domain, the crossbars of his scope - his words. With them he writes poetry; poems which magnificently sweep their time and space into a single gesture. In space there is no up or down; up here is down there on the otherside of the globe. Smith enlarged the concept of space in painting to meet with the twentieth century, everything moves at a diagonal. He first started experimenting with this in the rectilinear Constructivism of the forties - he implied lines which moved diagonally between points. Later he exposed the diagonals and still maintained a vocabulary of implied lines. Both are central to his dialogue, especially today. In the multiple panels Smith takes the concept of positive/negative parity one step further. He invites the surrounding space into the experience, and activates it into an equal exchange. The painting becomes a point of departure - a runway into space. We sense the awe in this work, and wonder. These latest paintings are of a dimension so large, so fast and so deep, they tower like futurist space machines, seeming to pulsate on the threshold of infinity. Smith constantly talks of excitement as though it were an essential. He has a faith in what art can do, and be, and this is supremely evident in his work; so much so that with it he restores even our doubt in the doubt intrinsic to both. . . . lsn't it simply wonderful to be able to paint? That's what l wanted to do. Now I can - It's something I would pay to do, if I were able to, if I had to.
Leon Polk Smith (American, 1906-1996) Collage. Title - Four Triangles. Collage of two blue and two orange paper triangles applied to a white paper background. Signed lower right Leon Polk Smith ‘74. Inscribed on the reverse Leon Polk Smith. Frame measures 22.4 inches high, 30 inches wide. The collage is from the personal collection and estate of Leon Polk Smith’s life partner and assistant, Robert Jamieson (1926-2020). ). A letter of provenance from Robert Jamieson will be included with the collage along with a LPS exhibition catalog and photo of Leon in his New York studio. In good condition. From AskArt: The power in the art of Brancusi and Mondrian had an early and profound effect on Leon Polk Smith who became one of the leading American non-objective color-field precisionists. Smith's success lied in his ability to create works which had a simple, colorful hard-edge presence. His strongest examples of these artistic tenets can be found in his Constellation Series, beginning in 1967. Native American born artist Leon Polk Smith came to New York City, at 30 years of age, in 1936 to study at Columbia University's Teachers' College. 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 irresistible to Smith, and in 1945, he began to explore the formal problems inherent in the creation of non-objective art. 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." The New York experience was a turning point, and he never looked back. His genius in extending the boundaries of the available geometric tenants truly took hard-edge minimalism to the next level. His free-hand approach, use of diagonals and circles and the abandonment of the European geometricians' grids would "re-invent the purpose of geometric abstraction”. Smith's work is including in the permanent collections of numerous museums including the Guggenheim, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the National Gallery of Art. LEON POLK SMITH - Addison Parks, 1985; Courtesy ARTS Magazine Leon Polk Smith admits to being one of the twice born; art too claims its converts. Seated in his New York apartment, which also hosts his studio, he speaks softly and serenely of the life art has shared with him. The air is surprisingly fresh and relaxed, it doesn't feel like New York. His living room is cool and bright from a crossfire of east and west exposures, high up they overlook Union Square on one side and face a cathedral of water towers on the other. Only Smith's paintings dress the walls, and they light the room with an elegance which is betrayed only by their jaunty and jubilant spirit. He explains that while he is an ardent art enthusiast, all of his ideas come from his own works, and they serve him well by being where he can look at them. He speaks with a gently rhythmic but a touch crusty southwestern accent, and there is still a shadow of the rugged frontier about him, which can be traced back to his work. "I discovered art my last year in college ... 1934. Having grown up in Oklahoma and having been older than the state, there wasn't much art there. So it was still younger than I at college age, and I had never seen an original painting. I don't think I knew anyone very well who even had art in their vocabulary. And it's quite by accident that I discovered art. That last year, I was in a building I had never been in before, walking down the hall, looking into the rooms as I passed. . . and this room had students and they were painting and drawing. And somehow that fascinated me immediately. I thought: I wish I could do that. And l went in and asked the instructor if I could come in and work for the rest of the term. He said yes. I think I realized very quickly that I had always been an artist, and that that was what I wanted. That I would always keep it for myself, that I would never prostitute it, or do anything with it just for money. I had prepared to be a teacher. When I started school, I said, I want to be a teacher, and it never entered my mind.... Even after I discovered art, and said I was going to be an artist, I knew that to make a living I would do what had been my first choice, which was teaching. I taught for about twenty-five years. After I finished college, and taught one year, I came to New York in 1936 to study at Columbia ... get my Masters ... education and psychology. I knew I wasn't going to start selling paintings (he laughs). Paintings didn't start selling to somehow support me until about 1957. That's when I stopped teaching. " From the awesome horizontality of the Oklahoma plains to New York's concrete peaks and valleys, Smith's one preoccupation has been space. From the late thirties through the early fifties it was the Constructivist space of Mondrian which dominated his scope: pure rectilinear abstraction with a parity of positive and negative form. Like many others working under the mast of Constructivism, Smith was looking for the next step up, a stage further in the evolution. Some painters pursued lyrical abstraction, but these solutions sat too self-centered to excite him. So he pushed on. "When I discovered this thing in 1954, of dividing a canvas into two areas, painting in two colors, I did about twelve to fifteen tondos before I was able to carry the idea over into the rectangle. Because I discovered the idea on a circular format, you know I must have told you about seeing this athletic catalog ... the illustrations that were done that were pencil drawings rather than photographs, of a baseball, tennis ball, football ... that came into my studio, that was in the mail. I don't know why it was sent to me ... found myself going through the catalog ... looking through the drawings. certainly was not interested in any of them as a baseball or a basketball, but I was looking. And I thought, what the hell am I doing this for, why am I looking at this ? And a little voice says, because that's what you're looking for ... that excited me and l knew immediately what it meant. I rushed into my studio, got some paper and a compass and started drawing circles and dividing them up. Then l had to start inventing my own break up. I was inspired. Because that presented what was I looking for? When Mondrian died, I think 1945, people said he had hit a dead end, or a stone wall and I said I don't think so. There is no such thing as a stone wall except in one's mind. I said to myself, I think it would be wonderful to use his great discovery of the interchange of elements of form and space, or background-- foreground, although he only used it at a direct angle or a straight line--if one could find a way of using that in curvilinear form-and that's what I was looking for, all through the forties ... I certainly wouldn't have gone to an athletic catalog to find it, but that's where I found it. Of course the shapes and lines were very limited, and immediately had to start finding my own, which I did. But then that created a space there that I had never seen in painting before. It was flat and at the same time it was curved. It was like a sphere. The planes seemed to move in every direction, as space does. And so I thought, maybe that is because that's on the tondo. I've got to find out if that is true or not. I've got to do some on a rectangle to see if the form and the space still moved in every direction. And it did. So it was exciting to do a painting on a rectangle that seemed to have a curved sur-face. It was the first time, you see that I had made an important step myself, or contribution in art. Color and shape are the converging planes which form the fulcrum over which Smith see-saws his space. They form the language of which he is a master. Color and shape are his domain, the crossbars of his scope - his words. With them he writes poetry; poems which magnificently sweep their time and space into a single gesture. In space there is no up or down; up here is down there on the otherside of the globe. Smith enlarged the concept of space in painting to meet with the twentieth century, everything moves at a diagonal. He first started experimenting with this in the rectilinear Constructivism of the forties - he implied lines which moved diagonally between points. Later he exposed the diagonals and still maintained a vocabulary of implied lines. Both are central to his dialogue, especially today. In the multiple panels Smith takes the concept of positive/negative parity one step further. He invites the surrounding space into the experience, and activates it into an equal exchange. The painting becomes a point of departure - a runway into space. We sense the awe in this work, and wonder. These latest paintings are of a dimension so large, so fast and so deep, they tower like futurist space machines, seeming to pulsate on the threshold of infinity. Smith constantly talks of excitement as though it were an essential. He has a faith in what art can do, and be, and this is supremely evident in his work; so much so that with it he restores even our doubt in the doubt intrinsic to both. . . . lsn't it simply wonderful to be able to paint? That's what l wanted to do. Now I can - It's something I would pay to do, if I were able to, if I had to.
Leon Polk Smith (American, 1906-1996) Three Collage Paintings. Oil on canvas applied to paper include, (one red square, one red and black square, and two black squares). Signed lower right Leon Polk Smith ‘85 on each painting - collage. Each measures 18 inches high, 24 inches wide. Unframed. The painting is from the personal collection and estate of Leon Polk Smith's life partner and assistant, Robert Jamieson (1926-2020). A letter of provenance from Robert Jamieson will be included with the 3 collage paintings, along with a LPS exhibition catalog and photo of Leon in his New York studio. In good condition. From AskArt: The power in the art of Brancusi and Mondrian had an early and profound effect on Leon Polk Smith who became one of the leading American non-objective color-field precisionists. Smith's success lied in his ability to create works which had a simple, colorful hard-edge presence. His strongest examples of these artistic tenets can be found in his Constellation Series, beginning in 1967. Native American born artist Leon Polk Smith came to New York City, at 30 years of age, in 1936 to study at Columbia University's Teachers' College. 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 irresistible to Smith, and in 1945, he began to explore the formal problems inherent in the creation of non-objective art. 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." The New York experience was a turning point, and he never looked back. His genius in extending the boundaries of the available geometric tenants truly took hard-edge minimalism to the next level. His free-hand approach, use of diagonals and circles and the abandonment of the European geometricians' grids would "re-invent the purpose of geometric abstraction”. Smith's work is including in the permanent collections of numerous museums including the Guggenheim, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the National Gallery of Art. LEON POLK SMITH - Addison Parks, 1985; Courtesy ARTS Magazine Leon Polk Smith admits to being one of the twice born; art too claims its converts. Seated in his New York apartment, which also hosts his studio, he speaks softly and serenely of the life art has shared with him. The air is surprisingly fresh and relaxed, it doesn't feel like New York. His living room is cool and bright from a crossfire of east and west exposures, high up they overlook Union Square on one side and face a cathedral of water towers on the other. Only Smith's paintings dress the walls, and they light the room with an elegance which is betrayed only by their jaunty and jubilant spirit. He explains that while he is an ardent art enthusiast, all of his ideas come from his own works, and they serve him well by being where he can look at them. He speaks with a gently rhythmic but a touch crusty southwestern accent, and there is still a shadow of the rugged frontier about him, which can be traced back to his work. "I discovered art my last year in college ... 1934. Having grown up in Oklahoma and having been older than the state, there wasn't much art there. So it was still younger than I at college age, and I had never seen an original painting. I don't think I knew anyone very well who even had art in their vocabulary. And it's quite by accident that I discovered art. That last year, I was in a building I had never been in before, walking down the hall, looking into the rooms as I passed. . . and this room had students and they were painting and drawing. And somehow that fascinated me immediately. I thought: I wish I could do that. And l went in and asked the instructor if I could come in and work for the rest of the term. He said yes. I think I realized very quickly that I had always been an artist, and that that was what I wanted. That I would always keep it for myself, that I would never prostitute it, or do anything with it just for money. I had prepared to be a teacher. When I started school, I said, I want to be a teacher, and it never entered my mind.... Even after I discovered art, and said I was going to be an artist, I knew that to make a living I would do what had been my first choice, which was teaching. I taught for about twenty-five years. After I finished college, and taught one year, I came to New York in 1936 to study at Columbia ... get my Masters ... education and psychology. I knew I wasn't going to start selling paintings (he laughs). Paintings didn't start selling to somehow support me until about 1957. That's when I stopped teaching. " From the awesome horizontality of the Oklahoma plains to New York's concrete peaks and valleys, Smith's one preoccupation has been space. From the late thirties through the early fifties it was the Constructivist space of Mondrian which dominated his scope: pure rectilinear abstraction with a parity of positive and negative form. Like many others working under the mast of Constructivism, Smith was looking for the next step up, a stage further in the evolution. Some painters pursued lyrical abstraction, but these solutions sat too self-centered to excite him. So he pushed on. "When I discovered this thing in 1954, of dividing a canvas into two areas, painting in two colors, I did about twelve to fifteen tondos before I was able to carry the idea over into the rectangle. Because I discovered the idea on a circular format, you know I must have told you about seeing this athletic catalog ... the illustrations that were done that were pencil drawings rather than photographs, of a baseball, tennis ball, football ... that came into my studio, that was in the mail. I don't know why it was sent to me ... found myself going through the catalog ... looking through the drawings. certainly was not interested in any of them as a baseball or a basketball, but I was looking. And I thought, what the hell am I doing this for, why am I looking at this ? And a little voice says, because that's what you're looking for ... that excited me and l knew immediately what it meant. I rushed into my studio, got some paper and a compass and started drawing circles and dividing them up. Then l had to start inventing my own break up. I was inspired. Because that presented what was I looking for? "When Mondrian died, I think 1945, people said he had hit a dead end, or a stone wall and I said I don't think so. There is no such thing as a stone wall except in one's mind. I said to myself, I think it would be wonderful to use his great discovery of the interchange of elements of form and space, or background-- foreground, although he only used it at a direct angle or a straight line--if one could find a way of using that in curvilinear form-and that's what I was looking for, all through the forties ... "I certainly wouldn't have gone to an athletic catalog to find it, but that's where I found it. Of course the shapes and lines were very limited, and immediately had to start finding my own, which I did. But then that created a space there that I had never seen in painting before. It was flat and at the same time it was curved. It was like a sphere. The planes seemed to move in every direction, as space does. And so I thought, maybe that is because that's on the tondo. I've got to find out if that is true or not. I've got to do some on a rectangle to see if the form and the space still moved in every direction. And it did. So it was exciting to do a painting on a rectangle that seemed to have a curved sur-face. It was the first time, you see that I had made an important step myself, or contribution in art. " Color and shape are the converging planes which form the fulcrum over which Smith see-saws his space. They form the language of which he is a master. Color and shape are his domain; the crossbars of his scope; his words. With them he writes poetry; poems which magnificently sweep their time and space into a single gesture. In space there is no up or down; up here is down there on the otherside of the globe. Smith enlarged the concept of space in painting to meet with the twentieth century, everything moves at a diagonal. He first started experimenting with this in the rectilinear Constructivism of the forties; he implied lines which moved diagonally between points. Later he exposed the diagonals and still maintained a vocabulary of implied lines. Both are central to his dialogue, especially today. In the multiple panels Smith takes the concept of positive/negative parity one step further. He invites the surrounding space into the experience, and activates it into an equal exchange. The painting becomes a point of departure - a runway into space. We sense the awe in this work, and wonder. These latest paintings are of a dimension so large, so fast and so deep, they tower like futurist space machines, seeming to pulsate on the threshold of infinity. Smith constantly talks of excitement as though it were an essential. He has a faith in what art can do, and be, and this is supremely evident in his work; so much so that with it he restores even our doubt in the doubt intrinsic to both. . . . lsn't it simply wonderful to be able to paint? That's what l wanted to do. Now I can - It's something I would pay to do, if I were able to, if I had to.
Leon Polk Smith (American, 1909-1996) Drawings. Title - Three Study Drawings for a Sculpture. Pencil and colored pencil sketches. Measurements from 8 inches high and 4.8 inches wide to 5.4 inches high and 6.5 inches wide. Inscribed on the bottom of one, 1963 sketch for sculpture and signed LPS. The other signed Sketch for Sculpture 20 (feet) high, dated 63 and signed LPS. The painting is from the personal collection and estate of Leon Polk Smith's life partner and assistant, Robert Jamieson (1926-2020). A letter of provenance from Robert Jamieson will be included with the drawings, along with a LPS exhibition catalog and photo of Leon in his New York studio. In good condition. From AskArt: The power in the art of Brancusi and Mondrian had an early and profound effect on Leon Polk Smith who became one of the leading American non-objective color-field precisionists. Smith's success lied in his ability to create works which had a simple, colorful hard-edge presence. His strongest examples of these artistic tenets can be found in his Constellation Series, beginning in 1967. Native American born artist Leon Polk Smith came to New York City, at 30 years of age, in 1936 to study at Columbia University's Teachers' College. 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 irresistible to Smith, and in 1945, he began to explore the formal problems inherent in the creation of non-objective art. 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." The New York experience was a turning point, and he never looked back. His genius in extending the boundaries of the available geometric tenants truly took hard-edge minimalism to the next level. His free-hand approach, use of diagonals and circles and the abandonment of the European geometricians' grids would "re-invent the purpose of geometric abstraction”. Smith's work is including in the permanent collections of numerous museums including the Guggenheim, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the National Gallery of Art. LEON POLK SMITH - Addison Parks, 1985; Courtesy ARTS Magazine Leon Polk Smith admits to being one of the twice born; art too claims its converts. Seated in his New York apartment, which also hosts his studio, he speaks softly and serenely of the life art has shared with him. The air is surprisingly fresh and relaxed, it doesn't feel like New York. His living room is cool and bright from a crossfire of east and west exposures, high up they overlook Union Square on one side and face a cathedral of water towers on the other. Only Smith's paintings dress the walls, and they light the room with an elegance which is betrayed only by their jaunty and jubilant spirit. He explains that while he is an ardent art enthusiast, all of his ideas come from his own works, and they serve him well by being where he can look at them. He speaks with a gently rhythmic but a touch crusty southwestern accent, and there is still a shadow of the rugged frontier about him, which can be traced back to his work. "I discovered art my last year in college ... 1934. Having grown up in Oklahoma and having been older than the state, there wasn't much art there. So it was still younger than I at college age, and I had never seen an original painting. I don't think I knew anyone very well who even had art in their vocabulary. And it's quite by accident that I discovered art. That last year, I was in a building I had never been in before, walking down the hall, looking into the rooms as I passed. . . and this room had students and they were painting and drawing. And somehow that fascinated me immediately. I thought: I wish I could do that. And l went in and asked the instructor if I could come in and work for the rest of the term. He said yes. I think I realized very quickly that I had always been an artist, and that that was what I wanted. That I would always keep it for myself, that I would never prostitute it, or do anything with it just for money. I had prepared to be a teacher. When I started school, I said, I want to be a teacher, and it never entered my mind.... Even after I discovered art, and said I was going to be an artist, I knew that to make a living I would do what had been my first choice, which was teaching. I taught for about twenty-five years. After I finished college, and taught one year, I came to New York in 1936 to study at Columbia ... get my Masters ... education and psychology. I knew I wasn't going to start selling paintings (he laughs). Paintings didn't start selling to somehow support me until about 1957. That's when I stopped teaching. " From the awesome horizontality of the Oklahoma plains to New York's concrete peaks and valleys, Smith's one preoccupation has been space. From the late thirties through the early fifties it was the Constructivist space of Mondrian which dominated his scope: pure rectilinear abstraction with a parity of positive and negative form. Like many others working under the mast of Constructivism, Smith was looking for the next step up, a stage further in the evolution. Some painters pursued lyrical abstraction, but these solutions sat too self-centered to excite him. So he pushed on. "When I discovered this thing in 1954, of dividing a canvas into two areas, painting in two colors, I did about twelve to fifteen tondos before I was able to carry the idea over into the rectangle. Because I discovered the idea on a circular format, you know I must have told you about seeing this athletic catalog ... the illustrations that were done that were pencil drawings rather than photographs, of a baseball, tennis ball, football ... that came into my studio, that was in the mail. I don't know why it was sent to me ... found myself going through the catalog ... looking through the drawings. certainly was not interested in any of them as a baseball or a basketball, but I was looking. And I thought, what the hell am I doing this for, why am I looking at this ? And a little voice says, because that's what you're looking for ... that excited me and l knew immediately what it meant. I rushed into my studio, got some paper and a compass and started drawing circles and dividing them up. Then l had to start inventing my own break up. I was inspired. Because that presented what was I looking for? "When Mondrian died, I think 1945, people said he had hit a dead end, or a stone wall and I said I don't think so. There is no such thing as a stone wall except in one's mind. I said to myself, I think it would be wonderful to use his great discovery of the interchange of elements of form and space, or background-- foreground, although he only used it at a direct angle or a straight line--if one could find a way of using that in curvilinear form-and that's what I was looking for, all through the forties ... "I certainly wouldn't have gone to an athletic catalog to find it, but that's where I found it. Of course the shapes and lines were very limited, and immediately had to start finding my own, which I did. But then that created a space there that I had never seen in painting before. It was flat and at the same time it was curved. It was like a sphere. The planes seemed to move in every direction, as space does. And so I thought, maybe that is because that's on the tondo. I've got to find out if that is true or not. I've got to do some on a rectangle to see if the form and the space still moved in every direction. And it did. So it was exciting to do a painting on a rectangle that seemed to have a curved sur-face. It was the first time, you see that I had made an important step myself, or contribution in art. " Color and shape are the converging planes which form the fulcrum over which Smith see-saws his space. They form the language of which he is a master. Color and shape are his domain; the crossbars of his scope; his words. With them he writes poetry; poems which magnificently sweep their time and space into a single gesture. In space there is no up or down; up here is down there on the otherside of the globe. Smith enlarged the concept of space in painting to meet with the twentieth century, everything moves at a diagonal. He first started experimenting with this in the rectilinear Constructivism of the forties; he implied lines which moved diagonally between points. Later he exposed the diagonals and still maintained a vocabulary of implied lines. Both are central to his dialogue, especially today. In the multiple panels Smith takes the concept of positive/negative parity one step further. He invites the surrounding space into the experience, and activates it into an equal exchange. The painting becomes a point of departure - a runway into space. We sense the awe in this work, and wonder. These latest paintings are of a dimension so large, so fast and so deep, they tower like futurist space machines, seeming to pulsate on the threshold of infinity. Smith constantly talks of excitement as though it were an essential. He has a faith in what art can do, and be, and this is supremely evident in his work; so much so that with it he restores even our doubt in the doubt intrinsic to both. . . . lsn't it simply wonderful to be able to paint? That's what l wanted to do. Now I can - It's something I would pay to do, if I were able to, if I had to.
Leon Polk Smith (American, 1906-1996) Crescents Collage. Signed lower right Leon Polk Smith 67. In good condition. Not laid down. Two black and orange paper crescent shapes applied to a lavender paper background. Measures 29 inches high, 21 inches wide. Aluminum frame adds 1/4 inch on all sides. The collage is from the personal collection and estate of Leon Polk Smith’s life partner and assistant, Robert Jamieson (1926-2020). In good condition. From AskArt: The power in the art of Brancusi and Mondrian had an early and profound effect on Leon Polk Smith who became one of the leading American non-objective color-field precisionists. Smith's success lied in his ability to create works which had a simple, colorful hard-edge presence. His strongest examples of these artistic tenets can be found in his Constellation Series, beginning in 1967. Native American born artist Leon Polk Smith came to New York City, at 30 years of age, in 1936 to study at Columbia University's Teachers' College. 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 irresistible to Smith, and in 1945, he began to explore the formal problems inherent in the creation of non-objective art. 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." The New York experience was a turning point, and he never looked back. His genius in extending the boundaries of the available geometric tenants truly took hard-edge minimalism to the next level. His free-hand approach, use of diagonals and circles and the abandonment of the European geometricians' grids would "re-invent the purpose of geometric abstraction”. Smith's work is including in the permanent collections of numerous museums including the Guggenheim, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the National Gallery of Art. LEON POLK SMITH - Addison Parks, 1985; Courtesy ARTS Magazine Leon Polk Smith admits to being one of the twice born; art too claims its converts. Seated in his New York apartment, which also hosts his studio, he speaks softly and serenely of the life art has shared with him. The air is surprisingly fresh and relaxed, it doesn't feel like New York. His living room is cool and bright from a crossfire of east and west exposures, high up they overlook Union Square on one side and face a cathedral of water towers on the other. Only Smith's paintings dress the walls, and they light the room with an elegance which is betrayed only by their jaunty and jubilant spirit. He explains that while he is an ardent art enthusiast, all of his ideas come from his own works, and they serve him well by being where he can look at them. He speaks with a gently rhythmic but a touch crusty southwestern accent, and there is still a shadow of the rugged frontier about him, which can be traced back to his work. "I discovered art my last year in college ... 1934. Having grown up in Oklahoma and having been older than the state, there wasn't much art there. So it was still younger than I at college age, and I had never seen an original painting. I don't think I knew anyone very well who even had art in their vocabulary. And it's quite by accident that I discovered art. That last year, I was in a building I had never been in before, walking down the hall, looking into the rooms as I passed. . . and this room had students and they were painting and drawing. And somehow that fascinated me immediately. I thought: I wish I could do that. And l went in and asked the instructor if I could come in and work for the rest of the term. He said yes. I think I realized very quickly that I had always been an artist, and that that was what I wanted. That I would always keep it for myself, that I would never prostitute it, or do anything with it just for money. I had prepared to be a teacher. When I started school, I said, I want to be a teacher, and it never entered my mind.... Even after I discovered art, and said I was going to be an artist, I knew that to make a living I would do what had been my first choice, which was teaching. I taught for about twenty-five years. After I finished college, and taught one year, I came to New York in 1936 to study at Columbia ... get my Masters ... education and psychology. I knew I wasn't going to start selling paintings (he laughs). Paintings didn't start selling to somehow support me until about 1957. That's when I stopped teaching. " From the awesome horizontality of the Oklahoma plains to New York's concrete peaks and valleys, Smith's one preoccupation has been space. From the late thirties through the early fifties it was the Constructivist space of Mondrian which dominated his scope: pure rectilinear abstraction with a parity of positive and negative form. Like many others working under the mast of Constructivism, Smith was looking for the next step up, a stage further in the evolution. Some painters pursued lyrical abstraction, but these solutions sat too self-centered to excite him. So he pushed on. "When I discovered this thing in 1954, of dividing a canvas into two areas, painting in two colors, I did about twelve to fifteen tondos before I was able to carry the idea over into the rectangle. Because I discovered the idea on a circular format, you know I must have told you about seeing this athletic catalog ... the illustrations that were done that were pencil drawings rather than photographs, of a baseball, tennis ball, football ... that came into my studio, that was in the mail. I don't know why it was sent to me ... found myself going through the catalog ... looking through the drawings. certainly was not interested in any of them as a baseball or a basketball, but I was looking. And I thought, what the hell am I doing this for, why am I looking at this ? And a little voice says, because that's what you're looking for ... that excited me and l knew immediately what it meant. I rushed into my studio, got some paper and a compass and started drawing circles and dividing them up. Then l had to start inventing my own break up. I was inspired. Because that presented what was I looking for? "When Mondrian died, I think 1945, people said he had hit a dead end, or a stone wall and I said I don't think so. There is no such thing as a stone wall except in one's mind. I said to myself, I think it would be wonderful to use his great discovery of the interchange of elements of form and space, or background-- foreground, although he only used it at a direct angle or a straight line--if one could find a way of using that in curvilinear form-and that's what I was looking for, all through the forties ... "I certainly wouldn't have gone to an athletic catalog to find it, but that's where I found it. Of course the shapes and lines were very limited, and immediately had to start finding my own, which I did. But then that created a space there that I had never seen in painting before. It was flat and at the same time it was curved. It was like a sphere. The planes seemed to move in every direction, as space does. And so I thought, maybe that is because that's on the tondo. I've got to find out if that is true or not. I've got to do some on a rectangle to see if the form and the space still moved in every direction. And it did. So it was exciting to do a painting on a rectangle that seemed to have a curved sur-face. It was the first time, you see that I had made an important step myself, or contribution in art. " Color and shape are the converging planes which form the fulcrum over which Smith see-saws his space. They form the language of which he is a master. Color and shape are his domain; the crossbars of his scope; his words. With them he writes poetry; poems which magnificently sweep their time and space into a single gesture. In space there is no up or down; up here is down there on the otherside of the globe. Smith enlarged the concept of space in painting to meet with the twentieth century, everything moves at a diagonal. He first started experimenting with this in the rectilinear Constructivism of the forties; he implied lines which moved diagonally between points. Later he exposed the diagonals and still maintained a vocabulary of implied lines. Both are central to his dialogue, especially today. In the multiple panels Smith takes the concept of positive/negative parity one step further. He invites the surrounding space into the experience, and activates it into an equal exchange. The painting becomes a point of departure - a runway into space. We sense the awe in this work, and wonder. These latest paintings are of a dimension so large, so fast and so deep, they tower like futurist space machines, seeming to pulsate on the threshold of infinity. Smith constantly talks of excitement as though it were an essential. He has a faith in what art can do, and be, and this is supremely evident in his work; so much so that with it he restores even our doubt in the doubt intrinsic to both. . . . lsn't it simply wonderful to be able to paint? That's what l wanted to do. Now I can - It's something I would pay to do, if I were able to, if I had to.
Leon Polk Smith (American 1909-1996) Drawing. Untitled 72. (Chevrons). Drawing on paper. Signed lower right Leon Polk Smith 72. On the reverse, Leon Polk Smith. Untitled. Drawing on paper, 1972 measuring 40.2 inches high, 26.2 inches wide. Frame measures 44.2 inches high, 30.5 inches wide. Leon used an old backboard from another piece and the old label is crossed off. The drawing is from the personal collection and estate of Leon Polk Smith's partner and assistant, Robert Jamieson (1926-2020). A letter of provenance from Leon Polk Smith's life partner and assistant, Robert Jamieson will be included with the drawing, along with a LPS exhibition catalog and photo of Leon in his New York studio. In good condition. From AskArt: The power in the art of Brancusi and Mondrian had an early and profound effect on Leon Polk Smith who became one of the leading American non-objective color-field precisionists. Smith's success lied in his ability to create works which had a simple, colorful hard-edge presence. His strongest examples of these artistic tenets can be found in his Constellation Series, beginning in 1967. Native American born artist Leon Polk Smith came to New York City, at 30 years of age, in 1936 to study at Columbia University's Teachers' College. 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 irresistible to Smith, and in 1945, he began to explore the formal problems inherent in the creation of non-objective art. 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." The New York experience was a turning point, and he never looked back. His genius in extending the boundaries of the available geometric tenants truly took hard-edge minimalism to the next level. His free-hand approach, use of diagonals and circles and the abandonment of the European geometricians' grids would "re-invent the purpose of geometric abstraction”. Smith's work is including in the permanent collections of numerous museums including the Guggenheim, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the National Gallery of Art. LEON POLK SMITH - Addison Parks, 1985; Courtesy ARTS Magazine Leon Polk Smith admits to being one of the twice born; art too claims its converts. Seated in his New York apartment, which also hosts his studio, he speaks softly and serenely of the life art has shared with him. The air is surprisingly fresh and relaxed, it doesn't feel like New York. His living room is cool and bright from a crossfire of east and west exposures, high up they overlook Union Square on one side and face a cathedral of water towers on the other. Only Smith's paintings dress the walls, and they light the room with an elegance which is betrayed only by their jaunty and jubilant spirit. He explains that while he is an ardent art enthusiast, all of his ideas come from his own works, and they serve him well by being where he can look at them. He speaks with a gently rhythmic but a touch crusty southwestern accent, and there is still a shadow of the rugged frontier about him, which can be traced back to his work. "I discovered art my last year in college ... 1934. Having grown up in Oklahoma and having been older than the state, there wasn't much art there. So it was still younger than I at college age, and I had never seen an original painting. I don't think I knew anyone very well who even had art in their vocabulary. And it's quite by accident that I discovered art. That last year, I was in a building I had never been in before, walking down the hall, looking into the rooms as I passed. . . and this room had students and they were painting and drawing. And somehow that fascinated me immediately. I thought: I wish I could do that. And l went in and asked the instructor if I could come in and work for the rest of the term. He said yes. I think I realized very quickly that I had always been an artist, and that that was what I wanted. That I would always keep it for myself, that I would never prostitute it, or do anything with it just for money. I had prepared to be a teacher. When I started school, I said, I want to be a teacher, and it never entered my mind.... Even after I discovered art, and said I was going to be an artist, I knew that to make a living I would do what had been my first choice, which was teaching. I taught for about twenty-five years. After I finished college, and taught one year, I came to New York in 1936 to study at Columbia ... get my Masters ... education and psychology. I knew I wasn't going to start selling paintings (he laughs). Paintings didn't start selling to somehow support me until about 1957. That's when I stopped teaching. " From the awesome horizontality of the Oklahoma plains to New York's concrete peaks and valleys, Smith's one preoccupation has been space. From the late thirties through the early fifties it was the Constructivist space of Mondrian which dominated his scope: pure rectilinear abstraction with a parity of positive and negative form. Like many others working under the mast of Constructivism, Smith was looking for the next step up, a stage further in the evolution. Some painters pursued lyrical abstraction, but these solutions sat too self-centered to excite him. So he pushed on. "When I discovered this thing in 1954, of dividing a canvas into two areas, painting in two colors, I did about twelve to fifteen tondos before I was able to carry the idea over into the rectangle. Because I discovered the idea on a circular format, you know I must have told you about seeing this athletic catalog ... the illustrations that were done that were pencil drawings rather than photographs, of a baseball, tennis ball, football ... that came into my studio, that was in the mail. I don't know why it was sent to me ... found myself going through the catalog ... looking through the drawings. certainly was not interested in any of them as a baseball or a basketball, but I was looking. And I thought, what the hell am I doing this for, why am I looking at this ? And a little voice says, because that's what you're looking for ... that excited me and l knew immediately what it meant. I rushed into my studio, got some paper and a compass and started drawing circles and dividing them up. Then l had to start inventing my own break up. I was inspired. Because that presented what was I looking for? "When Mondrian died, I think 1945, people said he had hit a dead end, or a stone wall and I said I don't think so. There is no such thing as a stone wall except in one's mind. I said to myself, I think it would be wonderful to use his great discovery of the interchange of elements of form and space, or background-- foreground, although he only used it at a direct angle or a straight line--if one could find a way of using that in curvilinear form-and that's what I was looking for, all through the forties ... "I certainly wouldn't have gone to an athletic catalog to find it, but that's where I found it. Of course the shapes and lines were very limited, and immediately had to start finding my own, which I did. But then that created a space there that I had never seen in painting before. It was flat and at the same time it was curved. It was like a sphere. The planes seemed to move in every direction, as space does. And so I thought, maybe that is because that's on the tondo. I've got to find out if that is true or not. I've got to do some on a rectangle to see if the form and the space still moved in every direction. And it did. So it was exciting to do a painting on a rectangle that seemed to have a curved sur-face. It was the first time, you see that I had made an important step myself, or contribution in art. " Color and shape are the converging planes which form the fulcrum over which Smith see-saws his space. They form the language of which he is a master. Color and shape are his domain; the crossbars of his scope; his words. With them he writes poetry; poems which magnificently sweep their time and space into a single gesture. In space there is no up or down; up here is down there on the otherside of the globe. Smith enlarged the concept of space in painting to meet with the twentieth century, everything moves at a diagonal. He first started experimenting with this in the rectilinear Constructivism of the forties; he implied lines which moved diagonally between points. Later he exposed the diagonals and still maintained a vocabulary of implied lines. Both are central to his dialogue, especially today. In the multiple panels Smith takes the concept of positive/negative parity one step further. He invites the surrounding space into the experience, and activates it into an equal exchange. The painting becomes a point of departure - a runway into space. We sense the awe in this work, and wonder. These latest paintings are of a dimension so large, so fast and so deep, they tower like futurist space machines, seeming to pulsate on the threshold of infinity. Smith constantly talks of excitement as though it were an essential. He has a faith in what art can do, and be, and this is supremely evident in his work; so much so that with it he restores even our doubt in the doubt intrinsic to both. . . . lsn't it simply wonderful to be able to paint? That's what l wanted to do. Now I can - It's something I would pay to do, if I were able to, if I had to.
Leon Polk Smith (American, 1906-1996) Constellation P, 1969 acrylic on canvas signed Leon Polk Smith, titled and dated (verso) 47 1/4 x 47 1/4 inches. Property from a Private Art Collection
