In This Case: Tony Smith June 5, 2007

In This Case is a series of periodic posts on art in the Luce Foundation Center, a visible art storage facility at the Smithsonian American Art Museum that displays more than 3,300 pieces in fifty-seven cases.

Tony Smith, She Who Must Be Obeyed, 1975, assembled and painted fiberboard, 20 5/8 x 30 3/4 x 11 1/2 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Transfer from the General Services Administration, Art-in-Architecture Program, 1979.159.21

Only the maquette for Tony Smith's sculpture, She Who Must Be Obeyed, can be found in the Luce Center; the sculpture itself, however, isn't far away. She Who Must Be Obeyed was commissioned by the General Services Administration in 1974 and completed for the U.S. Department of Labor in Washington, D.C., where it is still located.

The Luce Center has a story about the model:

Smith was concerned with getting the model safely from his studio in New Jersey to Washington, and carefully wrapped it and carried it like “a newborn child” (Thalacker, The Place of Art in the World of Architecture, 1980). The maquette had its own seat on the plane and arrived safely at National Airport. Smith hailed a taxi, and the driver, after insisting that the model would be safer in the trunk than on the seat, slammed the trunk lid on one of its edges.

Smith was uneasy around cars. In 1961, he suffered a car accident that brought about the end of his burgeoning career as an architect. (As a result of the accident, Smith developed a blood disease that made it dangerous for him to drive. Smith had always insisted on supervising construction crews who executed his projects, and his driving restriction hampered his ability to oversee the work.)

Smith turned to teaching, but it was another car ride that brought him to sculpture. Phyllis Tuckman recounts the story:

Smith's esthetic was formed by an epiphany he had in the '50s during a car ride with three of his Cooper Union students along an unfinished portion of the New Jersey turnpike between the Meadowlands and New Brunswick. The story has become one of the most repeated anecdotes in the annals of contemporary art. As Smith told it, the incident sounds much like an occurrence in a Joan Didion novel, hardly the stuff one relates to Minimalism.

According to Smith, "It was a dark night and there were no lights or shoulder markers, lines, railings or anything at all except the dark pavement moving through the landscape of the flats, rimmed by hills in the distance, but punctuated by stacks, towers, fumes and colored lights. This drive was a revealing experience. The road and much of the landscape was artificial, and yet it couldn't be called a work of art. On the other hand, it did something for me that art has never done.

"At first I didn't know what it was, but its effect was to liberate me from many of the views I had about art. It seemed that there was a reality there which had not had any expression in art." The industrial environment captivated him more that evening than many smaller sculptures and colorful paintings he had seen and previously admired in art galleries. The large looming unlit shapes combined mystery with power. Smith wanted his three dimensional forms to operate the way the stacks, towers and fumes had that "dark night."

Smith would make those dark shapes, and eventually return to colorful work and work influenced by architecture, such as She Who Must Be Obeyed. It's unclear, though, that he ever again much cared for cars.

• Tony Smith, Luce Foundation Center for American Art,
  Smithsonian American Art Museum