The sculptor-painter-architect, Tony Smith, born in South Orange, New Jersey in 1912, is one of the best-known unknowns in American art. Most people involved in the art world around New…

IT HAS BEEN JUST OVER a decade since those things Smith described as “black and probably malignant” began to appear on his lawn in South Orange. The longer one sees and …

Tony Smith’s Moondog, 1964, consists of extended polyhedral columns (the “legs” are octahedral; the top, tetrahedral) assembled in a structure that, according to the artist, “relates to Japanese …

Tony Smith’s sculpture Willy, 1962, and his series of drawings of the cube, in various states of monadic completeness, straddle the boundary between sculpture and architecture, stretching …

In this connection Tony Smith’s description of a car ride taken at night on the New Jersey Turnpike before it was finished makes compelling reading: When I was teaching at Cooper …

Yve-Alain Bois I WENT TO THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART’S TONY SMITH retrospective with mixed expectations.

“Talking with Tony Smith,” Samuel Wagstaff Jr.’s 1966 interview for Artforum, is indeed an important chapter in the trajectory of Smith’s career as an artist. And Smith’s comments would …

There is more kinship here with Tony Smith’s sensibility than in all the supposedly self-referential and asymbolic “specific objects” that Minimalism would engender during the ’60s. For all their …

One pleasant surprise of Tony Smith’s retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art (five years ago already!) was the group of paintings known as the “Louisenberg” series, dating from 1953–55,…

Tony Smith’s sometimes monumental sculptures, misleadingly associated with Minimalism when they gained attention in the 1960s, shape the viewer’s perception of space in complex and …