To the Editors:
It was very interesting to find Karen Wilkin’s paper “David Smith: The Sculptor and His Drawings” in the March New Criterion. It has always seemed inexplicable that Smith’s work should not be seen as a whole. He was very serious about his drawings and they were—certainly many of them—intensely personal. The vicissitudes of his life are reflected in them quite plainly. The spray paintings on canvas and the small ones on paper, done with paper cutouts, were made with great enthusiasm and many were closely related to the sculptures. He traveled about with supplies in his van—or his ancient Mercedes—and worked wherever he found himself.
I lived for some years with many of the drawings and paintings and I found that visitors usually took no interest in them. At that time Sam Wagstaff was at the museum in Hartford and he came in occasionally with young artists or members of his Ladies’ Committee. The Smiths were usually ignored except when I was given ardent lectures on the virtues of Pop Art and the beauty of the Sculls’ foyer, complete with stove draped in artificial vegetables. However, after several visits, Sam stood under one of the horizontal paintings—David hung these horizontally; I think now they are used vertically—and said, “You know, as a painting, this is rather good.” From then on, as a painting has been a password here.
Also at that time the then director of the Fogg Museum sent Rosalind Krauss to
