The sculptor David Smith (1906–65) famously said that he aspired to combine painting and sculpture into “a new art form” that would “beat either one.” He was unsure whether he succeeded every time, but he pursued the possibility throughout his working life, perhaps because he had started as a painter. As he told the story, the Czech Cubist Jan Matulka, his teacher at the Art Students League in the 1920s, encouraged his students to differentiate the areas of their compositions. Smith followed Matulka’s advice so aggressively that the canvas became a base and the painting, a projecting structure of varied parts.

That variety persisted. Beginning with his earliest sculptures, cobbled together with coral, stone, and wire, and continuing in his Surrealist-inflected metal constructions of the 1930s and 1940s, Smith often combined different materials for their individual properties, including their different hues. He colored his steel sculptures almost from the start, sometimes painting them a dull red that suggests industrial primer and, in an ambitious piece made in 1938, applying baked enamel in a rich, dark blue. When he used bronze, he employed a wide variety of patinas. The figures hinted at by the heads “drawn” with thin coils of steel in Billiard Player Construction (1937) are made explicit by the painted bodies on the back of the sculpture. Full-bore polychromy appeared for the first time in the extraordinary Helmholtzian Landscape (1946), an intimate construction that could be described as a subtly articulated exploded painting: a row of intensely