Leon Polk Smith: Space, Color, & Form. Installation View.
1. Leon Polk Smith was a painter and teacher of Cherokee descent
Leon Polk Smith was born in 1906, a year before Oklahoma became a state. His parents, who were of Cherokee descent, had arrived there in the late nineteenth century, when it was still known as Indian Territory. His abstract paintings were often inspired by the landscapes of the American Southwest. He recalled, “I grew up in the Southwest where the colors in nature were pure and rampant, and where my Indian neighbors and relatives used color to vibrate and shock.”
Smith realized early on that he wanted to pursue a different life, describing his hometown as a “confinement.” Life was not easy; he wrote that with the agrarian lifestyle came “hail storms, destroying entirely one year of crops, droughts, more crop failures, dust bowl, bole weevils, more failures, selling and giving away stock (cattle, horses, hogs), mortgages, trying to pay, moving, moving again, trying to pay and always trying to pay.” After the foreclosure of his parents’ farm, Smith was free to study at Oklahoma State College, where he discovered the art department and “Realized almost at once that [he] had always been an artist.”
Leon Polk Smith, Untitled, 1951. Estimate $10,000 - 15,000. Gallery One.
2. He was deeply influenced by Mondrian
When studying at Columbia University in the 1930s, Smith was introduced to the work of Piet Mondrian. In a letter from 1973, Smith wrote: “I saw Mondrian’s work first when I came to New York from Oklahoma in 1936. However, my work did not become completely abstract until 1943. […] It was never my intention to just paint in the manner of Mondrian. When he died about 1945, most everyone said that he had finished, or that he had painted into a ‘stonewall,’ a ‘dead-end.’ I strongly disagreed and aimed to find a way of expressing form-space, negative-positive with free forms, curvilinear forms, as Mondrian had done only with straight lines and rectangles.”
3. He was a leader of the Hard-Edge School
Smith was inspired by Surrealism, Expressionism, and Modernism, and, eventually, became one of the primary exemplars of Hard-Edge painting. The term was first used in 1959 to describe the geometric, flattened forms of West Coast abstraction (as opposed to the more layered, painterly approach). Smith explored line, color combinations, and focused on form, gravitating towards abstraction as a new visual language with subtle meanings. “Psychologists used to say that we can think without words,” Smith once remarked in an interview. “I don’t know if they changed their mind or not. But I have been able for many years (and observed many people doing the same) to think without words, to think on a non-verbal level. When I am creating these purely abstract paintings I am not thinking with words.” Leon Polk Smith was influential to many later abstract painters including Ellsworth Kelly, and his close friend and neighbor in New York City, Carmen Herrera.
Leon Polk Smith, Untitled, 1955. Estimate $6,000 - 8,000. Gallery One.
4. He fell in love with New York City
Smith initially moved to New York to receive his MA at Columbia’s Teachers College and spent the rest of his life in and out of the city that he loved. New York gave him the distance and freedom that he needed, referring to it as the place he felt most stimulated as an artist. In part, it seems he was attracted to the city as a counterpart to his upbringing, that brought out his unique vision in sharper clarity.
He reflected, “With me, New York City was love at first sight. Somehow it 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. Indeed, an endless drama in itself. I felt the physical city to be a perfect equation for a great abstraction.”
New York City was also home to some of Leon Polk Smith’s most prominent exhibitions, including solo and group shows at various galleries, as well as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Brooklyn Museum.
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