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David Smith, American, 1906-1965

More than any other artist of his generation, David Smith brought American sculpture into the international avant garde. Born in Decatur, Indiana, Smith moved to Ohio with his family in 1921. After briefly attending Ohio University, Athens, he moved to New York in 1926, determined to become an artist. Following the advice of his neighbor, Dorothy Dehner, Smith entered the Art Students League. Through Dehner (whom he married in 1927), Jan Matulka, his teacher at the League, and his friendship with 魩gr頡rtist John Graham, Smith was introduced to the contemporary currents of European modernism. In 1933, he forged his first work in steel, following the example of Julio Gonzᬥz and Pablo Picasso. Steel offered unique qualities for Smith, as he explained: "What it can do in arriving at form economically, no other material can do. The metal itself possesses little art history. What associations it possesses are of this century: power, structure, movement, progress, suspension, destruction, brutality."

Two Circle Sentinel exhibits the mastery and delicacy that Smith brought to his later steel constructions. He began to use burnished stainless steel in isolated examples in the 1940s, but it became his preferred medium only in the late 1950s. The image of the sentinel, or "watcher," was a theme that fascinated Smith. He created his first Sentinel in 1956, and by the end of the decade he had created five works in the first series of Sentinel figures; in 1961 he made four additional Sentinel sculptures. Two Circle Sentinel is the first of the 1961 series, and of this group, it is the most comparable to human scale. The anatomical references are handled with grace and wit: the open circle that crowns the work can be read as either a head or an eye; the lower circle evokes the curve of a feminine breast or hip. The various planes of the figure capture light and shadow, and each facet of the burnished surface is immediately responsive to every nuance of illumination. The artist later commented on this series, "They have an odd atmosphere of grandeur and, at the same time, delight." Created for out-of-doors installation, Two Circle Sentinel was placed first on a hillside by Smith at his farm in Bolton Landing, New York. In the Cullen Sculpture Garden, it is one of the first works that greets the visitor entering through the Bissonnet Street gate.