Don Quixote

This 1952 lithograph by David Smith represents the American sculptor's engagement with the print medium during the period when he was producing the "Tanktotem" sculptures and exploring the relationship between two-dimensional drawing and three-dimensional form. The image is based on the theme of Don Quixote, the knight-errant of Cervantes's novel who embodied the conflict between idealism and reality, the subject reflecting Smith's own romantic ambition to transform industrial material into spiritual form. The lithographic technique creates a surface of bold, gestural marks that suggest both the windmills that Quixote mistook for giants and the lance that he wielded against them, the abstract forms evoking the narrative without illustrating it literally. The cream wove paper provides a warm, sympathetic ground that makes the black lithographic lines appear rich and velvety, enhancing the romantic atmosphere of the image. The 1952 date places this work in the same year as "Tanktotem I," suggesting that Smith was simultaneously pursuing sculptural monumentality and graphic intimacy, the two practices enriching each other through their differences of scale and medium. Art historians have connected this print to the broader tradition of the artist's engagement with literature, from the illustrations of Dante by Blake to the Don Quixote paintings of Daumier, noting that Smith's treatment is more abstract, more focused on the formal possibilities of the medium than the narrative content of these more literary predecessors. The work also demonstrates Smith's mastery of lithography as a medium for spontaneous mark-making: the fluidity of the tushe drawing, the range of tonal effects, and the overall energy of the image all reflect the artist's comfort with a medium that many sculptors find challenging.

This 1952 lithograph translated Cervantean idealism into abstract windmill-lance gesture, using warm cream-paper romantic atmosphere to make sculptural monumentality and graphic intimacy simultaneously windmill-giant Quixotic.

It matters because Smith drew Don Quixote and made the lines look like they were tilting at windmills—proving that even a print could be a knight's errand if the lithograph was bold enough.