Ballet

David Smiths Ballet from 1941 is an etching that captures the energy and movement of dancers with the linear economy that Smith developed during his early years as a sculptor and draftsman in the orbit of the New York School. The etching depicts dancers in motion, their bodies reduced to a few sweeping lines that suggest both the physical exertion of the dance and the formal rhythm of bodies moving through space. Smith made this etching during the period when he was working at the Terminal Iron Works in Bolton Landing, New York, constructing welded steel sculptures that translated the lessons of Cubism and Constructivism into a specifically American idiom. The etching technique, with its capacity for both sharp line and soft tonal wash, allowed Smith to capture the fluidity of the dancers movements with a directness that would have been impossible in sculpture, where each line must be translated into heavy steel. The ballet subject connects Smith to the tradition of artists who found in dance a model for the relationship between movement and form, from Degass studies of dancers to Matisses paper cut-outs. The etching is also a document of the cultural moment when American artists were absorbing the lessons of European modernism while searching for subjects and styles that reflected specifically American experience.

Smiths early etchings reveal the sources of his sculptural vocabulary in dance, music, and the visual culture of the 1940s New York art world. Ballet demonstrates that his welded steel constructions were not merely industrial in inspiration but rooted in an understanding of movement and rhythm that he first explored on paper.

An energetic etching by Smith from 1941 depicting dancers in motion with sweeping linear economy, connecting his sculptural practice to the tradition of depicting dance and revealing the rhythmic foundations of his welded steel vocabulary.