Lisson Gallery is pleased to present Leon Polk Smith: Prairie Moon, an exhibition of works by Leon Polk Smith, organised by the curator, writer, and art historian, Lynn Zelevansky, opening 9 September. While recognised as a forerunner of American hard-edge painting, whose innovative abstractions of the 1950s were highly influential, the Oklahoma-born Smith often went unappreciated during his lifetime. This exhibition, featuring works spanning nearly fifty years of his mature career, from his struggle with the legacy of Mondrian to his impact on the language of abstraction and his acknowledgment, later in life, of the influence on his art of the rural prairies of Oklahoma, where he grew up, and the importance of his Cherokee heritage.
Born to a poor family in 1906 when Oklahoma was still Indian Territory, Smith spent his childhood attending a one-room school house, working on the family farm with his parents and eight siblings, and socialising with his Chickasaw and ChoctawNative American neighbours. After high school he took jobs as a telephone lineman and rancher, sending money home to the family. When they lost the farm, he attended East Central State Normal School in Ada, Oklahoma to realise his dream of becoming a teacher. During his senior year, he walked past an art class and intrigued, decided to audit the course. It was his first exposure to easel painting. Immediately absorbed, he knew that he was an artist. Accepted to Columbia University's Teachers College in New York for a summer course in 1936, he had his first encounter with the city and its blossoming modern art scene.At New York University's Albert E. Gallatin Gallery of Living Art, he saw the work of Modern masters. Jean Arp, Constantin Brancusi and Piet Mondrian made profound impressions on him. During the following years, he met and was mentored by the influential Hilla Rebay, director of the Museum of Non-Objective Painting and chief advisor to Solomon R. Guggenheim.
The works in the exhibition follow Smith's artistic trajectory. In the earliest piece, Untitled (1949), he worked with Mondrian's primaries, outlining red, yellow and white spaces within a grid in strong black lines. The large blue area on the left of the work, however, creates a sense of great depth, countering the older artist's insistence on the shallow space of the grid. Black White Repeat with Red No. 2 of 1953, part of a series of tondos with black-on-white grids that have red or yellow in one of the upper quadrants, continues Smith's work with Mondrian's grid and primary colours, but within the painting is a close-up view of a rupture — an event in which the grid has split, and the space has grown wider at the breaking point, allowing for the perception of a subtle roundness to the image, mirroring the curve of a ball. Smith had been searching for a way to introduce the curve into Mondrian's grid and this was a step toward accomplishing that.
In 1954 Smith encountered a catalogue of drawings of athletic equipment and was fascinated by the seams on the basketballs, tennis balls and baseballs sketched within it, and the way they defined the shapes on either side of them. The power of the line and the relationship between the shapes it creates became a rich and ongoing source of exploration for Smith. In a novel way, he mimicked the sports balls in his paintings, and also invented his own shapes. Rowell (1957) resembles a soccer ball, while in Pontotoc (1958), the shapes within the tondo have metamorphised, and become his own invention.
Press release courtesy Lisson Gallery.
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