Leon Polk Smith: Circle and Square, 1948-1987

Leon Polk Smith was born in Oklahoma territory to undocumented Cherokee immigrant parents from Tennessee. He grew up in impoverished circumstances surrounded by Chickasaw community culture. He initially worked on his family farm and then as a journeyman laborer to help support his family. Filled with academic drive, he attended college In Oklahoma and went on to study at Teachers College at Columbia University in New York City. All the while making his own art, he supported himself teaching and as education administrator in Delaware, Georgia, and Florida, before finding his way back to New York City. In 1941, Smith had his first solo show in Manhattan.  

Over the next six decades, culminating with his 1995–96 retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum, Smith sustained a solid, growing reputation as an early and continuing innovator in reductive geometric abstraction and complex, multi-part shaped canvases. In the 1950s and ’60s, younger painters including Al Held, Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, and Jack Youngerman visited his studio, placing his work at a key moment in the transition from gestural to hard-edge abstraction.  

Having first internalized the forms, meanings, and aesthetics of Oklahoma Native American art and culture, Smith, like other US abstract artists, was deeply influenced by the art of Picasso, Mondrian, Arp, Brancusi, and Matisse. He explored other cultural approaches to image, shape, and color in a way that was referential, personal, and yet generalized enough to be broadly accessible. The current show is a survey from 1948 to 1987 of Smith’s exploration of circles, squares, and triangles, along with their interrelationships in positive and negative space. While some works in the show emerge from a single type of shape, most works display the artist's masterful use of tension between shapes that he developed over a lifetime of dedicated investigation.