LEON POLK SMITH (1906-1996)

Leon Polk Smith, an American painter born in 1906, is best known for his lifelong commitment to simplified shapes, brilliant colors and minimal, pressurized compositions. Smith’s style has been associated with the Hard-edge school of the 1960s, and he was greatly influenced by Constantin Brancusi and Piet Mondrian. In his hard-edged paintings, Smith would push the geometry of Mondrian into curved compositions that celebrated optical tenseness and restraint.

From his first solo exhibition in New York City in 1941 through his death in 1996, Smith’s paintings, which were frequently on shaped or multipart canvases, exuded a buoyancy that was identified as quintessentially American. Roberta Smith, an art critic writing for the New York Times, analyzed his relationship to this uniquely American quality, connecting the overt simplicity, the balance of boldness and pensiveness to what she called a “slightly unhinged optimism.”

Smith has been the subject of numerous retrospectives and his work resides in major institutional collections including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Brooklyn Museum, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum, L.A. County Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.