David Smith's Untitled (c. 1936) is distinguished by a recurring motif that sets it apart from his other paintings of the period: wheels. Totemic, biomorphic figures populate a Surrealist landscape, but here the bicycles and wheeled carriage winding through the scene give the composition its animating energy—and its biographical resonance. The forms recall Smith's formative years working in a car body shop—an experience that left a lasting imprint on his understanding of metal and mechanics—and they directly prefigure the wheeled sculptures that would appear decades later in works such as Voltri VII (1962). 

The three figures are built from Smith's characteristic vocabulary of interlocking organic and geometric forms, but the linear energy here is especially animated: lines trace wheels, limbs, and handlebars in a flickering network that presses against the volumetric shading of the figures' bodies. As Luke Smith-Stevens—Special Projects Manager and Smith's grandson—has observed of this work: "He is balancing linear notation and volumetric shading and construction as means to define a figure and its relationship to its setting…in this painting he seems to be testing some of the principles that would propel" sculpture's evolution from solid mass toward open form and negative space. 

Of the approximately 150 paintings Smith made during the 1930s, only around ten are held in institutional collections—including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, and the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco—underscoring the scarcity of privately held examples from this foundational decade. His works appear in the permanent collections of MoMA, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, and his close friendships with Motherwell and Pollock place him at the very center of the postwar American art world his paintings helped to anticipate.