Visitors to the Bennington Museum study the museum's current exhibit of modernist artists. Sculptor David Smith, whose work will be on view at the Clark this summer, had strong ties to Bennington; two of his pieces will be on display at Bennington College this summer.

BENNINGTON, Vt. -- The works of David Smith are coming full circle this summer.

The man described by art historian Rosalind Krauss as having "the greatest body of work produced by any American sculptor" is the subject of one of the Clark Art Institute's special summer-long exhibitions. He is also a man with deep ties to the area.

"Raw Color: The Circles of David Smith," will bring to the Berkshires nine sculptures created by Smith in his Bolton Landing, N.Y., studio. Smith's Adirondack home is just a two-hour drive from the Clark, but his geographic connection is much closer than that.

From 1951 until his death in 1965, Smith was part of an avant garde arts scene that coalesced around Paul Feeley, the director of the art department at Bennington College.

"From all accounts, [Feeley] was an incredibly energetic and magnetic person," said Jamie Franklin, a curator at the Bennington Museum, which celebrates the town's and college's role in the abstract art movement with a continuing exhibition that debuted last summer.

"People were attracted to [Feeley], not only because he was an attractive man at a woman's college but becuase he was very engaging. He was kind of the fulcrum around which a lot of what was happening at the college and the Bennington area at large turned. Because not everyone who was part of what we call, 'Bennington Modernism' had direct ties to the college."

A case in point: the Indiana-born Smith, who moved to New York City in 1926 and the Lake George, N.Y., area in 1940.

In '51, Smith staged the first of two shows at Bennington College. Franklin has two theories on how he ended up in South Shire.

One possibility is Smith found Bennington through his relationship with famed New York art critic Clement Greenberg. Greenberg had a relationship with 1959 Bennington alumna Helen Frankenthaler, a celebrated abstract expressionist painter in her own right.

But Smith also shares a connection with David Gil, the founder of Bennington Potters.

"It might have been a combination of all of these things," Franklin said. "But he had his first exhibition at the college in 1951. He had an exhibition of his drawings at the college in 1959. He was coming back and forth."

And Smith was part of a social circle that included Feeley, Greenberg, Frankenthaler, sculptor Anthony Caro, painter Kenneth Noland and painter and sculptor Jules Olitski.

Frankenthaler, whom the New York Times called "one of the most admired artists of her generation" in her 2011 obituary, was a good friend of Smith's.

A passage from a 1998 publication by the Guggenheim Museum notes the bond that formed between the pair: "In this work, the device is more closely related to the sculpture of David Smith, to whom Greenberg had introduced Frankenthaler in 1950. By the following year, she was visiting Smith's home and studio in upstate New York, and the two formed a strong friendship, one that would affect the work of both artists."

Frankenthaler is among the Bennington Modernists currently represented in the Bennington Museum's gallery. The institution on Vermont's Route 9 west of downtown has had Smith scultures in the past, and it hopes to be able to show his works again in the near future, Franklin said.

"One of the reasons we did this gallery was this was the moment at which Vermont was most central to the larger discussion of American art history and art history at large," he said. "In the '50s and '60s was when America became the center of artistic culture in the world.

"Bennington was really kind of ... when you step back and look at it from a purely geographic standpoint, the number of artists who were considered to be the most important artists doing what they were doing at that time who were connected right here is astounding."

The Bennington Museum is hoping that some of the visitors drawn to the Clark's "Raw Colors" exhibit will be intrigued enough to explore the region's cultural history by making the 20-minute drive north.

Franklin's institution is collaborating with Bennington College, which will have two David Smith works on view this summer itself.

"The idea is a lot of people know the Clark, but they may not be familiar with the Bennington Museum, even though it's a 20-minute drive," he said. "You could do both of us in a day, easily.

"We started this ['Bennington Modernism'] a year ago, but it's a happy collision of people coming to the Clark to see David Smith and see abstract paintings from the National Gallery. ... What we're kind of billing it as is: Come see this art at its source.

"Hopefully people come here and enjoy this galler and the rest of the museum, and then they can go up the hill to Bennington College and literally wander the campus that these men and women were creating art at and get a fuller context."

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