It also shows how he brought practical skills to the art world.

 

"While we were installing these pieces, one of the riggers who was putting them down said, 'It's nice to actually work with these big sculptures that a real welder put together,' " Clark curator David Breslin said. "You're always afraid of having something happen when you're installing art. But these are really well-made things.

 

"I mean, the dude was making tanks. He can make these sculptures."

 

Smith, who settled in Bolton Landing in the Adirondack region of New York, did actually did help build tanks in Schenectady during World War II. But that was not his first experience working on the line.

 

"He started working for Studebaker right after he left the University of Notre Dame because they had no art classes," Breslin said of the Indiana-born Smith. "He was [at Notre Dame] for two weeks and realized it wasn't for him.

 

"He wanted to be an artist, but he also was someone who wanted to work with things, objects. And he didn't separate himself from a working class, physical type of labor."

 

Breslin said he has been fascinated by Smith since his own undergraduate days. As an English major at Amherst College, he became interested in Smith because he saw him as an "outlier among the Abstract Expressionists."

 

A paper Breslin wrote on Smith helped Breslin get into Williams College's master's program in art history. And his enthusiasm about the show that opens on July 4 is evident.

 

"While there's been tons written about him and he's not lacking in any kind of critical reception, how he fit in has always been kind of an issue," Breslin said while giving a tour of "Raw Color: The Circles of David Smith" at the Lunder Center at Stone Hill. "We know how to talk about the paintings of the period. There's so much about Jackson Pollock. There's so much about Willem De Kooning, two of [Smith's] very good friends when he was working in New York in the 1950s, and we could think about how a European avante garde tradition, from Picasso to Cezanne, how those guys worked through what those older guys were doing with painting.

 

"But with David Smith, it's a little more problematic becuase here's a guy with his welding mask and his torch, and he's working with these heavy materials. And in some ways, he's doing somethign similar to what his buddies were doing. But obviously, they had to be very different because he was working with industrial materials."

 

Works like Smith's Circles series, which are at the heart of the exhibit, come from a period in the 1960s when Smith (1906-1965) had long been doing works on a scale Breslin characterized as monumental.

 

Many of his works still reside on the grounds of the Bolton Landing farm he purchased in 1929 and moved to in 1940.

Smith saw his sculptures as being connected to that landscape, Breslin said. The dialogue between the man-made and the natural was critical to his work.

 

"[Smith] was probably the best photographer of his own works," Breslin said. "He would take these shots at very oblique angles of the work from down below with the clouds and the sky, so it was abundantly clear he was trying to make a relationship between what he was doing and how it related to what was around him."

 

In fact, one of the pieces in "Raw Color" is displayed not in the Lunder Center gallery but on the terrace at Stone Hill, so visitors can better appreciate how Smith's art embraces -- and is embraced by -- the landscape.

 

For conservation reasons, the Circles series itself is displayed indoors -- both at the Clark and in its permanent homes.  Four sculptures that Smith intended to be seen together are usually split up, with three at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and one in the JPMorgan Chase Collection. This summer, they are exhibited together for the first time since 1980, Breslin said.

 

Circle I, Circle II, Circle III and Circle V are arranged at the Lunder Center much as they were on Smith's farm, where used a fairly level plain to show the sculptures, Breslin said. Circle IV, while part of the same series, is displayed separately in the Lunder Center's other gallery.

 

Smith and his curatorial team poured over photos from Smith's estate in figuring out how to arrange the four sequential works, and he is confident their orientation at the Lunder Center is true to Smith's intent -- although the artist had a little more space to work with and would have set the pieces a few more feet apart.

 

"These [three] in the National Gallery of Art's collection ... were all made within 10 days of each other or something like that in the summer of '62," Breslin said. "[Circle V] was made six or seven months later. I think it was living with these installed in the field exactly as we have laid them out here ... I love how he came back several months later and said, 'I need something.' "

 

While as a practical matter the Circles series has to be shown under cover (most of the paint is original, Breslin said), the Lunder Center's "indoor/outdoor" design lends itself to the sculptures' exhibition.

 

The two Smith sculptures displayed outside the Lunder Center -- on the patio and down the hill at the new Clark Center -- are departures from the show's main narrative, namely Smith's use of color.

 

Although it is commonplace today for sculptors to use color in their work, Smith was breaking new ground in the 1950s and '60s, Breslin said. He specifically cited influential critic Clement Greenberg -- a Smith supporter -- as one of the voices arguing that painting and sculpture were separate media that ought not intersect.

 

"There are so many sculptors who are indebted to David Smith because he took that risk," Breslin said. "And it wasn't an obvious thing to do. There's kind of a renegade aspect to that practice.

 

"That's one of the reasons I thought it would be great to have an artist write for the catalog, someone like [Los Angeles sculptor] Charles Ray, who did write for the catalog. Because what Smith does with perception, what he does with color, is in some ways only imaginable because he did it.

 

"Obviously, artists change ... Charles Ray's sculpture looks nothing like a David Smith. But [Smith] created a clearing for people to think about what sculpture could be. Think about Donald Judd or Richard Sierra, and think about how those practies would be different if it wasn't for David Smith."