1905 Building

How do you begin to define what sculpture is and what it is not? During the heyday of Abstract Expressionism, the Buffalo-born painter Ad Reinhardt jokingly defined it as “something you bump into when you back up to look at a painting.” Reinhardt’s glib dismissal of sculpture as an object that occupies real space and ends up getting in your way inevitably sets it at odds with painting. Paradoxically, many postwar sculptors—among them David Smith, whose work is included in the exhibition—began their artistic careers as painters. This common ground, however, did not prevent others from drawing even finer distinctions.

Influential New York critic Clement Greenberg argued that color was exclusive to painting and that sculpture’s third dimension made color superfluous. Greenberg’s rigidly modernist dictates on what sculpture could and could not be prevented him from seeing its imminent transformation. By the early 1960s, the very notion of sculpture as the thing you bump into was about to crack open as the medium cross-pollinated with dance, theater, film, music, and literature, and it extended into the landscape.