Ned Smyth: Always About Reverence
Ned Smyth doesn’t remember his first visit to the Louvre, since he was 18 months old at the time. Years later, his parents told him that he ran ahead of them as they approached the entrance. Once inside, they found him on his knees, genuflecting.
“I’m not Catholic,” Mr. Smyth said during a recent conversation at his vast Shelter Island studio. “My family never went to church, although I did have an Italian nanny who probably took me to Mass. I realized that my work has always been about reverence. The museum looked to me like a church.”
Over the past four decades, Mr. Smyth has produced a body of work notable for both the consistency of its vision and the variety of forms it has taken. From his early concrete “paintings” to his recent works, which include massive bronze sculptures inspired by stones, “the line going through it all is kind of the same,” he said.
While he has in one sense moved away from the Judeo-Christian architectural vocabulary with which his sculpture of the 1970s and 1980s is associated, the stones that have inspired his recent work have a figurative quality. One in particular he likened to “Winged Victory of Samothrace” at the Louvre.
Mr. Smyth’s father, Craig Hugh Smyth, was a scholar of Renaissance and Mannerist art, director of N.Y.U.’s Institute of Fine Arts, and, after retiring from N.Y.U. in 1973, director of Harvard’s Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence.
“We’d live for a year and a half in Italy, then come back, then go for another year and a half,” he recalled. “I’d be dragged to every museum in Rome.” His father took him along on archeological digs as well. “I really liked climbing on the ruins at that age, and all the drama and fantasy that went on.”
As cosmopolitan as his upbringing was, it was also something he reacted against. “I became a jock. I was all-Midwest soccer in high school and captain of the soccer team at Kenyon College for two years. I learned it in the streets in Rome.”
During his sophomore year he took a color course taught by a former student of Josef Albers. “There was no art major at Kenyon, but all of a sudden I was spending time in this little farmhouse. There were easels and a table saw, but that was it. If you wanted to cast bronze, you built your own kiln.”
His last project for a sculpture course was inspired by a slide of Assyrian pyramids. “I cut and made a stepped pyramid that was eight feet long, and then I put sawdust all over it. It was almost like dirt, you could see the contours but not the wood underneath. It was so architectural; it made a big impression on me.”
After graduation Mr. Smyth spent a summer living with his family before taking a studio on Delancey Street, where he created massive wall pieces fromwood, cement, earth, and metal that he tinted with “mud-like” tones.
While hitchhiking back to the city from a summer framing houses in Aspen, he was picked up by Keith Sonnier and Dickie Landry, both of whom were already established in the downtown New York art world. Through them he got a job at Food, the legendary SoHo restaurant, one of whose artist-founders was Gordon Matta-Clark.
Mr. Smyth worked with Matta-Clark on several of his house-cutting projects, including “Splitting” in New Jersey, where they used Sawzalls to cleave a house scheduled for demolition. “When Gordon wasn’t ready for a show he had coming up at 112 Greene Street, he offered me his spot.”
The cast concrete works he showed in 1973 at 112 Greene, then a vortex of avant-garde activity, consisted of arches, portals, and other components that extended from the walls of the gallery into its unfinished space. A year later at the Holly Solomon Gallery, he showed cast concrete arcades that made reference to the architectural vocabulary of ancient Egypt, Greece, and Italy.
Through the 1970s and into the 1980s, arcades figured prominently in Mr. Smyth’s work, which was widely exhibited in galleries, museums, and public spaces. In the late ’70s, a new movement, Pattern and Decoration, took hold in the art world as artists turned away from Minimalism and looked to quilts, wallpaper, glassware, and Byzantine mosaics for inspiration.
“I was making arcades that repeated, and, yes, that was a pattern, but that work wasn’t about pattern, it was about what that did to a space when you walked into it. But I did get more decorative. If I was going to use color on objects, what I knew were fresco and mosaic. Fresco wouldn’t hold up outside, so I started to use mosaic as color.”
In 1987 he created the “Upper Room” at Battery Park City from cast concrete, bluestone, and mosaic. It had the look and feel of an ancient roofless temple, approached by a wide stairway, with columns, a table lined with chessboards, an altar-like structure at its center, and a view of the Hudson River. The piece recalled the drama that archeological sites held for him as a boy.
Mr. Smyth “dropped out of the gallery world” in 1985. He continued to make art in his studio but never showed it, choosing instead to concentrate on public works for the next 20 years, during which he completed over 30 large-scale projects throughout the United States.
For many years, he resisted coming to the East End. When Holly Solomon invited him to her vacation house, he told her, “I don’t have green pants and I don’t play golf. I’ll never go.”
“But at a certain point I didn’t want to live in New York City anymore.”
With his former wife, Rima Mardoyan, an artist who lives in Sag Harbor, he looked for a permanent residence within a 90-mile radius of the city. They rented in Sagaponack for several years before buying a house in Sag Harbor in 1994.
Six years later, needing a studio, he acquired eight “completely overgrown” acres on Shelter Island. A visit to a riding stable in Mecox provided the architectural model he needed. “It had no columns, just trusses, and I thought it would make a perfect studio.” He called a company in Ohio that built barns and began working with it to develop plans.
“But the town said you can’t build a studio. You can build a house, and if you do, you can build an enormous studio. But a studio by itself would be commercial. So I put in a kitchen, four bedrooms upstairs, and two baths, though I never finished one of them. It was way too much space.”
The family spent several summers on Shelter Island while renting out the Sag Harbor house, but neither his wife nor his sons, Roman and Julian, now 27 and 23, were happy there. “After almost 24 years of marriage, Rima and I separated, and I was lucky to have this. I’ve lived here by myself for eight years or so.”
In addition to the immense studio space, the building has a 2,000-square-foot basement with 10-foot ceilings that enabled Mr. Smyth to consolidate his storage from both Southampton and New York City. “When I moved all that stuff, I found these milk crates filled with rocks. I had no memory of them. What blew me away was that there were so many. And they had sculptural shapes.”
The stones inspired two related bodies of work: massive bronzes and large-scale photographs. His studio is home now to several “big rocks” that are actually the Styrofoam forms from which he makes the molds for casting in bronze. While they vary in shape and size from small to large, some of the bronzes are more than 12 feet tall.
The C-prints feature the original rocks, shot in black and white and enlarged to 68-by-48 inches. It took a year and a half before the artist was able to capture not only the forms but also the textures of the stones on a scale consistent with the monumental bronzes.
Next October, Mr. Smyth, who has taught art at the Ross School for the past eight years, will have an exhibition at Grounds for Sculpture, a sculpture park with high-ceilinged galleries in Hamilton Township, N.J. Exploring how to make the photographs even larger without losing detail, he discovered a 16-foot-wide material that can be stretched over a lightbox. “If you had a colonnade of 10-by-12-foot lightboxes and no other light in the room, all the light would come from the boxes. Which means you’d have these glowing stones.”
A visitor couldn’t help but remember the story of the toddler who experienced the Louvre as a sacred space.