Robert Smithson

Robert Smithson – From Expressionist painter to Minimalist sculptor

Robert Smithson was born on 2 January 1938 in Passaic in the US state of New Jersey. He was already passionate about art as a fifteen-year-old high school student, attending the Art Students League in New York and starting studies at the Brooklyn Museum School. After fulfilling military service, he undertook a trip through the United States to Mexico in 1957. His artistic interest at this time lay in painting, producing drawings and pictures in the Abstract Expressionist style, whereby influences from Catholic art, science-fiction and Pop Art were noticeable, with several of his painting based on Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy. In 1961 he visited Rome where he explored Byzantine art and religion and also psychology. In 1963 he married his fellow artist, Nancy Holt. Following a creative pause, Robert Smithson no longer saw himself as a painter, but as a sculptor, and in 1964 he started exploring the phenomenon of reflection and refraction of light using neon tubes and glass panes in a Minimalist style. 

A new art created beyond museums and galleries

Robert Smithson expressed his art in ever larger dimensions. In 1967, while roaming the industrial area of New Jersey, he discovered the huge dumper trucks that moved tons of earth and rock. For Smithson, these piles were equivalent to the monuments of antiquity, and inspired his own work. He was initially satisfied with creating sculptures by collecting earth and stone from a particular location, which he presented as so-called ‘non-sites’ in museums and galleries, often in combination with mirrors or glass. His theoretical paper A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects proved groundbreaking for the development and establishment of Land Art, encouraging a whole wave of artists in this field and in 1969, Robert Smithson himself began to realise Land Art projects. He explored the writings of J. G. Ballard, William S. Burroughs and George Kuubler, and took many trips to find suitable locations for the realisation of his visions.

A stone spiral cemented Robert Smithson’s fame

In 1970, Robert Smithson created his most famous work, Spiral Jetty. It took the artist just three weeks, using heavy equipment, to erect the spiral of stone on the edge of the Great Salt Lake in the north of the US state of Utah. The artwork is difficult to access as the changing level of the lake sometimes covers it completely with water. The sculpture consists of natural materials and thus disintegrates with time, but Smithson documented the construction in a 32-minute film of the same name, which together with his sketches, written elaborations, and the actual structure, was conceived as one whole piece of work. Due to the artist’s unexpected early death, Spiral Jetty also became his legacy. 

Robert Smithson died on 20 Jul 1973 at the age of 35 in an airplane crash in Texas.