When I researched Tony Smith for one of the previous blog posts, I did not look to deeply into his background or information. I also did not find too much about “Willy”. However for this blog post I was able to find more information on both artist and sculpture. When a child he was put in quarantine structure behind his house after being diagnosed with tuberculosis (New Angles on Art). He spent much of his time building models out of medicine boxes. He found his skill of building thing from the family’s tool building business. After spending years in architecture, he became frustrated with people making changes to his work. So he left architecture however he did not keep it from influencing his work.

Tony Smith often found objects in life that he could turn into an idea for his sculpture. For example, one of his earlier sculptures was created after he noticed a file cabinet behind one of his students. He would start with building his models from cardboard and worked from there. I found it interesting that with my deeper research I found that in fact many of his sculptures are described as anthropomorphic in nature (New Angles on Art). I read in the Sheldon Art Museum’s Brochure that Tony Smith’s sculpture “Willy” was influenced by the character Willie in Samuel Beckett’s play Happy Days. Willie spends most of his time crawling around his wife who is buried waist deep in a mound of earth. Like the character in Samuel Beckett’s play Happy Days, “Willy” looks as to be a object crawling.

With this new knowledge of Tony Smith’s “Willy” sculpture, I am better able to interpret or get a better sense of its purpose or argument. Now that I know the relationship between the sculpture “Willy” and the character Willie from the play, I see that my original interpretation of his piece of art is not as accurate as I had originally thought. Instead, I now see how it somewhat resembles a crawling creature. In my original posts I was unable to see any resemblance of his art to anything but geometrics. But instead I now see that his art uses geometric shapes to create a unique form of anthropomorphism in “Willy”. In addition to the combination of geometry and anthropomorphism, I can now understand that the name that Tony Smith gave to this particular sculpture was of importance to him. It is now more evident to me that sometimes to get the full interpretation of a sculpture, or any piece of art really, you must also try and see the background or meaning behind it. We must step back and try to imagine different purposes. After learning more about Tony Smith himself and the artwork he produced you can see how he parallels his love of architecture with his talent in building sculptures. His works of art were, and are still, seen as “monumental, grand, spiritual, anthropomorphic, elusive, exploring infinity, geometric, biomorphic, complex, simple, multifaceted” (New Angles on Art).


Works Cited:

(n.d.). Snapshot: tony smith. Retrieved from http://www.nga.gov/education/classroom/new_angles/bio_smith.shtm