Arrogant Intrusion

By ROBERT HUGHES

No doubt there have been some art critics who wished, in self-indulgent moments, that art history were neater than it is, that the work fitted the pet theory more smoothly. The sight of a critic physically altering an artist's work to conform to his own ideas about it is, mercifully, almost unknown. But it happened recently--to David Smith, who died in 1965 and is probably the greatest sculptor in U.S. history. Readers of this month's Art in America were electrified to learn from an article by Art Historian Rosalind Krauss that since Smith's death seven of his late sculptures --large constructions of welded steel, finished with a white coat of primer, preparatory to painting--have been ground back to bare metal, while other finished polychrome works were simply left in the open fields outside his studio at Bolton's Landing, N.Y., until their surfaces rusted into disintegration.

The man who authorized this bizarre policy of revision and neglect was one of the three executors of Smith's estate, Art Critic Clement Greenberg. About ten sculptures underwent change at Greenberg's whim, some irrevocably. Flat paint can be resprayed, but some of Smith's polychrome works were painted in a splashy, brushy manner--a handwriting that can no more be restored than the excited scribbles he made with a grinder on the skin of his stainless-steel pieces.

The other executors -- Artist Robert Motherwell and Washington Attorney Ira Lowe -- maintain Greenberg never told them what he was doing. "I was stupefied when I heard about it," said Motherwell last week, adding that Greenberg had given the impression that nothing beyond "some restoration work" had been done.

The changes seem to have been made because Greenberg thought Smith's use of color in his late sculptures unsuccessful, and preferred plain steel to the white primer coats. "Clem never made any secret of his dislike of Smith's painted work," recalls former Guggenheim Museum Curator Edward Fry, who organized a major Smith retrospective in 1969.

Narrow Imperatives. Smith, naturally, felt otherwise, and nothing in his work or writings Indicates that the sculptures he started to paint but left unfinished at his death would have been closer to his intentions if cut back to raw steel. If he had wanted them raw, he would not have begun to paint them. Indeed, the vitality and open-endedness of his work largely stemmed from his refusal to entertain the kind of narrow imperatives about painting as painting and sculpture as sculpture that Greenberg, in the days when he was writing criticism, proposed.

The counterpoint between steel and paint did not always come off, but Smith's effort to make it work was an integral part of American art history. Greenberg's decision to posthumously destroy the evidence of what he considered Smith's "failure" was, one must in charity assume, directed by sincere aesthetic motives -- just as John Ruskin's posthumous burning of "pornographic" watercolors by J.M.W. Turner in the 19th century was sincerely meant to protect Turner's moral reputation.

Greenberg sticks by his guns. "I can answer to my conscience," he declares. "Were I to have known that this fuss would come up I would still have done the same thing, and I'm only sorry I didn't do it earlier." But conscience is not the point. The point is that altering the work of a dead artist -- especially one of Smith's eminence -- is an arrogant intrusion that borders on vandalism. We are entitled to the work as it left Smith's hand, warts and all. Perhaps the best thing to be said for Greenberg's action is that, aberrantly, he has given the art world a dismaying lesson in the limits of criticism.

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