Smith-o-rama: juxtaposing the work of the late Tony Smith with that of his daughters Kiki and Seton, "The Smiths" hinted at some shared concerns, however divergently addressed - Report From Palm Beach

"The Smiths," which appeared last winter at the Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art, was a group show with a twist. It featured Tony Smith (1912-1981) and his daughters Kiki Smith and Seton Smith, each with a very distinct style, working in different mediums and having achieved a sizable international reputation. While Tony Smith's geometric sculpture was on the cover of Time magazine in 1967, Kiki Smith's figurative work has propelled her reputation, which, for the moment, has largely overshadowed that of her father and sister. Associations among the three artists can be made, but not without a good deal of specialized knowledge. The connections are enhanced in the catalogue, which readily acknowledges the inherent difficulties of the show. And yet the exhibition was also interesting as an exploration of how ideas about style may evolve from one generation to another, in this case jumping from the 1960s to the 1990s. The work by Tony Smith in the show was largely created in the 1960s, while that by Kiki and Seton was made within the last 10 years. Both women employ identifiable imagery, although to very different effect. Kiki uses the figure as a vehicle for her intensely emotional expressions, while Seton's soft-focus photographic images are devoid of figuration and project a more dreamlike emotional tenor, more removed from the physical world than is the work of her sister, though echoing her father's statement that his own art was "on the edge of dreams."

Tony Smith's work is all angles and crisp edges and, from the vantage point of the 21st century, archetypally masculine in form. His presence in the show was announced by the installation of Duck (1962), superbly sited on a neat rectangular lawn diagonally across from the museum entrance. Inside, the black-painted steel 8-foot-high The Keys to Given! (1965) dominated the vista at the show's entrance, though it was not placed in the first gallery; visually it set the tone for the show's father figure. While the L-shaped arms of the sculpture began as elements of an unrealized house plan, the title phrase was lifted from the closing lines of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. This piece is a prime example of Smith's transition from his architectural work to his free-standing sculptures. It was physically juxtaposed with Kiki Smith's untitled kneeling supplicant figure, which by its placement in the gallery seemed to fill the implied figurative void of her father's work. This was one of a group of her varied figural sculptures from 1994-2000 included in the exhibition. She clearly chose to express herself in a completely different formal range than her father did, and yet their work seems closer emotionally than one might imagine, as his Mimimalist-looking pieces are often darkly expressive ("black and probably malignant," in the artist's words), although cloaked in the mantle of abstraction. I suspect that their expressionism is also bound up with a northern, Irish Catholic sensibility, a conjecture that might bear further investigation.

Tony Smith's drawings from the mid-1950s of boulderlike forms enriched his portion of the exhibition. The religious aspect of his art was announced by Cross (1960-62) and One Gate (1967), an annotated drawing which analogizes one's physical entrance into the environmental sculpture Stinger (1967) to spiritual passage: "Even those who enter by the wrong gate, who take the wrung path, will find their way. It shall be the right way, the correct way."

But what is the connection between Tony Smith's geometric compositions and Kiki Smith's largely figural creations? Both artists evidence concern with the body, although figural references in Tony Smith's work are always oblique. The connection between them could have been strengthened with a greater emphasis on Tony Smith's more body-oriented "presences," such as The Snake Is Out (1962), which was not included in the show. According to Tony Smith, both The Snake Is Out and The Elevens Are Up (1963) refer to veins in the head and neck that become visible when one has had too much to drink. While a small model for the severe The Elevens Are Up was displayed, there was no way for the viewer to apprehend the artist's metaphoric reading. Some of Smith's lesser-known eccentric images from the mid-1940s, which are mentioned in the catalogue but not illustrated, bear a startling resemblance in tone to Kiki Smith's expressive figural work. For instance, in 1943 he made a drawing that explicitly linked the word "generation" to an image of a woman's reproductive system. Although Kiki Smith did not know of this aspect of his work until recently, the echoes remain tantalizing. More relevant to her often physically ravaged subjects, however, are the illnesses that marked her family life, including her father's various ailments during her childhood and the death of her sister Beatrice (Bebe) from AIDS in 1988.

Seton Smith's 6-by-4-foot Cibachrome images project a cool affect, immediately allying her work to the sensibility often attributed to her father's large geometric sculptures. In the first gallery, along the left wall, was a group of her large photographs of exterior and interior architectural sites, made between 1997 and 2001. Mounted flat on shallow boxes, they were all hung intentionally low on the wall in order to underscore the relationship between the scale of one's body and that of the art object--a concern that relates in turn to the finely honed sense of scale of her father's architectonic sculptures. The images were identified as separate works but displayed as a single installation. One's natural inclination to create a comprehensible narrative linking the images was frustrated; the cumulative effect was like trying to recall the details of a dream. Elsewhere in the show, images of window openings, staircases, mirrors and decontextualized objects were all out of focus, inviting yet inevitably disorienting. While their formal means are disparate, both Seton Smith and her father created works in which meaning simultaneously seems to be within our grasp but elusive.