Leon Polk Smith: The Constellation Paintings

Though he is most frequently referenced as one of the founding fathers of New York based Hard Edge painting Leon Polk Smith (1906  - 1996) never lost his connection to the raw-boned vistas of his native Oklahoma.  Perhaps Smith’s tireless contemplation of space and its myriad geometries, defined in the purest, boldest and truest of colors, has its roots in his Cherokee heritage.  Whatever the genesis, thirty-plus years after their creation, Smith’s Constellation Paintings remain as fresh-eyed, invigorating and revelatory as ever.

Smith “discovered” art, his lifelong vocation, during his senior year of college in 1934.  Initially he pursued Mondrian-inspired rectilinear abstractions.  Then in 1954, he began dividing the canvas into two areas, working with the circular tondo and then allowing the color to reinvent the shapes/spaces inside the canvas.  Somehow Smith had miraculously caused the flat surface of the canvas to appear to curve.  Working with strong rich reds, forest greens and butter yellows, edged in by black, Smith invented forms that appeared to move with the effortlessness of space itself.  The Constellation Paintings, executed in the late sixties through the mid seventies, take these spatial experiments one step further.  The series consists of boldly colored forms laced together in such meticulous and inventive constructs as to redefine the space of walls themselves.  Curves bleed from one egg shaped canvas into the next, tumbling across the space with the elegance of undiscovered stars.  A duo of fuchsia and black and orange and black oblongs knit themselves into a single adjacent rectangle with mind-bending, inspired precision.  All in all, they create an extraordinary sense of motion powered by a resplendent sun-laced palette:  a veritable heaven of color and line in a singularly eloquent universe invented by a true American original.