DAVID SMITH’S LATER WORKS, INCLUDING UNTITLED, 1962, SHOW THE ARTIST TRYING TO BLEND CUBISM AND POP STYLES INTO A SINGULAR STYLE.

There is a theory about dyslexia that makes it sound a lot like modern art. According to this theory, dyslexia may stem from an impulse to see around corners. So rather than just an annoying visual glitch that causes people to see letters, or even words, out of sequence, it might really be a misguided attempt by the nervous system to see multi-dimensionally. Put this way, dyslexia sounds a lot like cubism, since cubists painted objects as they might look if viewed from several different angles at once.

  Advocates of the theory went so far as to conduct some tests at a San Francisco art school, and discovered that nearly half of the student body exhibited at least some dyslexic tendencies. All of which came to mind while viewing the David Smith Two into Three Dimensions show at the Newcomb Art Gallery. Smith was a profoundly influential sculptor, yet he tends to be almost taken for granted despite his prominence as an avatar of American modernism. His large outdoor sculptures, defined by heavy steel construction and ethereal, flat surfaces, sometimes suggest an unlikely mix of Matisse paper cut-outs and a truss bridge, and of course, Matisse and his School of Paris evolved out of cubism. While it is not known if either Smith or Matisse was dyslexic, their sculptural work sometimes seems to challenge the eye and to try see around corners, which was probably intentional, as far as Smith was concerned.

  Trained as a painter, he became a self-taught sculptor almost by accident. While trying to give his canvases additional depth and dimension, he at first contented himself with building them up with layers of paint and found objects. But one thing led to another, and all those add-ons eventually grew into so much sculpture that he had to buy a farm just to have enough space to stash his inventory. He was obsessive that way.

  But despite owning a farm strewn with acres of sculptural projects, Smith always said, "I belong with the painters," and this Newcomb show appears dedicated to that premise. It is interesting for the insight it brings to his better-known later creations. Odd as it seems, Smith’s early work was indebted to surrealism as well as Picasso, and if he had not responded to cubism’s challenge of seeing around corners by adding real corners for people to see around, he might have remained simply a painter, period.

  Untitled, 1930, is an abstract canvas, an articulation of richly skewed patterns of lush greens, yellows and fertile earth tones that might almost hark to Matisse, only the paint looks like it came from one of those grease-gun devices that bakers use to apply decorative icing to wedding cakes. By 1932, he was painting on wood built up with more wood as we see in Virgin Islands Relief, a lyrical assemblage of scrap millwork that suggests a collaboration of Joan Miro and Joseph Cornell. Other oddities include a series of bronze medallions from the 1930s that initially resemble those plaques seen at historical sites, only up close they are actually surreal, and highly Picassoid, bas reliefs depicting fascist atrocities. For instance, Death by Gas depicts decomposing corpses dancing on roller skates or carrying tanks of oxygen, as chickens run around in gas masks. It’s pretty strong stuff, and the studies from which they were taken are even more gut-wrenching.

  Like a lot of artists who did surrealism in the ’30s, he evolved into abstract expressionism in the ’40s and ’50s, and continued to make not only sculpture but also his relief paintings, which read like a cross between sculpture and painting. Many involved either bones or scrap metal, sometimes set in plaster and painted with enamel or automobile paint. They look a lot like 3-D paintings, and even in the ’50s, when fascism was a receding shadow, Smith was no less visceral in his use of steel and bones to convey his uniquely bare-knuckled sensibilities.

  Part of this may have to do with his blue-collar background. He learned about metals not in art school, but working on the assembly line of the Studebaker factory in his native Indiana. In the ’40s, he welded stainless steel armor plate for the war effort, and it is Smith who is credited with popularizing the use of stainless steel in sculpture. His work would eventually become bigger and bolder, yet simpler and more ethereal over the years, and later studies on paper (such as Untitled, 1962) point to his classic final sculpture series of the 1960s, to their amazing synthesis of cubism and pop into a whole new paradigm. .