David Smith is certainly among the most important sculptors of the twentieth century. By opening the central form of sculpture in the round, he created a three-dimensional analogue to the Abstract Expressionism on canvas of his friends Adolph Gottlieb and Willem de Kooning. A native of Ohio, Smith studied at the Art Students League under John Sloan and John Graham. Graham is credited with exposing Smith to Picasso’s welded steel sculpture, which certainly provided a point of departure for Smith’s developing sculptural style. Smith‘s work advanced toward a celebration of the geometric forms with his Cubi, using the rigid form of the square as a unit of expression in manner not distant from Josef Albers’ Homage to the Square . If his sculpture retained a drawerly aspect throughout, it was in part because the artist continued to draw in two dimensions throughout his career. The swirling forms in his two dimensional work evoke Jackson Pollock and even suggest the broad linear forms of Jean Michel-Basquiat to come, but the formal suggestions are a vocabulary all Smith’s own.