About the Artist

Leon Polk Smith (1906–1996) was an American painter who combined the rhythmic patterns of his Cherokee ancestry with the Hard-Edged and Minimalist styles of abstraction that he helped popularize in New York during the latter half of the 20th century.

Smith was born near Chickasha, a year before Oklahoma became a state. His parents, William and Samantha Smith, had arrived in present-day Oklahoma from Tennessee at the end of the 19th century, and had settled on land with the Chickasaw Nation and Choctaw Nation in Indian Territory. Smith was the eighth of nine children and labored on his parents' modest homestead throughout an impoverished childhood.

When he was still quite young, one of Smith’s brothers had married a woman of Chickasaw origin, who taught him her songs and language. His parents themselves had Cherokee ancestry. Although at the time Oklahoma had only a small African American population compared to its American Indian population, Smith’s parents were committed to the principle of equal opportunity and instilled this in their offspring. They had observed the marginalization of the American Indian population by the white settlers, and they encouraged their children to recognize their own Indian ancestry by socializing openly with all of their neighbors, regardless of origin. As a consequence, Smith would prove to be a staunch, early supporter of the civil rights movement during his first two full-time appointments outside Oklahoma.

After high school, he worked as a ranch-hand in Oklahoma, then built roads and constructed telephone systems in Arizona. During this period Smith sent money home to help his parents with the mortgage on their land, but even the aggregate of the family's funds proved insufficient to avoid foreclosure.

After the foreclosure and released from the burden of familial financial support, Smith enrolled at Oklahoma State College (now East Central University), in Ada, Oklahoma, with the intention of becoming a teacher. Following graduation, he moved to New York City (1936), where he attended the Columbia University Teacher's College. Smith's artistic development was set in motion during his first semester at Columbia, when one of his teachers took him to see the Gallatin Collection, then at New York University. The sight of paintings by Mondrian and sculpture by Constantin Brâncuși and Jean Arp was a formative and deeply influential experience.

A year after earning his M.A. degree at Columbia and returning home to Oklahoma, Smith had earned enough to plan his first trip to Europe, in the summer of 1939. He visited the major countries of Western Europe with the exception of Germany and the states on its eastern borders, which were already closed to tourism because of the brewing political circumstances.

Once back in Oklahoma, Smith decided that it was time for him to seek a post elsewhere on a more advanced level and became an assistant professor of art at Georgia Teachers College in Collegeboro.

Smith prospered in Georgia and made influential friends on the faculty. While holding a full-time job, he pursued his art and was inspired by a trip to Mexico. Prophetically, his first one-artist show took place in New York at the Uptown Galleries in January and February 1941. The fifteen paintings and eighteen watercolors were figurative, and reviewers generally found them praiseworthy. In the following year two more exhibitions followed in rapid succession, and Smith’s reputation was growing. The first of these 1942 shows consisted largely of works inspired by Mexico, and it was also Smith’s first one-artist exhibition in a museum, taking place at the Telfair Academy of Arts and Sciences in Savannah. The second 1942 exhibition was his debut in abstraction and took place at the Pinocoteca Gallery in New York. Also in the same year, Smith left Georgia when he felt that the state government’s resistance to campus desegregation was too far from his deeply held convictions. He accepted a post as State Supervisor of Art Education in Delaware, where much segregation remained in place but was less obvious.

In the decade that followed, Smith moved through preliminary explorations of neo-plasticism and began to paint in a more hard-edge style, typified by geometric lines, curving shapes of color, and the use of tondo (disk-shaped) canvases. A review for a 1956 solo show at the Camino Gallery noted Smith as a Geometric painter, who had "extended De Stijl principles to include tonal variations and nonrectilinear elements."

Smith acknowledged his debt to the De Stijl movement and to Mondrian, but stated that he was looking in his work to take the road beyond: "people said [Mondrian] had hit a dead end, or a stone wall and I said I don't think so." He was inspired by Mondrian’s works, if not fully convinced by the philosophy behind them. Pragmatic in his approach, Smith took what he wanted from the aesthetic experience and left the theorizing behind.

Critic Arthur Danto, in his analysis of Smith’s absorption of Mondrian’s style, suggests that the way in which Smith comprehended space is attributable directly to his Southwestern background. Smith’s perceptions of artistic space led to a quest to make color and form one. This quest consisted of a series of intuitive decisions rather than the theoretical, ruminative creative process that preoccupied Mondrian and other members of the De Stijl group.

Although he was pleased with his working situation and with the results of his efforts in Delaware, after two years Smith felt it was time to move on. “With me, New York City was love at first sight,” he wrote, and in 1944, he determined to return.

Smith shared Mondrian's affection for New York, writing in 1989: "New York City revealed its physical self to me through the mountains and canyons of the Southwest. There were the ups and downs--the high peaks, the in-betweens, or the canyons, and topped with the great dome....I felt the city to be a perfect equation for a great abstraction." (Ratcliff, 1996).

Lacking funds to remain financially independent, Smith sought a Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation fellowship. In the process of application, he was offered a job assisting at the Museum of Non-Objective Painting (later to become the Guggenheim Museum) by Hilla Rebay, who was director of both the foundation and the museum. She had informed him that he was too late for the current funding cycle but that he could apply the following spring.

It was an important learning opportunity, coming at the right moment for him, to work among examples of art by the leading European geometric abstractionists. As part of the Guggenheim Fellowship that Smith eventually received, he traveled back to the Southwest to proselytize as an art educator for the new abstraction, distributing Guggenheim materials in Oklahoma and New Mexico, where he still had many contacts. Santa Fe had a long-established, growing artists’ community, and he even attempted, unsuccessfully, to organize a show there of some of the Guggenheim’s collection.


With the support of prominent gallerists in the late 1950s, by the mid-60s Smith had found an audience for his work as an independent voice. His artwork was included in two important group exhibitions, The Responsive Eye at the Museum of Modern Art (1965) and Systemic Painting at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (1966). His two important series of the period, Correspondences and Constellations impressed reviewers with their interplay of form, color, and space.

During the next few years Smith established affiliations with various galleries and maintained studio and living spaces in buildings housing other artists, while leaving on occasion for visiting teaching posts. An appointment lasting two years at Rollins College in Florida was followed by a brief residence in Cuba.

In 1966, Smith established a summer home on Long Island at Shoreham, which for a time also served as his principal residence. For most of the remaining years of his life, Smith remained in New York City.

Smith died in Manhattan in 1996, with an acknowledged position in the development of American geometric abstraction. He had arrived at geometry before others and remained steadfastly loyal to its principles, cultivating aspects of scale and simplicity that presaged the Hard-Edge and Minimal painting styles of the late 1950s and '60s. Younger painters like Ellsworth Kelly, Jack Youngerman and Al Held visited his studio and came away inspired. But he cultivated a maverick attitude as a New York outsider that resisted definition as part of any single contemporary movement on the arts scene. This challenged his reviewers, as they looked for easy ways to describe his status and his work. When asked for his inspirations at a post-commencement speech roundtable, Smith cited the two professors of English who opened his mind to the beauty of Middle-English and poetry, rather than name-dropping his contemporaries or artistic mentors.


The Leon Polk Smith Foundation was established by the artist before his death to "preserve and promote the art and legacy of Leon Polk Smith."


Smith's work is included in the collections of numerous museums including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Boston, Massachusetts; the Brooklyn Museum , Brooklyn, New York; the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Buenos Aires;
 Buenos Aires, Argentina; the Art Institute of Chicago,Chicago, Illinois; the Georgia Museum of Art, Athens, Georgia; the Musée de Grenoble, Grenoble, France; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of Art, New York, New York; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden,
Washington D.C. ; the Institut für Diskrete Mathematiks, Bonn, Germany; the Israel Museum; Jerusalem, Israel; the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, University of Oklahoma, Norman, Oklahoma; the Museum für Konkrete Kunst,Ingolstadt, Germany; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art,Los Angeles, California; the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York; the mumok, Museum of Modern Art, Ludwig Foundation, Vienna, Austria; the National Gallery of Art ,Washington, D.C.; the Neue Nationalgalerie,Berlin, Germany; the Neues Museum Nuremberg (State Museum for Art and Design), Nuremberg, Germany; the Oklahoma State University Museum of Art, Stillwater, Oklahoma; the Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, New York; the Pogue Art Gallery, East Central University, Ada, Oklahoma; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York, among others.


biographical sources inlcude Artsy; Artnet; Robert Buck, “Leon Polk Smith American Original,” Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, The University of Oklahoma; and others