'David Smith: A Centennial' at the Guggenheim

"David Smith: A Centennial," the Guggenheim Museum's major show this season, is a joy to see. It's been a very long time since an exhibition has looked this good in the Guggenheim's difficult space.

Instead of fighting against the circular architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright's building, and the angled floors of its spiraling exhibition ramps, Smith's art seems entirely at home. Maybe that's because the 1959 building, and the mature works Smith was making at the time it was built, so clearly belong to the same moment in our visual history.

That's meant as both praise and blame.

The Guggenheim show celebrates the 100th anniversary of the birth of Smith, whom the museum is billing as "the greatest sculptor of his generation." And the overwhelming impression of the show is indeed of a certain pastness -- of art made by and for one generation, born a century ago. It feels as much of its time as a bobbysoxer's dress -- or as Wright's old-time "futuristic" building.

The greatness is there in Smith, all right, but it's of a distinctly Old Masterish kind: Smith's works feel safe and vintage and eminently pleasant, rather than relevant and present and even vaguely threatening, as some older art still manages to be. The National Gallery's Cezanne exhibition, as well as that gallery's survey of Marcel Duchamp and his fellow dadaists, contain more art with current implications than the Guggenheim's survey of a sculptor who died as recently as 1965 and might have been around much longer but for a fatal crash.

Smith was one of the first artists to fully realize the potential of messily welded steel, and of scrap metal in general, as a medium for abstract sculpture. Instead of building nice, orderly, well-composed, mostly solid objects, as sculptors had done for centuries, Smith cobbled together peculiar, open webs of rods and blocks and blobs of steel. Rather than taking the solid human form as the model for his art, Smith borrowed from the mark of the human hand: His works are "drawings in space," with all the gestural freedom that implies, rather than classic figure paintings fattened into three dimensions.

Smith is often said to be an "abstract expressionist in steel" -- the sculptor's equivalent of Pollock and de Kooning -- but that doesn't ring true when you look at his art. No matter how freely you work in welded metal, you'll never capture the vigor and spontaneity of someone splashing paint. There's a studied regularity to Smith that Pollock never had. The fact of Smith's innovations cannot be denied, but somehow his art doesn't have the raw energy that major innovations tend to gather round them.

A Pollock can still hold down any kind of contemporary space and scream at us across the years; it turns out that a Smith works best as decoration -- wonderful, entirely winning decoration -- for a building from the past.