About Leon Polk Smith

Leon Polk Smith (1906-1996) holds a unique place in the long tradition of American geometric abstract painting, which includes such artists as Burgoyne Diller, Fritz Glarner, Al Held, and Ellsworth Kelly, among others. Polk Smith’s printmaking activity, begun in 1965, resulted in close to seventy distinct images characterized by a lively and high-contrast color palette, and buoyant forms floating on solid backgrounds. Among these are early color lithographs dating from 1968 created at Tamarind Lithography Workshop, Albuquerque, New Mexico, to a suite of large-format screenprints printed at Edition Domberger in Stuttgart, Germany in 1987. Betsy Senior Fine Art is the representative for the artist’s editioned works from the Leon Polk Smith Foundation. Established by the artist himself, the Foundation has actively sought to preserve and promote Polk Smith's art and legacy since his death at the age of ninety in 1996. 

Born in 1906 near Chikasha, a Native American territory later annexed by the U.S. as the state of Oklahoma, Smith’s parents, who were of Cherokee ancestry, raised him with both a strong sense of his heritage and an abiding respect for the land. Polk Smith took up painting late, at the end of his college studies in Oklahoma. By 1936, lured by post-graduate studies at Columbia University and a larger art community, Polk Smith moved to New York. Under the tutelage of Hilla Rebay, Polk Smith would soon visit A.E. Gallatin’s Gallery of Living Art at New York University, where he would first see paintings by Piet Mondrian, Fernand Leger, and Pablo Picasso.

Though Polk Smith quickly embraced elements of geometric abstraction, many of his hard-edge compositions and shaped canvases could be viewed as distillations of imagery drawn from the Plains landscape as well as Native American art forms and colors of his youth. By the late 1950s, Smith’s explorations of non-objective imagery put him at the forefront of movements including Color Field, Minimalist, and Hard Edge painting. Robert Buck, former director of the Brooklyn Museum, described Polk Smith as “an influential pioneer in the development of American Modernism”, adding, “he created a new vocabulary in painting that has had a far-reaching influence on subsequent generations of artists.”