Divulging the Intimate Secrets of Artists’ Lives
Robert Smithson, the pioneering land artist, repeatedly said that his art was a clear distillation of his essential self, and should be free of any biographical discussions, which he considered residual dross not worth examining.
A work of art, he declared, was verifiable and substantial, while the essence of the artist is nebulous. He reveled in issuing gnomic pronouncements, proclaiming “Abstract art is not a self-projection, it is indifferent to the self.” Smithson’s best-known work is “Spiral Jetty,” a 1,500-foot-long 1970 earthwork that juts into a corner of the Great Salt Lake in Utah.
It appears as impersonal as an art piece can be. And yet, as Suzaan Boettger persuasively argues in her biography of Smithson, “Inside the Spiral: The Passions of Robert Smithson,” published earlier this year, the Sphinx-like monument — like Smithson’s other land art, sculpture and painting — secretly poses a riddle, with its answer buried in the artist’s life history.
Smithson died in a plane crash in 1973, when he was 35. As a graduate student researching earthworks in 1993, Boettger met with his widow, the artist Nancy Holt, who told her, “Now, you have to remember that Bob had a brother who died two years before he was born.” When she investigated, Boettger discovered that Harold Smithson had succumbed at the age of 9 to hemorrhagic leukemia, a horrific illness that was untreatable then.
