Acknowledged as the greatest American sculptor of the Twentieth Century, David Smith (1906-1965) combined imagery inspired by European innovations in Cubism and Surrealism with materials and techniques that evoked the power of American industry and technology. Synthesizing avant-garde traditions in works of welded metal, he created a unique three-dimensional form of abstract expressionism. His diverse, iconic works revolutionized the art of sculpture at home and abroad.

Celebrating the 100th anniversary of his birth, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, in collaboration with the Centre Pompidou and Tate Modern, have organized the retrospective “David Smith: A Centennial.” Curated by the Guggenheim Museum’s curator of Twentieth Century art, Carmen Gimenez, it features 120 sculptures from throughout Smith’s career (1932-1965), as well as drawings and sketchbooks. Many works come from the David Smith estate. It is on view at the Guggenheim through May 14 and then travels to the Musee National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou in Paris (June 14-August 21) and Tate Modern in London (October 25-January 14, 2007).

The exhibition offers a comprehensive opportunity to appreciate the complexity of Smith’s aesthetic concerns and his impact on the course of modern sculpture. His use of industrial materials, notably welded metals, utilization of “drawing in space” in open networks of forms and eventual commitment to works of enormous scale continue to influence sculptors. When he died in a tragic car accident at the age of 59 and at the peak of his profession, Smith left behind a remarkable body of work.

Smith used symbolic objects to recall memories of his life in “The Letter,” 1950. Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute, Museum of Art, Utica, N.Y.

David Roland Smith was born in Decatur, Ind., thegreat-great-grandson of a blacksmith and the son of a telephonecompany engineer. As a youngster, he took little interest in art,although in high school he took mechanical drawing and subscribedto a correspondence course in drawing.

Starting in his late teens, Smith worked briefly as a riveter and welder at the Studebaker automobile factory in South Bend, then attended college for a short time and ended up employed in Studebaker’s finance department in New York City. His vague aspirations for a career as an artist intensified after he met an art student Dorothy Dehner, who encouraged him to join her in classes at the Art Students League. There he studied under Richard Lahey, John Sloan and Jan Matulka. The latter, a Czech abstract painter, exposed Smith to Cubism and Constructivism, and encouraged him to attach found and shaped wooden objects and other materials to painted surfaces.

Similarly, after learning about Pablo Picasso and Spanish sculptor Julio Gonzalez from Russian émigré artist John Graham, Smith studied reproductions of Picasso’s art and Gonzalez’s welded metal sculptures in the periodical Cahiers d’Art. That started Smith thinking about iron and steel as artistic mediums.

In 1929, two years after marrying Dehner (they divorced in 1952), Smith purchased the Old Fox Farm in Bolton Landing, N.Y., near Lake George in the Adirondack Mountains. They lived in Brooklyn but spent summers and falls on the farm, renamed Terminal Iron Works, until settling there permanently in 1940.

For a time around 1930, Smith worked in an abstract Surrealist style, experimented with painting, collage and reliefs, and tried combining constructed compositions with painting. Following an extended visit to the Virgin Islands in 1931, he created his first freestanding sculptures, including “Construction (Lyndhaven),” 1932, in which a painted wood base supported a construction of coral, iron, lead and wire. He used his earlier experience at the Studebaker plant to weld these pieces, primarily in a rented working space in a metal shop on the Brooklyn Navy Pier.

The circle, a recurrent element in Smith’s work since the late 1930s, was an important conceptual and formal theme in later pieces, such as “Voltri XII,” 1962, created during his stay in Italy. Private collection, Atherton, Calif.

In the 1930s, Smith turned out relatively small works ontraditional subjects like reclining figures, musicians, dancers andbathers, while at the same time searching for a systematic style ofmetal-working to create open structures akin to Picasso’sconstructions.

In “Aerial Construction,” 1936, he scrapped the conventional design of a central mass around which sculptures had historically been organized in favor of retaining a hollow space at the heart of the piece framed by a network of lines and planes.

As World War II approached, Smith began work on a series of 15 antiwar medallions titled “Medals for Dishonor,” 1938-40. These jam-packed, complex narrative reliefs depict everything from racism and sexual violence to mutilated bodies, disease and mortality. “Bombing Civilian Populations,” 1939, for instance, cast in bronze and ten inches in diameter, focuses on a woman who stands with her womb cut open to reveal a fetus, surrounded by bombs, ruined structures and an impaled child. These are passionately composed, graphic and powerful images.

During the war, with metal scarce for his own pieces, Smith worked on an assembly line at American Locomotive Company in Schenectady, N.Y., welding tanks and locomotives seven days a week.

By the time the war ended, he had built an open-plan, cinderblock studio with a concrete floor at the farm in Bolton Landing. It looked more like a machine shop than an artist’s studio, with stacks of stainless steel, piles of cast iron, strips of metal tubing, nuts and bolts, brass, copper and aluminum strewn everywhere and tools on workbenches and hoses running from cylinders of gas to various torches. Much of this material was ransacked from local dumps and junkyards.

In this cluttered setting, Smith unleashed his pent-up creativity during an enormously productive and inventive period; in 1945 alone he turned out 35 pieces.

The totemic “Cubi I,” 1963, was the first of Smith’s much admired “Cubis” series. This tall piece is in the collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts.

Smith began to evolve away from small-scale works towardlarger pieces with deeply felt, highly elaborated autobiographicalthemes. Thus, “Pillar of Sunday,” 1945, is a totemic series ofpainted steel vignettes recalling his teenage years. In “TheLetter,” 1950, interwoven lines and planes in open space definesymbolic scenes.

Two of his most acclaimed sculptures, “Hudson River Landscape” and “Australia,” both 1951, were larger in scale and incorporated recreated graphic effects in sculptural terms. In the process of “drawing in space,” Smith welded steel rods into delicate curves and loops that resembled lines on a blank page. Measuring a mere 491/2 by 75 inches, “Hudson River Landscape” offers a rather playful image, whereas “Australia,” more than 6 feet tall and 9 feet wide, exerts a magisterial presence. Usually described as a “seminal” work, “Australia” was given to the Museum of Modern Art by the late William Rubin, then director of the museum’s department of painting and sculpture.

While enjoying growing success in the art market, Smith often chafed under his self-imposed isolation in Bolton Landing and became increasingly irascible. Divorced from Dehner (by now an accomplished sculptor in her own right) in 1952, he married Jean Freas the following year. Daughters Rebecca and Candida, born in the 1950s, have been active in perpetuating their father’s legacy.

In the “Tanktotem” series, 1952-1960, Smith created tall, linear forms set off by curved discs and steel fragments in sculptures that could stand directly on the floor or ground. “Tanktotem VIII,” 1960, exemplifies the manner in which he painted this series in vibrant colors.

In order to view his work outdoors amidst nature, he arranged pieces on the field outside the farm, a practice he continued for the rest of his life. When he died, there were 89 sculptures in the field.

In the final decade or so of his abbreviated career, Smith continued to incorporate found materials and worked on an increased scale in numerous series of works. During a monthlong residency in Italy in 1962, he created a phenomenal 27 sculptures in 30 days. Titled “Voltri” after the town where he worked, this series consisted of found scraps of steel and tools assembled in coherent but diverse construction styles. “Voltri VII,” 1962, shaped in the form of a wagon, includes a variety of clearly identifiable, found components. The more abstract “Voltri XII,” 1962, features a grouping of metal fragments.

In his large, breakthrough sculpture, “Hudson River Landscape,” 1951, Smith created an abstract, symbol-filled depiction of the region in which he worked. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City.

Between 1961 and his death in 1965, Smith turned out his mostfamous works, the “Cubis” series, which have become icons ofTwentieth Century American art. This group, characterized by hugecompositions of burnished, stainless-steel rectangular boxesattached to one another around a main support, pick up the colorand light of their surroundings. “A marvelous geometric order,simplicity and harmony pervade the entire arrangement – as if onewere visualizing in a single instant some great metallic symphony,”art historian Wayne Craven has written. “They are a testimony toman’s ability to find beauty in geometric truths and in the harmonyof pure geometric forms.”

The extreme verticality (124 inches in height) of “Cubi I,” 1963, recalls the earlier “Tanktotems” series. Fashioned as a huge gate, “Cubi XXVII,” 1965, a carefully balanced construction of industrial steel blocks and cylinders, serves as a frame on an enormous scale – 1113/8 by 873/4 by 34 inches.

The high esteem in which the “Cubis” works are held was confirmed in November 2005 when the last work in the series, “Cubi XXVIII” (measuring 108 by 110 by 45 inches), achieved $23.8 million, the highest price ever paid for a work of contemporary art sold at auction. Coming from a Texas foundation, “Cubi XXVIII” was purchased by Eli Broad, famed Los Angeles financier and connoisseur, for his personal collection.

In the spring of 1965, while driving in Bennington, Vt., Smith’s truck overturned. He died that night. He was at the height of his creative powers.

Since then Smith has been the subject of a half-dozen retrospectives and numerous museum and gallery exhibitions. His work is in the permanent collections of major museums throughout the world.

“Aerial Construction,” 1936, made of painted iron, drew inspiration from Smith’s early cubist paintings. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.

The feel of the “sculpture farm” he organized at BoltonLanding was memorably evoked, with the cooperation of Smith’sdaughters, in “The Fields of David Smith,” a series of outdoorexhibitions, 1997-1999, on the spacious grounds of the Storm KingArt Center in Mountainville, N.Y.

By displaying works from each phase of his career, “David Smith: A Centennial” offers a great opportunity to appreciate the evolution of the sculptor’s influential styles and the magnitude of his achievement. “He was as much a pioneer as any artist can be,” Storm King Art Center director David Collens has observed. “No sculptor was more important than Smith to those who followed.”

From plain, small works of the 1930s to brightly painted, monumental pieces of the 1960s, this driven, restlessly experimental sculptor created diverse yet coherent and extraordinarily powerful works that will forever mark a high water mark in American art history.

The 472-page, fully illustrated exhibition catalog features scholarly essays and photographs of sculpture in the show, as well as an extensive bibliography, exhibition history and chronology. This handsome and comprehensive volume sells for $85 (hardcover) and $50 (softcover).

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum is at 1071 Fifth Avenue. For information, 212-423-3500 or www.guggeheim.org.