The current painting titled Untitled (Nude) was made at David Smith's Bolton Landing studio during the winter of 1964, in the final months of the artist's life.

From the late 1920s onwards, the human figure remained a constant point of reference for Smith, providing a source from which his drawings, paintings and sculptures derived much of their expressive force. For these series of paintings, Smith began with photographs he had taken of models in ordinary, domestic poses: standing in a hallway, reading a book or sitting casually in a chair. Their nudity, set against the familiarity of these everyday situations, creates an unexpectedly direct confrontation. As Candida Smith observes, “The mediation of the photographic technique created an abstracted space between artist and model.”

Smith transformed the physical immediacy of these photographs through a vigorous and highly gestural painting process, producing works that are at once formally powerful and sexually charged. Their overtly anti-puritanical character, together with the difficulty of reconciling them with the heroic abstraction traditionally associated with Abstract Expressionism, contributed to their relative absence from discussions of Smith’s work.

Moving between lyrical draughtsmanship and explosive gestural abstraction, Untitled (Nude) resists any simple distinction between figuration and abstraction. They also demonstrate Smith’s refusal to recognise rigid boundaries between painting and sculpture, revealing instead the continuity of gesture, form and physical presence that runs throughout his work.

“It was the soar of the human figure that held him, the uncompromising thrust it makes, the fight it carries on with the force of gravity... If this is geometry here, it is geometry that writhes and squirms.”

- Clement Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. IV, Chicago 1993, pp. 227-98, as quoted in Alex Potts, “Personages: Imperfect and Persistent”, David Smith: Personage, p. 7.