Tony Smith was a pioneering sculptor of the Minimalist movement, creating large-scale abstract constructions during the 1960s and 1970s. While he is best known for his sculptural work in the last two decades of his life, Smith started his career in painting and drawing at the Art Students League during the 1930s. He attended night courses at the League while he worked as a toolmaker, draftsman, and purchasing agent at his family’s business, the A.P. Smith Manufacturing Company in East Orange, New Jersey.  



In 1937, Smith followed his passion for architecture and enrolled at the New Bauhaus, a progressive school in Chicago founded by the German Bauhaus émigré László Moholy-Nagy. Smith was a pupil of Moholy-Nagy, as well as Alexander Archipenko and Gyorgy Kepes. While his tenure at the school lasted only a year, it was successful because it sparked his interest in metalwork; Smith was appointed as the head of the metal workshop by Moholy-Nagy. From 1938 to 1940, Smith worked at the studio of Frank Lloyd Wright, assisting with the Ardmore project outside of Philadelphia, and several Usonian houses including the Armstrong house in Indiana. Smith was a notable talent, quickly rising from carpenter to Clerk of Works at Wright’s studio. His early success encouraged him to work as an independent architectural designer from 1940 to the early 1960s, during which time he realized at least nineteen private homes.  



Combining his interest in volumetric architectural forms and metalwork, Smith began to construct large-scale, black sculptures by the early 1960s. Spitball was first conceived as a large-scale object in 1961. Along with Cigarette, 1961, the present work is among the earliest of Smith’s modular tetrahedral sculptures. In the catalogue for the retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, Tony Smith: Architect, Painter, Sculpture, Joan Pachner writes of the two important early works,  

“They were made by taping together small, handmade paper tetrahedral modules. When Smith liked a particular form, as he did in the instance of these two works, he painted the small model black so that he could view the piece as a sculptural whole. Spitball is symmetrical when it is rotated; its outer faces define the exterior planes of a tetrahedron. The surfaces are at such an angle to each other that the outer faces tend to reflect the light, rather than to absorb it, while the central portion has the appearance of a black hole. To Smith, the dense form of the small model resembled a spitball.” (Joan Pachner, in Tony Smith: Architect, Painter, Sculpture [Museum of Modern Art, 1998], p. 128) 



In 1970, The Friends of Modern Art of the Detroit Institute of Arts commissioned Smith to create an edition of fifty small Spitball sculptures that were sold to distinguished patrons of the museum. The sculptures were fabricated in ebony granite at Montecatini-Edison in Viareggio, Italy, and were each approved, signed and numbered by Smith. This important commission helped to fund the purchase of Smith’s monumental Gracehoper sculpture that sits on the North Lawn of the museum today.



Smith’s sculptures were met with early recognition and success; in the spring of 1966 his work was shown in his first New York group exhibition, Primary Structures, at the Jewish Museum, and in the fall of the same year he received his first solo exhibition, concurrently held at the  Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut and at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia.