Metal Welding in Postwar US Sculpture: Between Expressionism and Vulgarity

Abstract

This essay considers a number of artists, including David Smith, Theodor Roszak, and Herbert Ferber, who utilized the welding process in the decades following World War II to invest their sculptures with a sense of precarious danger that summoned the violence of militarized technology and the fearful possibility of future nuclear annihilation. These works’ notably figurative allusions to technologically driven apocalypse align them with Cold War–era science fiction, a comparison that complicates their status within modernist aesthetic criteria.