Yellow White Sun, 1959

In 1954, Leon Polk Smith found artistic inspiration in an unusual place: an illustrated sporting goods catalogue. He had experimented with curved lines in his geometric abstractions in the 1940s, but the catalogue’s illustrations of rounded seams on balls suggested a new way of defining shapes and spaces in his paintings. “First I used these shapes that I found on the baseball, tennis ball, football, and so forth, in order to better understand what I was experiencing,” he recalled, “and then I thought, ‘Now I need to find my own shapes,’ and so I did.” In subsequent two-color paintings such as "Yellow White Sun," Smith eliminates both rectangular canvases and straight lines. A sinuous line divides the shaped canvas into two equal forms, rather than fore- and background. Smith thus anticipated the flat but cleanly defined abstraction and shaped canvases that would define painting in the 1960s.