Nasher Sculpture Center

House in a Landscape was included in Smith's dual exhibitions at the Willard and Buchholz galleries in New York in 1946, and several years later, in a Guggenheim Fellowship report, he proudly noted that it had been sold through his dealer to Gina Knee (Mrs. Alexander Brook) a painter, for $750.

Like the closely related Home of the Welder and Reliquary House from the same year, House in a Landscape presents a Surrealist- inspired tabletop tableau in which various ideographic and symbolic forms interact in a psychological narrative of deeply personal meaning. Home of the Welder has been interpreted as a meditation by Smith on his métier, on the codependence of creativity and sexuality, and the bondage that both represent for him as man and artist. House in a Landscape contains some of the same imagery, and while seeming at first to be lighter in mood, also holds dark messages of yearning, loss, and sexual frustration.

Set on a flat ground plane, the intersecting axes of two trees and a thin vertical house define the outer limits of a boxlike space. From the secondary title, we know that the scene is rural and that the house is decidedly "manless." Indeed, the two immediately apparent figures are both women. On the platform with a framing window cantilevered from the side of the house crouches a pliable, Picassoid, headless female that recalls the reclining woman in Home of the Welder. Above, several curved, spiky forms seem to represent curtains blowing in the wind. With one hand, this partial figure reaches out to grasp a phallic ball atop a column, clearly a symbol of the missing male. On the opposite side of the house, within a raised window outline, sits another woman- watching and waiting. More curious is the easily overlooked human profile formed by the cutout front edge of the house, with a long molded attachment on the side shaped into a type of Egyptian eye and a little arm below that grasps another ball. Altogether then, three women inhabit this lonely residence, looking outward expectantly or longingly into the landscape, occupying themselves with male symbols. While Smith's specific meanings remain uncertain, one can conjecture, given the date and the impact that the war had upon his emotional life, that his quest for a personal symbolism is here infused with sadness over the many American households that had recently lost their husbands and brothers. House in a Landscape thus emerges as one of Smith's most moving statements from this period of introspective, cathartic analysis, and one of modern art's key responses to World War II.