A unique figure in postwar American art, Tony Smith is primarily known for his large, abstract sculptures, which he made during the last 20 years of his life. At its core, Smith's work attempts to propose an underlying universal structure of the physical world. Influenced early on by reading naturalist D'Arcy Thompson's On Growth and Form (1917) pertaining to geometric form found in nature and Jay Hambridge's Dynamic Symmetry analyzing the Golden Section as a link between natural forms and ideal geometry, Smith's architecture, painting, and sculpture explore both biomorphic and geometric form as the essence of materiality.