Long recognized as a key originator of the Hard-Edge style in the United States, Leon Polk Smith (1906–1996) began producing abstract paintings around 1940. Scholars and critics have often drawn a clear lineage from Smith’s work back to that of Piet Mondrian and other European modernists. Only recently—with a major exhibition at the Heard Museum in Phoenix, Arizona—has serious attention been focused on an earlier, foundational source of inspiration: Native American art and aesthetics.

Born to parents who were both said to be part Cherokee, Smith spent his childhood in Oklahoma among Chickasaw, Choctaw, and other Indigenous neighbors. Their world views and traditions, not to mention arts and design, would have a lifelong impact on him, influencing his bold, flat positive and negative forms—which are also prominent in the ribbon- and beadwork techniques of Oklahoma Tribal artists—and his distinctive palette. “I grew up in the Southwest,” he once noted. “Where the colors in in nature were pure and rampant and where my Indian neighbors used color to vibrate and shock.”

When Smith began making prints, in the late 1960s, he quickly embraced the medium’s reductive and graphic qualities. His screenprints and lithographs, among his most distilled works in terms of composition and color, reflect not only the culmination of his artistic objectives but also, perhaps, their origin. Such a reexamination of Smith’s work provides new insights into the development of a seminal figure in twentieth-century art and, by extension, illuminates the myriad wellsprings of American modernism.