Leon Polk Smith grew up in Oklahoma among the Native American Choctaw and Chickasaw tribes. At the age of 30, he enrolled at Columbia University and moved to New York City, where he lived for the rest of his life. He was a member of the so-called Hard-Edge school of Minimal, abstract art and burst onto the art scene in late 1950s and early 1960s with a series of brightly colored canvases arranged in pairs and groups, named Correspondences.
Leon Polk Smith's work is represented in many important public collections in the USA and in major museums in Argentina, Canada, Israel and Germany. In the year of his death, a retrospective was held at the Brooklyn Museum in New York.
The present work was published in the legendary portfolio Formen der Farbe ('Shapes of Color'), on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at the Württembergischen Kunstverein in Stuttgart in 1967. The portfolio included works by Josef Albers, Allan D'Arcangelo, Max Bill, Robyn Denny, Nicholas Krushenik, Karl Georg Pfahler, Robert Indiana, William Turnbull and Victor Vasarely, and was sold out instantly. Many of the artists continued to work with Edition Domberger and defined their program for years to come.