“What is art?” It’s a question that has been debated from the time that man first touched charcoal to cave wall. As the modern economy developed, that question quickly became wrapped up with “what is the value of art?” a query that some have taken to its more literal extremes.
Monumental works of sculpture may seem relatively crime-proof given their sheer size and weight, but that would be to underestimate the audacity of thieves who covet these pieces for the value of their materials.
There was the 4,500-pound Henry Moore nicked for its bronze; the solid 24k-gold toilet ripped out of a palace wall; and recently the sentencing of three men in Berlin for stealing a 220-pound, Guinness-award-winning giant gold coin, the only remaining sign of which were some flecks of gold in their car.
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Given this history, it may seem hard to believe that the case of a disappearing piece of public sculpture could have been unintentional. But that is exactly what happened following the 1964 World’s Fair in San Antonio.
In the wake of the fair, city officials discovered that a monumental work by one of the leading sculptors of the day, Tony Smith, was missing. It took them a year to locate the piece and, by then, 60 percent of “Asteriskos” had been dismantled for its parts…but not in the way one might think.
A group of enterprising city workers, not realizing that the beautifully-designed hunk of steel in front of them was an expensive sculpture, carted “Asteriskos” off to their scrapyard where they turned the metal into tool chests and beer coolers for their after-hours enjoyment.
“Someone joked that it was sort of an inverse neo-Dada kind of act because, instead of taking a common everyday object like a urinal and turning it into a work of art, they took a work of art and turned it into a common everyday item,” Lyle W. Williams, curator of prints and drawing at the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, told The Daily Beast with a laugh. “At least some people had a sense of humor about it.”
In the 1960s, San Antonio was still reeling from the Great Depression. Once the preeminent city in Texas, the home of the Alamo had been bypassed in size and wealth by both Houston and Dallas in the early 20th century. The years of economic hardship that followed in the 1930s had sealed its third-place status.
But as the 1960s dawned, a group of San Antonio businessmen came up with a scheme to put the city back on the map. They were going to host a world’s fair that would rebrand San Antonio as the “gateway to the Americas.”
Initially, this seemed like a far-fetched proposition. It was cities like New York, San Francisco, and Seattle that were already equipped to handle the influx of people and infrastructure that were generally given the honor. But San Antonio had an ace card to play—an “in” with the most prominent man in the country, Texas native President Lyndon B. Johnson.
The event would be a HemisFair, a celebration of cultures from around the globe, with a specific emphasis on the city’s Latin American neighbors to the south, those to whom San Antonio wanted to be considered a “gateway.”
It would be a Herculean task for San Antonio to pull of this progressive vision, particularly for a city that was still segregated, one that knew it had to quickly change its racist policies if it wanted to pull off a successful fair that would welcome and celebrate people from around the world.
There was the issue of finding a site that would not only fit the projected fair grounds, but would also earn the city federal urban renewal funding. They settled on a diverse neighborhood known as “Germantown,” which, while growing a little shabby around the edges, was not an area in need of condemnation. But no matter—residents were eventually convinced by money or force to abandon their homes and relocate.
Then, they had to convince heads of state, particularly in Latin America, to agree to participate. In a 2010 PBS documentary, one man involved in the effort told the story of a successful trip a group of HemisFair officials took to South America to meet with leaders from several countries. Within 60 days of their return, four of the presidents who had signed off on attending the fair had been deposed. The officials had to start over.
Among the many attractions the over six-million fairgoers, including the president and first lady, as well as Prince Rainier of Monaco and his wife Grace Kelly, were treated to were sculptures scattered around the 92-acre park.
“Probably there will never again be on 92 acres the sculpture that was amassed there,” Patricia Galt Steves, a prominent San Antonian and fair official told PBS. “It was international and of nothing but the highest quality. It was just beautiful.”
One of the extraordinary works of art that could be seen was Tony Smith’s “Asteriskos,” a nearly 17-foot minimalist steel sculpture painted in the artist’s characteristic black commissioned by the Catto Foundation to honor the former Texas Governor William Pettus Hobby, father of Jessica Catto Hobby.
“Some people speculate that Smith was inspired to make an Asteriskos—which is, of course, a star—because of Texas, because we’re the Lone Star State, and as sort of an homage to Mr. Hobby as well,” Williams says.
In the 1960s, Smith was in the midst of a mid-life transformation of his own. Born in 1912, Smith dabbled in his higher education, doing stints at Fordham, Georgetown, and the New Bauhaus school that opened in Chicago in the 1930s, before taking a job under Frank Lloyd Wright.
After two years apprenticing under the master architect, moving from bricklayer to superintendent of construction, Smith left to open his own architecture practice. He was celebrated for his work building private homes which took on a distinctly sculptural quality.
But by the 1950s, his interest was starting to wander. He tried his hand at painting before deciding in 1961 to officially give up architecture to dedicate himself full-time to sculpture. The next year at the age of 50, he created his first large-scale steel sculpture. Two years later, he would make his inaugural exhibition debut.
Smith’s career as an artist was not just notable for the age at which he started; his work was distinctly original. He was a Minimalist before minimalism became a beloved 21st-century buzzword, and by the time of his death in 1980, his New York Times obituary proclaimed him “one of the best-known American sculptors.”
“He’s one of the most important artists of the 20th century—full stop,” Arne Glimcher, founder of Pace Gallery, said in a 2017 press release announcing that the gallery would be taking over management of the estate of Tony Smith. “And of that group, he’s one of the least appreciated, though for a good reason: It’s very hard to move a Tony Smith around.”
Hard, that is, unless you are a public works crew from the city of San Antonio who are already engaged in dismantling many of the structures that made up a world’s fair.
According to city official Melvin Sueltenfuss, the issue was not that the sculpture was lost per se. “We knew it was there all along, but it just wasn’t recognized as a work of art,” Sueltenfuss told the San Antonio Express-News in 1970.
They weren’t the only ones. “Minimalism is still a hard ‘ism’ for many people to wrap their heads around, and we’re going all the way back to 1968,” Williams says. “So, I can imagine it was even more difficult for people to understand this kind of art back then.” He remembers reading that some fairgoers also overlooked the piece as a work of art and had stuck flyers and posters to it during the run of HemisFair.
But there was some good luck for the black star. When Smith accepted the acquisition, he designed the sculpture and then had the blueprints sent to San Antonio for fabrication. When its fate was discovered, Mrs. Catto agreed to pay the cost to have the sculpture recreated. Today, this second version stands on the pristine green grounds of the McNay.
According to Williams, the reincarnated Asteriskos has found peace: “It’s been a very serene life since that time.”
