Sex & Violence – News Syndication

Goliath hasn’t been hit hard yet, but David is getting new slingshots.

The unending struggle between the managers who control America’s corporations and the investors who own them is about to become more interesting. It might even become a fairer fight.

Last fall, the Securities and Exchange Commission clarified the rules under which investors can nominate candidates to serve on boards of directors.

In the waning weeks of 2011, just in time to meet the 120-day advance notice typically required to get onto the proxy ballot ahead of springtime annual meetings, investors in 16 major companies—including Goldman Sachs, Hewlett-Packard and Wells Fargo—filed petitions to amend corporate bylaws to open up the nominating process under the revised SEC rule.

Christophe Vorlet for The Wall Street Journal

Meanwhile, networks are springing up online to rally investors large and small. These websites could enable investors—anyone from a dogcatcher in Dubuque with 100 shares to giant pension funds holding tens of millions of shares—to mingle online and pool their dispersed power as never before.

“Mechanisms like these,” says James McRitchie, who runs CorpGov.net, a shareholder-activism site, “will eventually lead to the revolution in corporate governance that people have been talking about for many years.”

Make that “dreaming about.” In theory, whenever corporate managers and directors are overpaid and underperforming, investors should exercise their rights and throw the bums out.

In practice, most investors have long responded to bad management either by sitting on their hands or by voting with their feet. Breaking decades of inertia won’t be easy.

If change does come, it might be led by people like Kenneth Steiner and Argus Cunningham.

Mr. Steiner, 45 years old, is a private investor from New York’s Long Island who filed petitions at five companies late last year under the new SEC rule. Over the past decade or so, Mr. Steiner estimates, he has formally made several hundred proposals to improve how companies are run—including simplifying the election of directors, giving more say over how top executives are paid and eliminating “poison pills” that can entrench management.

“It’s up to the small shareholders to get these things on the agenda,” Mr. Steiner says. “Institutional investors have been horribly negligent in what I consider their fiduciary duty to the people who invest with them and to the country in general. They don’t want to ruffle feathers, and they’re cowards.”

After all, professional investors want to manage—or to keep managing—the pension and 401(k) plans at the very companies whose stocks they invest in. These folks aren’t going to throw bombs at board members.

Using a form he downloaded from proxyexchange.org, Mr. Steiner late last year requested that the boards at Bank of America, Textron, Ferro, Sprint Nextel and MEMC Electronic Materials amend their companies’ bylaws to permit any group of 100 or more shareholders who have held at least $2,000 in stock for at least one year—or any holder of 1% or more for at least two years—to nominate directors.

In recent years, many of Mr. Steiner’s proposals have been approved by a majority of investors at companies’ annual meetings. “It’s sort of a David and Goliath situation,” he says, “but sometimes David wins.”

Mr. Cunningham, 36, is a former Navy pilot whose portfolio crash-landed in 2008. “Losing a lot of money will cause you to re-evaluate your role,” he says. “You feel disempowered and disconnected even though you are the owner of your companies, and I started thinking about what I didn’t like about the system.”

Frustrated by how hard it is to find other investors willing to shake up moribund companies, Mr. Cunningham founded Sharegate. Likely to launch later this year, the website will join others that seek to rally shareholders, including United States Proxy Exchange, ProxyDemocracy.org and Moxy Vote.

If you think the directors at XYZ Corp. should be fired, you will be able to circulate a throw-the-bums-out proposal on Sharegate with the click of a mouse. Every other XYZ shareholder on the site will see it immediately; you will promptly be able to tell whether they agree with you.

Contrast that with the status quo, in which you can’t know what actions other investors are prepared to take until your annual proxy statement arrives—assuming that any grievances haven’t already been quashed by the company.

“The system has been broken for 100 years,” says Glyn Holton of the United States Proxy Exchange, “but that’s no reason to keep it broken.”

The great investor Benjamin Graham wrote in 1949 that “the only way to inspire the average American shareholder to take any independently intelligent action would be by exploding a firecracker under him.”

If enough firecrackers start going off, the bang just might get big enough to make a difference.

—
intelligentinvestor@wsj.com; twitter.com/jasonzweigwsj

Write to Jason Zweig at intelligentinvestor@wsj.com

When a mothers’ group huddled on Laurie Witt’s screened porch last summer over sandwiches and iced tea, they wanted more than leisurely chit-chat. As their children played nearby, the women grilled each other in imaginary job interviews, tore apart each other’s resumes and told tales of rugged job-market forays.

All had former careers—in consulting, marketing or finance—and all were intent on returning to work after years at home. The biweekly career-coaching sessions “built confidence and helped us develop a stronger game plan,” says Ms. Witt, of Wellesley, Mass. Three of the four regular participants have since found jobs.

Few job seekers face higher hurdles than at-home parents trying to return to the work force. Mothers at home full-time crested in 2004 at a recent high of 31.2%, among married-couple families with children, government data show; at-home dads, who often face even greater bias than returning mothers, make up about 5%. Many of these parents now need or want to get back to work. Beyond the recession and employer bias against dropouts, many also are burdened by outdated skills and self-doubt.

Those who succeed are using savvy job-finding tactics, including some particular to at-home parents. Some are mining neighborhood networks in new ways, drawing on other out-of-work professionals for career coaching. Others choose volunteer work strategically, to hone skills. Still others invest heavily in training and credential-building. In sum, returning parents “are taking a more sophisticated approach,” says Carol Fishman Cohen, an author and co-founder of iRelaunch.com, a Web site on the topic. They also need a measure of luck, of course, to find employers who aren’t biased against taking career breaks. Here are three success stories:

Neighborhood Nexus

In her 10 years out of the work force, Ms. Witt, a former design manager for Nike, sought out volunteer work that would keep her skills “rich and vibrant,” she says. She chaired a $115,000-a-year scholarship program and co-headed a 60-parent school group with a $65,000 budget. By 2007, when her children were 3, 10 and 12, “I was ready to take a break from all the volunteer work,” she says. Getting started was tough. “I don’t know where to begin,” she told her husband, who brought home a book, “Back on the Career Track” co-authored by Ms. Cohen.

Ms. Witt began spreading the word that she was job-hunting. “I got a lot of ‘Me too!’” reactions, and thus the screened-porch sessions began, she says. Among the tips she gleaned was to leave dates off her resume, to avoid distracting employers from her skills. The sessions also lifted her confidence. She started cold-calling employers for meetings, and began landing interviews. Even with the economy in a swoon, she had three job offers by November and signed on as a regional marketing manager at Watson Wyatt, a benefits and human-resources consulting firm.

Patricia O’Connor, a Watson Wyatt managing consultant and Ms. Witt’s boss, liked not only her Nike experience, but her volunteer work. As a working mother, she says, “there’s a connection there for me.” The scholarship job showed Ms. Witt could “manage a lot of complexity” on her own, she says. Ms. O’Connor says it was clear from Ms. Witt’s resume that she could handle a wide range of tasks. “She had her hands in a lot of things all along.”

Bringing skills and experience that can have an immediate impact on the business can separate an applicant from the crowd, says Tim Schoonover, chairman of OI Partners, a career-coaching firm. It may not even matter whether you got a paycheck in your last “job.” In Ms. Witt’s case, says recruiter Patricia Lenkov of Agility Executive Search, the volunteer work was enough to prove “continued development and a track record of success.”

Pay to Play

Many at-home parents discover new interests and change career paths when they return; only 39% take the same kind of job they left, says a 2005 study of 130 people at the Wharton School. During Katherine Buehler’s 16-year break caring for her three children, she discovered an affinity for advising people on investments, and fixed her sights on a career doing that. As a former client-service director for a wealth-management concern, she had a good start.

But reaching her goal took more credential-building and networking than the Kenilworth, Ill., mother expected. After deciding in 2005 to return to work, she spent the next two years prepping for the Certified Financial Planner exam. Nearing the test, she spent most of a Florida vacation hitting the books, saying goodbye each morning to her husband and three teenagers and setting out on her bike for the library.

Then, just after Ms. Buehler passed the exam and hit the job market with her newly minted credentials, the economy tanked. Intent on her goal, she turned down a first job offer last September, because it emphasized sales and “in my gut, didn’t feel like the right fit,” she says. As hiring ground to a halt by December, “I was kicking myself, thinking, ‘I should have taken that job,”’ she says. She did pro-bono work, helping low-income families with finances, and forced herself to keep networking.

Her dogged efforts landed her an interview in January, with Globe Wealth Advisors, Deerfield, Ill., a unit of Globe Corp., an investment company. Bert A. Getz Jr., co-chief executive, says he was awash in applications from ex-employees of Wall Street firms when he heard about Ms. Buehler from a business contact. He was impressed by her aggressive preparation and, in a twist, saw the break on her resume as a plus. The open job was a new position, and “we wanted to start with a clean canvas. We didn’t want someone coming in and saying, ‘This is the way Goldman Sachs does it,”’ Mr. Getz says. “Katherine comes with a fresh perspective.” He hired her as a vice president and head of compliance; both say it’s a good fit.

More than half of workers returning from career breaks sign on with companies smaller than those they left, the Wharton study shows. Smaller employers tend to be less hung up on conventional career ladders; checking out such firms “is even more important in this down market,” Ms. Cohen says.

Give to Get

Shavonne Blades was apprehensive about Pam Kruteck, one of 40 applicants for a sales job, even before they met for a lunch interview. Ms. Blades, publisher of Yellow Scene, Erie, Colo., a glossy regional magazine, feared Ms. Kruteck’s former career in advertising, including a stint as media-services director at Slim-Fast Foods, made her overqualified. “My first reaction was, ‘Oh no, another media snob,”’ she says.

But by the time the pair finished lunch, Ms. Blades had done a 180. She tried to scare Ms. Kruteck away, telling her, “Sales is a brutal job; there’s a lot of rejection,” she says. But Ms. Kruteck didn’t wince, and proved herself humble and open to learning. Ms. Blades says she also won her over by “getting it”—understanding the magazine’s mission; “she has that passion” about its goals. She offered Ms. Kruteck the job.

Ms. Kruteck is taking a step down in pay and status. But she chooses not to see it that way. To her, the job poses an opportunity to learn a new skill—sales. Also, her background afforded Ms. Kruteck enough leverage to persuade Ms. Blades to let her work part-time, to spend time with her sons, 10 and 13, she says.

“As long as I’m making money and you’re making money, it shouldn’t matter,” she told Ms. Blades. Ms. Kruteck considers herself “lucky to find someone who is willing to take a flyer on me” and give her flexibility.

Albeit a step down, the job may actually be “a better position” for Ms. Kruteck because it’s “a better fit” personally, says OI Partners’ Mr. Schoonover. Also, Ms. Lenkov says, getting a foot in the door often pays off later; “one may have to take a step backward to ultimately advance.”

—Email:sue.shellenbarger@wsj.com

By KATY MCLAUGHLIN

Chef and restaurateur David Burke’s business sounds like a financial-crisis perfect storm. Consider:

His restaurants are mainly in hard-hit areas including Manhattan’s Upper East Side and Las Vegas. Mr. Burke has no experience owning restaurants in a down economy; he launched his empire during restaurant boom times, starting in 2003. And the $7 billion fine-dining industry will see a 12% to 15% drop in sales this year, according to Technomic, a Chicago restaurant industry consultant.

And yet…Mr. Burke reports overall growth, some of his restaurants are booked to capacity on some evenings, and restaurant-industry analysts say he is one of the few high-end players with the right idea for the times.

How could this be? Mr. Burke, it seems, has figured out a way to navigate the downturn. His strategy is to throw out the high-end-dining playbook that says discounting should be subtle. Instead, he is offering dramatic, attention-getting and significant discounts. By engineering the menu carefully and keeping labor costs in check, he is able to slash prices without losing money, he says.

His promotions have included $20.09 three-course meals with items such as oysters and lobster at many of his upscale restaurants, including two in Manhattan (where, without discounts, entrees run $29 to $44), and $5 burgers and milkshakes at his Chicago steakhouse (where a 14-ounce sirloin is $48 on the regular menu). On one menu, he crossed out prices of wine and listed new prices with the term “sale” — a rarely seen word in fancy restaurants.

TRY IT! David Burke’s promotions include a wine auction and $20.09 three-course meals

One of his most unusual promotions is the Wine Auction at the tony David Burke Townhouse in Manhattan. Diners are handed a list of high-end wines with prices ranging from $200 to $600 struck out with red ink. The sommelier approaches the table, suggests that diners make him an offer and begins a negotiation. Wine director Bruce Yung says he sells an average of five bottles a night, meeting his reserve price or better.

“It’s worth a shot,” says Mr. Burke of his unorthodox approach to selling fine wine. “I’m sitting on close to $200,000 worth of wine anyway, already paid for.”

The D Word

Discounting is a strategy high-end restaurateurs have traditionally avoided or carried out in subtle ways, out of fear of eroding the cache of their brands. But this winter and spring, an unprecedented number of fine-dining restaurants slashed their prices.

Mr. Burke tries to set his restaurants apart from other bargains being offered mainly by making his discounts as drastic, easy-to-grasp and catchy as those of one of the few restaurants doing well these days: McDonald’s.

“I have teenage kids who go to McDonald’s for a dollar meal,” Mr. Burke says. The snappy ring to that promotion inspired him to come up with a high-end equivalent. “I see that it’s working for them at a buck, so it might work for me at $20,” Mr. Burke says.

 

Wooing Diners in a Down Economy

2:07

Chef David Burke is known for his creative cuisine. Now he’s using that same creative approach to weather a downturn in dining out. He talks with WSJ’s Beckey Bright about his strategy.

Starting in January, he rolled out $20.09 meals on Sunday nights at David Burke Townhouse and Fishtail in Manhattan, and at David Burke Fromagerie in Rumson, N.J. At Primehouse, in Chicago, he offers the $20.09 deal for lunch six days a week, excluding Sunday. At David Burke at Bloomingdale’s, in Manhattan, he serves a $20.09 dinner every night of the week. For a $5 supplement, diners can have a one-pound lobster or filet mignon entrée.

Last year, DB Global, Mr. Burke’s New York-based company, had $35 million in revenue, and for this year he predicts $45 million. Like many multi-unit operators, he reports that his less-expensive restaurants are doing well this year. For instance, David Burke at Bloomingdale’s, which has both a sit-down restaurant and a Burke in the Box take-out area, is up 2% over last year. Sales at all three Burke in the Box restaurants — the others are at McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas, and Foxwoods Resort Casino in Connecticut — are up from last year.

Still, even his high-end restaurants, while taking a hit, are doing better than many of their high-end competitors: Primehouse had a 2% decline in sales in the last quarter of 2008 and beginning of this year, compared with the prior year; Fromagerie is down 5%, and David Burke Townhouse in New York City saw an 8% sales drop. Across Manhattan, meanwhile, fine-dining operators are reporting sales declines of around 15%, and some celebrated restaurants, including Fiamma, a highly praised Italian eatery in the same price range as Mr. Burke’s fanciest restaurants, recently closed.

Some of the impact of Mr. Burke’s discounting is measurable: The Sunday discount dinner at Townhouse in Manhattan turned a night that typically grossed $5,250 into a $12,750 night, Mr. Burke says. There are softer benefits, too, such as increased goodwill, publicity, and customers who discover the restaurants and return on full-price nights, Mr. Burke says.

Internal Breeding

Mr. Burke is somewhat insulated from the risk of besmirching his high-end image with discounts because of his unique public persona, says Ed Levine, founder of the food blog SeriousEats.com. “David Burke is the master of the culinary grand gesture, so this is perfectly in keeping with his brand,” Mr. Levine says. Mr. Burke now has “pricing gimmicks” that link up with other gimmicks he’s used over the years, Mr. Levine says. Mr. Burke, for example, bought his own breeding bull to sire the beef cattle used at Primehouse. He also lines his beef-aging cave with Himalayan rock salt, which he sells for $29.99 for a two-pound box.

Discounting, if done too often for too long by too many players, can erode pricing power in the long term, says Dennis Lombardi, executive vice president of WD Partners, a restaurant and retail consultant in Dublin, Ohio. Citing one example, “customers have been trained to expect to buy pizza at a discount,” because of all the coupons and deals, Mr. Lombardi says.

Mr. Burke says that by limiting most of his discounts to Sunday and varying the deals, he avoids such expectations.

Less Bass

With careful planning, Mr. Burke says he is able to keep food costs on his discounted menus at about 45% of the menu price, which is higher than the traditional 35% most fine-dining restaurants aim for but still enables him to earn a profit, because people tend to order more drinks when they are paying less for food. He sprinkles in luxurious ingredients, though some, such as dry-aged beef or black bass, are served in smaller portions than on the a la carte menu. He caught a break this winter when the wholesale prices he was paying for lobster fell to about $5 a pound, from a norm of $7.50, enabling him to include on the discounted menu items such as lobster carbonara and half an “angry lobster,” a spicy signature dish.

Stephen Hanson, a New York-based restaurateur who manages operations for the Chicago hotel where Primehouse is located and who helped devise the concept for the restaurant, disagrees with the discounting approach. Mr. Hanson says he fears that the customer will think, “Were you gouging me beforehand?” But Mr. Hanson, whose company, New York-based B.R. Guest Restaurants, owns 14 other restaurants in New York and Las Vegas, says he is content to let Mr. Burke, whom he calls “a marketing genius,” decide the menu pricing.

During a weeklong promotion in October at Primehouse in which Mr. Burke sold normally $12 burgers for $5, the restaurant made money, Mr. Burke says. Serving lunch to 30 to 40 people on an ordinary day yields about $8,000 per week. During the promotion, the restaurant served 300 lunches a day, Mr. Burke says, for a weekly lunch take of $30,000. While food costs were higher, because more was served, labor costs stayed almost the same, because waiters at the restaurant make most of their wages through tips and the kitchen required only two extra line cooks, who make $15 an hour, he says.

In addition to discounting, DB Global is reducing labor costs. Every week the company analyzes how many bookings have been made at each restaurant and looks at past history to determine how busy it will be. Then it pares or increases hourly staff — about 70% of all employees — accordingly. In winter, about a dozen cooks usually return to their home countries, including Mexico, India and France, for six weeks of unpaid vacation; this year, Mr. Burke encouraged them to take two or three months off. Because his three Manhattan restaurants are in close proximity, he also moves staff from less-busy to fuller restaurants and asks them to multitask. For example, the company butcher now also makes ravioli and crab cakes.

DB Global also focuses on retaining every potential customer. On a recent Tuesday, Fishtail was too full to accommodate more patrons. Mr. Burke instructed the Fishtail hostess to send patrons to nearby David Burke Townhouse, promising a free drink would be waiting. Out of 20 potential guests, 18 took the offer, Mr. Burke says.

—Ms. McLaughlin is a staff reporter for The Wall Street Journal in Los Angeles.

Write to Katy McLaughlin at katy.mclaughlin@wsj.com

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page R3

Human beings, we tend to think, are at the mercy of their genes. You either have blue eyes or you do not (barring contact lenses); no amount of therapy can change it. But genes are at the mercy of us, too. From minute to minute, they switch on and off (i.e., are actively used as recipes to make proteins) in the brain, the immune system or the skin in response to experience. Sunbathing, for example, triggers the expression of genes for the pigment melanin.

As a recent study confirms, on a much longer time scale, genes are even at the mercy of culture. The paradigmatic example is lactose tolerance. All mammals can digest lactose sugars in milk as babies, but the lactase gene switches off at weaning when no longer needed. In much of Europe and parts of Africa, by contrast, most people can digest lactose even as adults, because the lactase gene remains switched on. (About 90% of East Asians and 70% of South Indians are lactose-intolerant to some degree.)

This “lactase persistence” is caused by one of four genetic mutations that occurred in different regions and at different dates, one in Europe and three in Africa. Coincidentally, these regions also saw the domestication of cattle and the adoption of milk-drinking by adults around the same time. Of course, it’s plausible that the culture came first—drinking milk gave some advantage to all, because milk has nutrition other than lactose in it, but it especially benefited adults with mutations that allowed lactose digestion. So such mutations spread.

The new study, of 5,000-year-old bones from the Basque region of Spain, catches this evolutionary event in the act, finding that just 27% of individuals were then lactose tolerant, much lower than today. Concepción de la Rúa of Spain’s University of the Basque Country and her fellow authors conclude that the genetic change most probably happened after cattle domestication, at a time “when fresh milk consumption was already fully adopted as a consequence of a cultural influence.” Here we have genes at the mercy of culture.

Could blue eyes be another example of the same phenomenon—”culture-gene co-evolution”? Thanks to the work of the appropriately named (and blue-eyed) Danish geneticist Hans Eiberg and his colleagues, we now know that the chief mutation that causes blue eyes is a single letter change, from A to G, at the 26,039,213rd position on chromosome 15, within a gene called HERC2.

HERC2 has no effect on eye color, but it contains an unexpressed segment of DNA that is needed for the switching on of a nearby gene called OCA2, as demonstrated by newly published work by Robert-Jan Palstra and others at Erasmus University in the Netherlands. The mutation that causes blue eyes reduces the expression of OCA2 and hence reduces pigment concentration. Paler eyes look bluer.

Why did this mutation become so common somewhere around the shores of the Baltic sea around 6,000 years ago? The answer may lie in the fact that the date coincides with the arrival of agriculture in the area. When people began relying heavily on a diet of bread at such a northern latitude, they probably became chronically deficient in vitamin D, for bread is generally low in vitamin D.

This wouldn’t matter in a lower latitude, because the body can synthesize vitamin D if exposed to ultraviolet sun rays. But in northern Europe, diseases related to vitamin D deficiency, such as rickets, would have become common. Any individual who had a genetic mutation that lightened his or her skin (and eyes) would absorb more sunlight, boosting health and the ability to survive and breed. Paleness was selected.

When Nordic people started depending more on bread than on fish, they got less vitamin D from their diet. As a result, they got paler, improving the capacity of their skin to generate this crucial nutrient just from scarce sunlight. How they lived changed, in effect, how they looked.

By KAREN WILKIN

New York

In January 1943, Clement Greenberg, reviewing an exhibition titled “American Sculpture of Our Time,” complained that none of the “better work” on view came “close enough to great art”—none, that is, but a steel construction by a young artist named David Smith. “Smith is thirty-six,” Greenberg wrote. “If he is able to maintain the level set in the work he has already done . . . he has a chance of becoming one of the greatest of all American artists.”

Jerry L. Thompson

Smith’s pieces, far from being dispassionate arrangements of geometric elements, retain an eerie sense of presentness, as if they have us fixed in their invisible gaze. From left, ‘Tanktotem VII’ (1960) and ‘Circle IV’ (1962)

Greenberg’s prediction was indisputably accurate, but in the past few years it has been difficult to evaluate Smith’s full achievement. The “retrospective” “David Smith: A Centennial,” organized in 2006 to commemorate the anniversary of the artist’s birth (he died in 1965) and seen at the Guggenheim, the Centre Pompidou and Tate Modern, was badly skewed. By emphasizing the early Surrealizing sculptures—indeed by emphasizing any work noticeably responsive to European influences—rather than the later, fiercely original works, the show paid homage to Smith’s sculptural intelligence, delicate touch and faultless sense of scale, but ultimately distorted our view of his evolution. The formative pieces are clearly important (full disclosure: in 1980, I organized the first museum show devoted to Smith’s sculptures of the 1930s and ’40s) but not at the expense of the mature work. Now, however, “David Smith: Cubes and Anarchy” redresses the balance.

Selected from a larger exhibition organized by Carol S. Eliel that was seen at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the current version has been splendidly installed by the Whitney’s Barbara Haskell. The fourth-floor galleries have rarely looked as good, in spite of the peculiar premise of “Cubes and Anarchy,” a phrase Smith attributed to John Sloan, with whom he studied at the Art Students League. The show was apparently conceived to prove that the crisp, rectangular volumes Smith deployed in his later works, especially the stainless-steel “Cubi” series, were part of a lifetime interest in nonreferential geometric form—his association with Abstract Expressionism and the allusive biomorphic elements of his early work notwithstanding. I wouldn’t have thought this needed pointing out, given the variousness of the unstoppably inventive Smith’s work from any period. It can be argued, too, that Smith was never really an abstract sculptor, whether using organic or geometric forms; even the most severe of the vertical Cubis reads as a surrogate for the figure despite the Platonic austerity of its components, and there are countless other examples.

But the thesis can be ignored. “Cubes and Anarchy” is full of terrific sculptures, including masterpieces conspicuously absent from the centennial show, such as the loose-limbed, brushily painted “Zig III” (1961), a paradigm of the unpredictability that distinguishes Smith’s work. As we move around “Zig III,” it unfolds from a tightly packed, vertical assembly of suave curves, projections and a framing circle into a high-stepping structure bridging a horizontal expanse. There’s the great “Untitled (Candida)” (1965), an open, generously proportioned, squared-off “collage” of stainless plates, their surfaces enlivened with scribbles from the grinder. Seen head-on, it’s imposing and ample, while end views are startlingly thin; collage indeed, made aggressively physical. Equally surprising is the mysterious “Black and White Forward” (1961), a vertical plane, nipped delicately at the edges to emphasize its sculptural three-dimensionality, despite its “pictorial” flatness. Pierced by curves and angles of thin metal, the precarious, canted structure is poised on elegant little wheels.

“Zig IV” (1961) was included in the centennial show, but this spectacular, muscular sculpture—part Cubist still life, part antiaircraft gun, part bony personage, with its boldly brushed surface and tipped, implacable plate, above playful wheels—gains from its new context by entering a conversation with “Zig III” and with the exhibition’s paintings, works on paper, and earlier sculptures, all chosen to underscore the continuity of the cranky geometry that informs the larger pieces on view.

A group of slender, watchful Tanktotems, made in 1960, along with other tall, alert works from about the same time, make it clear that even Smith’s most pared-down pieces, such as the uncanny “Tanktotem IX,” a narrow vertical rectangle on a casual tripod, supporting a sliced tank-end, are far from being dispassionate arrangements of geometric elements. They retain an eerie, anthropomorphic sense of presentness; faceless, eyeless, even, bodyless—Smith plays havoc with familiar proportions and divisions—they nonetheless seem to confront us and fix us with their invisible gaze. Like the Zigs and some of the smaller works at the Whitney, the Tanktotems are painted; their engaging polychromy reminds us that Smith famously strove to combine painting and sculpture into what he called “a new art form” that “would beat either one.”

A selection of Smith’s photographs is testimony to this unstoppable artificer’s restless exploration of materials, scales, methods and disciplines. Sometimes he simply recorded works. Occasionally, he tested the potential of the medium with phenomena such as multiple exposures. Most exciting, he used photography to make sculptures, combining existing works into monumental structures by overlapping them in his images, sometimes co-opting elements of the studio setting or of still other sculptures, in the background, into unexpected, new wholes.

Whatever questions we may have about the premise, “David Smith: Cubes and Anarchy” is a delight. The selection of Smith’s works, in just about all of the many media he explored, spanning his life as an artist, from about 1930 to 1965, helps to flesh out our sense of his mastery and originality. It’s easy to see how prescient Greenberg was.

Ms. Wilkin writes about art for the Journal.