The three sculptures in Marriage, Night, We Lost are among Tony Smith’s most important early large-scale sculptures. Conceived of connected rectangular and square modules that relate to the perimeter of a cube, these works are among the most streamlined, reduced sculptural forms the artist ever made.

After exploring painting in the 1930s, Tony Smith supported himself as an architect for over twenty years. He did not start making sculpture until the late 1950s, producing his first mature sculptures in the early 1960s. The artist’s first one-person exhibition was held at the Wadsworth Athenaeum in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1966, in which the three present sculptures were first exhibited.

The process of arranging and combining classical geometric forms is at the core of the artist’s sculptural work. Tony Smith often began working on a new sculpture by rearranging elements used in previous sculptures and incorporating new ones: both Marriage and Night were born out of the rearranged and augmented modules of a slightly earlier work, Free Ride. Inspiration for Free Ride came when the artist was placing a group of three Alka-Seltzer boxes on a table in different arrangements; struck by one particular arrangement, the artist decided to make a sculpture based on that design, and the present works followed shortly thereafter.