ROBERT SMITHSON. SPIRAL JETTY

One of the old themes of American art that got a new lease on life in the later 1960s and 1970s was the apprehension of nature's sub limity. It reappeared, in a secular form, in the Earth Art movement.... The best-known work of earth art...was created by Robert Smi thson [whose] great success was a work which virtually no one in the art world ever saw except in the art magazines.--Robert Hughes