Most of the time when we see art, we see it in museums and galleries. While these settings are ideal for preserving fragile works and accommodating lots of viewers, they also impart an unfortunate sterility to the experience. Artwork in a white room lacks the flavor of its creation. And sometimes that whiff is essential to understanding and appreciating it. One great artist of whom this seems especially true is the American sculptor David Smith.

Between 1940 and 1965, Smith worked at Bolton Landing in the Adirondack Mountains creating what he called a "sculpture farm" in the fields around his house. "My sculpture is part of my world," he once said in an interview. "It's part of my everyday living; it reflects my studio, my house, my trees, the nature of the world I live in." In the photographs Alexander Liberman took at Bolton Landing, it is possible to see how Smith's sculptures originally related to these surroundings and to each other.

You get a sense of Smith as the yeoman farmer of modern sculpture from the exhibition now at Storm King Art Center, a sculpture park in the Hudson Valley, a few hours south of where Smith lived. This is not an attempt to recreate the original setting of his sculptures but rather a presentation inspired by it. What comes across magnificently in this show is what's missing in a museum: the counterpoint between the industrial character of Smith's welded pieces and the arcadian setting he put them in.

The exhibition is the third and final installment of three curated by Candida Smith, the younger of the artist's two daughters. It's an unusual type of presentation, personal and experiential rather than scholarly. "My relationships with my father's sculptures are almost those of a sibling," Smith writes in the catalog. The 1965 piece named for her stands next to one named for Smith's older daughter, Becca. Here the steel sisters play among their father's sculptures, as his daughters did when they were girls.

It's difficult to argue the appeal of any abstract art to someone who doesn't respond to it instinctively. Smith himself thought writing was unhelpful in explaining his work. "There were no words in my mind during its creation and I'm certain words are not needed in its seeing," he once wrote. What an assemblage like this does is allow the viewer to test his response to an artist's vision. Seeing dozens of Smith's sculptures in this setting, you begin to recognize his vocabulary of forms, to enter his aesthetic and emotional world.

Smith has an elliptical relationship to the Abstract Expressionists. Born in 1906 in Decatur, Ind., he learned to weld steel in a Studebaker factory before moving to New York to study art. Like his contemporaries, he was influenced by Cubism, Constructivism, and Surrealism. But while the abstract painters pondered the flatness of the picture plane, Smith projected it back into three dimensions. In the early 1930s, he started welding sculptures in a shop at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. In 1940, he moved with his first wife and welding suit to Bolton Landing.

In the 1940s, Smith made jagged-looking, Surrealist-inspired pieces. He saw his work as being closely connected to painting and seemed to be trying to fuse the two forms. In the 1950s, some of his sculptures became more figurative and whimsical, like his personage The Sitting Printer (1954-55), while others grew more fully abstract, like his "tanktotems," concave and convex pieces that he made out of boiler lids. Not until the mid-'50s did he begin to fill the fields around his house with these sculptures.

In 1958, Smith bought a big shipment of stainless steel--a medium that could survive an upstate winter out of doors--and began making larger pieces, such as the Cézanne-inspired XI Books III Apples (1959). Before long he was grinding the surface of the steel in a way that simulated brush strokes and which looks, on some of his pieces, like an agitated scribbling. The burnished surfaces create a semi-mirror, reflecting the clouds, mountains, and greenery. When the sun is out, the light dances like electricity on the face of the sculptures.

Smith was a kind of Paul Bunyan. Everything about him was huge: his person (which Helen Frankenthaler, the painter, described as an egg with a belt around the middle), his ambition, and his productivity. Yet when Smith's scale increases, his work becomes wonderfully ethereal, as in the 12-foot sculptures Three Ovals Soar (1960) and Sentinal V (1959). There is a lyricism to these pieces, a filament lightness that defies the solidity of their materials. To me they suggest a pair of bodies, an elegant woman trailed by a chattering man.

In 1962, Smith was invited to Italy for the Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto. With a crew of Italian workmen, he constructed in one month not one sculpture, as commissioned, but 27. These pieces were made from the tongs, wheels, wrenches, and other industrial detritus Smith found on the floor of an abandoned factory in Voltri. Displayed in Spoleto's Roman amphitheater, they created a wonderful modern-ancient contrast paralleling the industrial-agrarian one on view at Bolton Landing.

"It was after his return from Italy that the fields began to burgeon at an amazing rate," Candida Smith writes in the exhibition catalog. "It was as if the creative explosion and the resulting enormous installation in Spoleto ignited a fire that did not burn out." David Smith used the term "work stream" to describe the flow of art that poured from his shop and into the fields. The profusion included "Bolton-Voltris," made with salvage from Italy, white-painted "primo pianos, "wagons," "circles," "cubis," and "zigs."

This year's Storm King exhibition concentrates on Smith's work in stainless steel. Soon after his return from Italy, he built Tower One (1963), a 23-foot tall confection that picks up where Three Ovals Soar left off, treating stainless steel as spun sugar. From the front, Tower One appears massive, like a disheveled electrical tower. From the side, however, it's so wispy as to be nearly invisible. This work is an extraordinary counterpart to the earthiness of the Voltri-inspired iron pieces Smith was making around the same time.

This view of the upper field at Bolton Landing shows the variety of Smith's work in the 1960s. In the right foreground is the first of his cubi series, which introduced a new sense of volume to sculpture that had been described as "drawing in space." At the same time he was producing these "volumetric" cubis, Smith was developing various new planar concepts. Behind Untitled (Candida) is Wagon I (1964) and the white-painted Primo Piano II from 1962. In the back row are several of Smith's circles.

Smith was isolated and lonely at Bolton Landing, especially after his two divorces. It has been suggested that he filled his hills with sculptures for company. His abstract works do have a human quality, seeming to communicate wordlessly with each other. Indoors, this effect is lost. Untitled (1964) opens onto a white wall in the museum where it usually resides. At Storm King, it becomes again what it was at Bolton Landing: a window onto other sculptures. Here, as then, it affords a view of Becca (1965).

Becca and Untitled (Candida), both made 1965, the year Smith died in a car accident, sum up his genius. Despite their mass, they float. Their electric, constantly shifting surfaces are mesmerizing. They fuse industry with nature and abstraction with depiction, expressing the personalities of Smith's beloved daughters without any explicitly anthropomorphic elements. To me, they exemplify the qualities Smith valued most in art: vitality, belligerence, and conviction. When you see them in the hills, their power is palpable. But the artist was right: You can't explain them in words.