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拍品專文
“1962 was the year in which David Smith, to his own surprise, realized a number of wholly new sculptural ideas in a burst of most intense activity… entering new realms of the artistic endeavor in the process.” - Jörn Merkert
Standing as a colossal figurative form, David Smith’s Voltri-Bolton IV expresses a forceful physicality which achieves the concrete immediacy attained by the best Abstract Expressionist masterpieces. The second example executed of his famed Voltri-Bolton series, completed on December 3, 1962, the present work represents the famed American sculptor at the height of his creative prowess. The work integrates the creative impetuses gleaned from his Italian residency completing a commission for the Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto with his singular American aesthetic as well as his intensive, idiosyncratic working practices developed at his Bolton Landing studio. Voltri-Bolton IV represents the pinnacle of Smith’s artistic development during his most seminal year. The art historian Jörn Merkert identifies the year Voltri-Bolton IV was made as the artist’s annus mirabilis, writing that “1962 was the year in which David Smith, to his own surprise, realized a number of wholly new sculptural ideas in a burst of most intense activity. He took stock of all his previous work and developed his earlier approaches in unexpected directions, entering new realms of the artistic endeavor in the process” (J. Merkert, “‘There are no rules in sculpture’: The Sculpture of David Smith,” in David Smith: Sculptures and Drawings, exh. cat., Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, 1986, p. 45). With Voltri-Bolton IV, Smith achieves a newfound sculptural vernacular synthesizing his previous experiments into a profound and arresting physical experience.
Voltri-Bolton IV consists of a primary form made of an upright rectangular steel plate through which Smith cut a triangle-shaped opening. The sculptor placed on top of this plate a steel joint which Michael Brenson describes as suggestive of “one of Smith’s recurring images—a bow or curl on a little girl’s head” (M. Brenson, David Smith: The Art and Life of a Transformational Sculptor, New York, 2022, p. 591). The work’s large, opened sheet is attached to its support by a small, table-like horizontal plane. Smith attaches other elements, including a hinge-like form, along one side, further elaborating the form’s surrealist figuration. Assembling disparate found objects together to form an integrated whole, Smith achieves here a work of exceptional physical and psychological presence.
The influential David Smith scholar and curator E. A. Carmean, Jr. identifies Voltri-Bolton IV as the pivotal example among the Voltri-Bolton series, revealing Smith’s evolving attitude toward materiality and his own aesthetic. The present work demonstrates Smith’s transition from using found materials in a way where their original identity and auratic function is subsumed within a larger sculptural syntax to one where each implemented object participates individually within the larger context. “Voltri-Bolton IV is a transition between these two formulations,” Carmean describes, in which the work’s constituent parts “fit into the composition but are not taken over by it” (E. A. Carmean, Jr., David Smith, exh. cat., National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1982, p. 165). The formal advances Smith achieved with the present work would go on to influence the remainder of the sculptor’s career.
David Smith executed Voltri-Bolton IV at the height of his creative prowess, in the midst of a fertile period in which the prolific sculptor created the majority of his masterpieces. The critic Rosalind Krauss describes in her important early monograph on the artist how Smith’s monumental pieces from this period show the artist at his best: “the rate at which he was able to strike off great sculptures, the fecundity of his ideas, the apparent ease with which one masterpiece followed another, all of this is part of the phenomenon of David Smith’s mature career” (R. Krauss, Terminal Iron Works: The Sculpture of David Smith, Cambridge, MA, 1979, p. 51).
Smith was invited by the Italian steel company Italsider to participate in a commission to create sculptures to headline Spoleto’s Festival of Two Worlds in 1962. Smith agreed to the prestigious commission after the festival’s founder, the famed composer Gian Carlo Menotti, offered to dedicate an opera to Smith’s daughters. Arriving at Italsider’s massive industrial complex outside of Genoa, Smith found the new complex at Cornigliano too industrialized and lacking the artisanal techniques which he favored for his creative process. Italsider instead gave the artist free reign of their recently decommissioned factory complex at Voltri, which was more in-tune with the artist’ working methods. Smith delighted in his unrestricted access to materials left at this complex, writing how at Voltri, “the beauties of the forge shop, parts dropped partly forged, cooled now, but stopped in progress—as if the human factor had dissolved and the great dust settled—the found tombs of the twentieth century, from giants to tweezers headed to the open hearth to feed the world’s speediest rolls” (D. Smith, quoted in A. J. Taylor, Forms of Persuasion: Art and the Corporate Image in the 1960s, Oakland, 2022, p. 176).
In an astounding burst of creativity, Smith produced twenty-seven works in the thirty days working at Voltri, with prominent art historian and critic Edward Fry noting in 1969 that the series was “without precedent in the history of modern sculpture” (E. Fry, quoted in E. A. Carmean, Jr., op. cit., p. 151). The festival’s curator Giovanni Carandente installed the Voltri series in the ancient Teatro Romano in Spoleto, where these profound sculptures reflected the symbolic register of Roman antiquity, the site revealing Smith’s absorption of classical antiquity in his radically modern works. A contemporaneous film commissioned for the exhibition describes how the Voltri series were “dark, magical objects from a civilization lost to ancient floods... like the chariots of heroes, ghosts and gods, who returned to look at us from an hour from the infinity of time,” emphasizing Smith’s union of the ancient and the modern, the artist masterfully bridging the old and the new (quoted in A. J. Taylor, op. cit., p. 184).
Smith, closely attuned from his early days as a ironworker to the materiality of his works, reveled in his access to steel at Voltri, noting how “Italsider let me roam all the factories—pick out whatever I wanted” (D. Smith, quoted in E. A. Carmean, Jr., op. cit., p. 151). The artist sorted through the massive stockpiles of steel stock held by the company, identifying any pieces he desired which would then be transported to his temporary workshop. By the end of his residency at the factory complex, Smith had accumulated a store of nearly one ton of iron and steel which he requested Italsider to ship back to his Bolton Landing studio. His Voltri-Bolton series emerged from these materials, functioning as, “both in spirit and substance... a continuation and out-growth of [Smith’s] Italian works,” in Fry’s description (E. Fry, quoted in E. A. Carmean, ibid., p. 153). Smith created twenty-five works for his Voltri-Bolton series, the second of which is the present work. While continuing certain compositional themes first explored in the Voltri works, here Smith advances stylistically, incorporating motifs found among his previous sculptures installed on the lawn of Bolton Landing as the sculptor was working again with his own tools and familiar working methods. Incorporating the motifs and compositional methods inspired by both his American and his Italian works, the Voltri-Bolton series incorporate important “innovations which were to remain without sequel in his oeuvre” (J. Merkert, op. cit., p. 45).
Voltri-Bolton IV recalls the forms of classical antiquity which Smith eagerly devoured while working on his Voltri series, the work’s figurative elements emerging out from its abstracted form in a way both radically modern yet simultaneously archaic. Aspects of Greek and Roman sculpture and vase-painting are referenced in both series, Smith melding the rich classical tradition into his steel sculptures with skillful discretion. Merkert describes how the works’ “radical simplification of formal vocabulary, the subtle, restrained rhythm in relation of the parts to one another and the unexpectedly ancient feel of the material are permeated with the spirit of classical antiquity and its ideals of beauty” (J. Merkert, ibid., p. 46). The Voltri-Bolton works further reflect the influence of their past as their imposing forms return to bear almost surrealist resemblances to human figures. Discussing the series with the critic Thomas B. Hess in a 1964 interview, Smith describes his Voltri-Bolton works as “personages,” relaying how they “were all pretty much built on human physiognomy. In most cases there was a human relationship there” (D. Smith, quoted in C. Lyon, “The Sculpture Series of David Smith” in David Smith: A Catalogue Raisonné, 1932-1965, Volume One, ed. C. Lyon, New Haven, 2021, p. 219). Voltri-Bolton IV uniquely juxtaposes the archaic and the surreal to express Smith’s iconic multi-dimensional vernacular.
Indicative of the work’s importance to David Smith’s oeuvre, Voltri-Bolton IV was including in the artist’s final lifetime exhibition, David Smith: Sculpture & Drawings at the University of Pennsylvania’s Institute of Contemporary Art in the winter of 1964. Of the twenty-five works in the series, twelve are in prestigious institutional collections, including the Menil Collection in Houston, Storm King Art Center in in upstate New York, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and the Museum Ludwig, Cologne. Writing that same year, the American artist and critic Donald Judd proclaimed that “David Smith’s sculpture is some of the best in the world” (D. Judd, quoted in M. Brenson, “Series, Sequence, and the Radical Imagination: The Sculpture of David Smith,” in David Smith: A Catalogue Raisonné, op. cit., p. 2). David Smith’s imaginative melding of the figurative and the abstract and his union of the ancient and the modern is boldly articulated with Voltri-Bolton IV, a masterpiece which proclaims Smith’s enduring legend.
Standing as a colossal figurative form, David Smith’s Voltri-Bolton IV expresses a forceful physicality which achieves the concrete immediacy attained by the best Abstract Expressionist masterpieces. The second example executed of his famed Voltri-Bolton series, completed on December 3, 1962, the present work represents the famed American sculptor at the height of his creative prowess. The work integrates the creative impetuses gleaned from his Italian residency completing a commission for the Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto with his singular American aesthetic as well as his intensive, idiosyncratic working practices developed at his Bolton Landing studio. Voltri-Bolton IV represents the pinnacle of Smith’s artistic development during his most seminal year. The art historian Jörn Merkert identifies the year Voltri-Bolton IV was made as the artist’s annus mirabilis, writing that “1962 was the year in which David Smith, to his own surprise, realized a number of wholly new sculptural ideas in a burst of most intense activity. He took stock of all his previous work and developed his earlier approaches in unexpected directions, entering new realms of the artistic endeavor in the process” (J. Merkert, “‘There are no rules in sculpture’: The Sculpture of David Smith,” in David Smith: Sculptures and Drawings, exh. cat., Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, 1986, p. 45). With Voltri-Bolton IV, Smith achieves a newfound sculptural vernacular synthesizing his previous experiments into a profound and arresting physical experience.
Voltri-Bolton IV consists of a primary form made of an upright rectangular steel plate through which Smith cut a triangle-shaped opening. The sculptor placed on top of this plate a steel joint which Michael Brenson describes as suggestive of “one of Smith’s recurring images—a bow or curl on a little girl’s head” (M. Brenson, David Smith: The Art and Life of a Transformational Sculptor, New York, 2022, p. 591). The work’s large, opened sheet is attached to its support by a small, table-like horizontal plane. Smith attaches other elements, including a hinge-like form, along one side, further elaborating the form’s surrealist figuration. Assembling disparate found objects together to form an integrated whole, Smith achieves here a work of exceptional physical and psychological presence.
The influential David Smith scholar and curator E. A. Carmean, Jr. identifies Voltri-Bolton IV as the pivotal example among the Voltri-Bolton series, revealing Smith’s evolving attitude toward materiality and his own aesthetic. The present work demonstrates Smith’s transition from using found materials in a way where their original identity and auratic function is subsumed within a larger sculptural syntax to one where each implemented object participates individually within the larger context. “Voltri-Bolton IV is a transition between these two formulations,” Carmean describes, in which the work’s constituent parts “fit into the composition but are not taken over by it” (E. A. Carmean, Jr., David Smith, exh. cat., National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1982, p. 165). The formal advances Smith achieved with the present work would go on to influence the remainder of the sculptor’s career.
David Smith executed Voltri-Bolton IV at the height of his creative prowess, in the midst of a fertile period in which the prolific sculptor created the majority of his masterpieces. The critic Rosalind Krauss describes in her important early monograph on the artist how Smith’s monumental pieces from this period show the artist at his best: “the rate at which he was able to strike off great sculptures, the fecundity of his ideas, the apparent ease with which one masterpiece followed another, all of this is part of the phenomenon of David Smith’s mature career” (R. Krauss, Terminal Iron Works: The Sculpture of David Smith, Cambridge, MA, 1979, p. 51).
Smith was invited by the Italian steel company Italsider to participate in a commission to create sculptures to headline Spoleto’s Festival of Two Worlds in 1962. Smith agreed to the prestigious commission after the festival’s founder, the famed composer Gian Carlo Menotti, offered to dedicate an opera to Smith’s daughters. Arriving at Italsider’s massive industrial complex outside of Genoa, Smith found the new complex at Cornigliano too industrialized and lacking the artisanal techniques which he favored for his creative process. Italsider instead gave the artist free reign of their recently decommissioned factory complex at Voltri, which was more in-tune with the artist’ working methods. Smith delighted in his unrestricted access to materials left at this complex, writing how at Voltri, “the beauties of the forge shop, parts dropped partly forged, cooled now, but stopped in progress—as if the human factor had dissolved and the great dust settled—the found tombs of the twentieth century, from giants to tweezers headed to the open hearth to feed the world’s speediest rolls” (D. Smith, quoted in A. J. Taylor, Forms of Persuasion: Art and the Corporate Image in the 1960s, Oakland, 2022, p. 176).
In an astounding burst of creativity, Smith produced twenty-seven works in the thirty days working at Voltri, with prominent art historian and critic Edward Fry noting in 1969 that the series was “without precedent in the history of modern sculpture” (E. Fry, quoted in E. A. Carmean, Jr., op. cit., p. 151). The festival’s curator Giovanni Carandente installed the Voltri series in the ancient Teatro Romano in Spoleto, where these profound sculptures reflected the symbolic register of Roman antiquity, the site revealing Smith’s absorption of classical antiquity in his radically modern works. A contemporaneous film commissioned for the exhibition describes how the Voltri series were “dark, magical objects from a civilization lost to ancient floods... like the chariots of heroes, ghosts and gods, who returned to look at us from an hour from the infinity of time,” emphasizing Smith’s union of the ancient and the modern, the artist masterfully bridging the old and the new (quoted in A. J. Taylor, op. cit., p. 184).
Smith, closely attuned from his early days as a ironworker to the materiality of his works, reveled in his access to steel at Voltri, noting how “Italsider let me roam all the factories—pick out whatever I wanted” (D. Smith, quoted in E. A. Carmean, Jr., op. cit., p. 151). The artist sorted through the massive stockpiles of steel stock held by the company, identifying any pieces he desired which would then be transported to his temporary workshop. By the end of his residency at the factory complex, Smith had accumulated a store of nearly one ton of iron and steel which he requested Italsider to ship back to his Bolton Landing studio. His Voltri-Bolton series emerged from these materials, functioning as, “both in spirit and substance... a continuation and out-growth of [Smith’s] Italian works,” in Fry’s description (E. Fry, quoted in E. A. Carmean, ibid., p. 153). Smith created twenty-five works for his Voltri-Bolton series, the second of which is the present work. While continuing certain compositional themes first explored in the Voltri works, here Smith advances stylistically, incorporating motifs found among his previous sculptures installed on the lawn of Bolton Landing as the sculptor was working again with his own tools and familiar working methods. Incorporating the motifs and compositional methods inspired by both his American and his Italian works, the Voltri-Bolton series incorporate important “innovations which were to remain without sequel in his oeuvre” (J. Merkert, op. cit., p. 45).
Voltri-Bolton IV recalls the forms of classical antiquity which Smith eagerly devoured while working on his Voltri series, the work’s figurative elements emerging out from its abstracted form in a way both radically modern yet simultaneously archaic. Aspects of Greek and Roman sculpture and vase-painting are referenced in both series, Smith melding the rich classical tradition into his steel sculptures with skillful discretion. Merkert describes how the works’ “radical simplification of formal vocabulary, the subtle, restrained rhythm in relation of the parts to one another and the unexpectedly ancient feel of the material are permeated with the spirit of classical antiquity and its ideals of beauty” (J. Merkert, ibid., p. 46). The Voltri-Bolton works further reflect the influence of their past as their imposing forms return to bear almost surrealist resemblances to human figures. Discussing the series with the critic Thomas B. Hess in a 1964 interview, Smith describes his Voltri-Bolton works as “personages,” relaying how they “were all pretty much built on human physiognomy. In most cases there was a human relationship there” (D. Smith, quoted in C. Lyon, “The Sculpture Series of David Smith” in David Smith: A Catalogue Raisonné, 1932-1965, Volume One, ed. C. Lyon, New Haven, 2021, p. 219). Voltri-Bolton IV uniquely juxtaposes the archaic and the surreal to express Smith’s iconic multi-dimensional vernacular.
Indicative of the work’s importance to David Smith’s oeuvre, Voltri-Bolton IV was including in the artist’s final lifetime exhibition, David Smith: Sculpture & Drawings at the University of Pennsylvania’s Institute of Contemporary Art in the winter of 1964. Of the twenty-five works in the series, twelve are in prestigious institutional collections, including the Menil Collection in Houston, Storm King Art Center in in upstate New York, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and the Museum Ludwig, Cologne. Writing that same year, the American artist and critic Donald Judd proclaimed that “David Smith’s sculpture is some of the best in the world” (D. Judd, quoted in M. Brenson, “Series, Sequence, and the Radical Imagination: The Sculpture of David Smith,” in David Smith: A Catalogue Raisonné, op. cit., p. 2). David Smith’s imaginative melding of the figurative and the abstract and his union of the ancient and the modern is boldly articulated with Voltri-Bolton IV, a masterpiece which proclaims Smith’s enduring legend.