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Auction archive: Lot number 184

David Smith

Estimate
US$400,000 - US$600,000
Price realised:
US$471,000
Auction archive: Lot number 184

David Smith

Estimate
US$400,000 - US$600,000
Price realised:
US$471,000
Beschreibung:

David Smith Follow Spectre steel and found objects 15 3/4 x 15 1/2 x 5 1/4 in. (40 x 39.4 x 13.3 cm.) Executed in 1953.
Condition Report Request Condition Report Thank you for your request. The Condition Report will be sent shortly. Contact Us * Required Send me the Report Via Email Fax Contact Specialist Cancel Provenance The Artist John J. O’Connor Jr., Pittsburg (acquired from the above) Private Collection, Bloomsburg (by descent from the above) Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1992 Exhibited Miami, Museum of Contemporary Art, David Smith Stop/Action , December 19, 1998 - February 24, 1999, no. 6, pp. 16, 50 (illustrated) New York, Freedman Art, Carved, Cast, Crushed, Constructed , March 8 - August 22, 2014 Literature E. C. Goossen, "David Smith", Arts , vol. 30, no. 6, March 1956, pp. 24-25 (illustrated, p. 25) David Smith 1906-1965: A retrospective exhibition , exh. cat., Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, 1966, no. 248, p. 74 Rosalind E. Krauss, The Sculpture of David Smith A Catalogue Raisonné , New York and London, 1977, no. 302, p. 62 (illustrated, fig. 302) Karen Wilkin, "At the Galleries", Hudson Review 67 , no. 2, Summer 2014, p. 298 Catalogue Essay Steel and bronze dynamically fuse in David Smith’s Spectre , 1953, merging into a fantastical creature that seems poised to levitate from its pedestal at any moment. Varying patinas are revealed as one moves around the sculpture – a range that draws attention to the nuances of the material and the presence of the artist’s hand. In its vivid expression of velocity and playful allusions to both industry and nature, this iconic work presents a powerful continuation of Smith’s earlier Spectre series from the mid-1940s that included works such as War Spectre, 1944, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. While those were created in direct response to World War II, the present sculpture and its related Spectre Riding a Headless Horse , 1951-1952, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C., demonstrate how Smith in the early 1950s further pushed the theme into more mythical pastures with a heightened abstract idiom and playful allusions to the natural world. Executed in 1953, Spectre was notably acquired directly from the artist by John O’Connor Jr., the former Assistant Director of The Carnegie Institute who frequently visited Smith with the Carnegie’s then-Director Homer Saint-Gaudens, the son of the famous sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens When Smith created Spectre at the height of the Abstract Expressionist movement, it had been exactly two decades since his decisive shift from painting to sculpture. It was in 1933, having encountered reproductions of the welded sculptures by Pablo Picasso and Julio González, that Smith had begun “drawing in space”. Challenging all convention, Smith utilized industrial material in the form of found-objects – metal scraps, fragments of wheel rims or cogs of discarded motors. Smith’s Spectre series seem like the physical manifestation of Picasso’s Painting (Running Minotaur), 1928 – the distilled lines of Picasso’s human-animal figure, however, radically reimagined in the industrial materials specific to new age. As Smith noted of his Spectre series in 1951, “Possibly steel is so beautiful because of all the movement associated with it, its strength and function. Yet it is also brutal…But in my Spectre series, I speak of these things and it seems most functional in its method of statement” (David Smith “Notes for Elaine de Kooning”, 1951, in Susan J. Cooke (ed.), David Smith Collecting Writings, Lectures, and Interviews , Oakland, 2018, p. 129). Exemplary of Smith’s interest in openness and expansiveness in the early 1950s, Spectre is situated at a critical juncture in Smith’s formal development of his sculptural idiom. As evidenced in sculptures such as Europa and Agricola XIII from the same year, it speaks of Smith’s focus on making sculptures connected to the theme of drawing in 1953. In Spectre , the sculpture’s wry form is welded from disparate metal elements: a flat, curved metal plane forms the central portion of the body to whic

Auction archive: Lot number 184
Auction:
Datum:
14 Nov 2018
Auction house:
Phillips
New York
Beschreibung:

David Smith Follow Spectre steel and found objects 15 3/4 x 15 1/2 x 5 1/4 in. (40 x 39.4 x 13.3 cm.) Executed in 1953.
Condition Report Request Condition Report Thank you for your request. The Condition Report will be sent shortly. Contact Us * Required Send me the Report Via Email Fax Contact Specialist Cancel Provenance The Artist John J. O’Connor Jr., Pittsburg (acquired from the above) Private Collection, Bloomsburg (by descent from the above) Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1992 Exhibited Miami, Museum of Contemporary Art, David Smith Stop/Action , December 19, 1998 - February 24, 1999, no. 6, pp. 16, 50 (illustrated) New York, Freedman Art, Carved, Cast, Crushed, Constructed , March 8 - August 22, 2014 Literature E. C. Goossen, "David Smith", Arts , vol. 30, no. 6, March 1956, pp. 24-25 (illustrated, p. 25) David Smith 1906-1965: A retrospective exhibition , exh. cat., Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, 1966, no. 248, p. 74 Rosalind E. Krauss, The Sculpture of David Smith A Catalogue Raisonné , New York and London, 1977, no. 302, p. 62 (illustrated, fig. 302) Karen Wilkin, "At the Galleries", Hudson Review 67 , no. 2, Summer 2014, p. 298 Catalogue Essay Steel and bronze dynamically fuse in David Smith’s Spectre , 1953, merging into a fantastical creature that seems poised to levitate from its pedestal at any moment. Varying patinas are revealed as one moves around the sculpture – a range that draws attention to the nuances of the material and the presence of the artist’s hand. In its vivid expression of velocity and playful allusions to both industry and nature, this iconic work presents a powerful continuation of Smith’s earlier Spectre series from the mid-1940s that included works such as War Spectre, 1944, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. While those were created in direct response to World War II, the present sculpture and its related Spectre Riding a Headless Horse , 1951-1952, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C., demonstrate how Smith in the early 1950s further pushed the theme into more mythical pastures with a heightened abstract idiom and playful allusions to the natural world. Executed in 1953, Spectre was notably acquired directly from the artist by John O’Connor Jr., the former Assistant Director of The Carnegie Institute who frequently visited Smith with the Carnegie’s then-Director Homer Saint-Gaudens, the son of the famous sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens When Smith created Spectre at the height of the Abstract Expressionist movement, it had been exactly two decades since his decisive shift from painting to sculpture. It was in 1933, having encountered reproductions of the welded sculptures by Pablo Picasso and Julio González, that Smith had begun “drawing in space”. Challenging all convention, Smith utilized industrial material in the form of found-objects – metal scraps, fragments of wheel rims or cogs of discarded motors. Smith’s Spectre series seem like the physical manifestation of Picasso’s Painting (Running Minotaur), 1928 – the distilled lines of Picasso’s human-animal figure, however, radically reimagined in the industrial materials specific to new age. As Smith noted of his Spectre series in 1951, “Possibly steel is so beautiful because of all the movement associated with it, its strength and function. Yet it is also brutal…But in my Spectre series, I speak of these things and it seems most functional in its method of statement” (David Smith “Notes for Elaine de Kooning”, 1951, in Susan J. Cooke (ed.), David Smith Collecting Writings, Lectures, and Interviews , Oakland, 2018, p. 129). Exemplary of Smith’s interest in openness and expansiveness in the early 1950s, Spectre is situated at a critical juncture in Smith’s formal development of his sculptural idiom. As evidenced in sculptures such as Europa and Agricola XIII from the same year, it speaks of Smith’s focus on making sculptures connected to the theme of drawing in 1953. In Spectre , the sculpture’s wry form is welded from disparate metal elements: a flat, curved metal plane forms the central portion of the body to whic

Auction archive: Lot number 184
Auction:
Datum:
14 Nov 2018
Auction house:
Phillips
New York
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