David Smith

Estate of the Artist
Marlborough-Gerson Gallery, Inc., New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above in 1969

New York, Willard Gallery, David Smith, March - April 1951, cat. no. 5
Boston, Margaret Brown Gallery, October 1951
New York, The Museum of Modern Art, David Smith, September – October 1957, cat. no. 12, p. 13, illustrated and p. 9 (text)
Rochester, Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester; Cambridge, Hayden Gallery, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Exeter, Lamont Gallery, The Phillips-Exeter Academy; Washington, D.C., Phillips Collection; Hartford, Wadsworth Atheneum; Indianapolis, John Herron Museum of Art; San Antonio, Witte Memorial Museum; Carbondale, Southern Illinois University, David Smith, November 1961 - January 1963 (organized by The Museum of Modern Art, New York) (checklist)
New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Dallas, Dallas Museum of Fine Arts; Washington, D.C., Corcoran Gallery of Art, David Smith, March - November 1969, cat. no. 35, figs. 35A-F, pp. 64-65, illustrated (with details and sketchbook studies)
Chicago, Arts Club of Chicago, David Smith: Spray Paintings, Drawings, Sculpture, June 1983, cat. no. 52
Des Moines, Des Moines Art Center, Iowa Collects, May – July 1985, p. 27, illustrated
New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Paris, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou; London, Tate Modern, David Smith: A Centennial, February 2006 – January 2007, cat. no. 49, pl. 49, n. p., illustrated; p. 303, illustrated (at Bolton Landing circa 1960), and pp. 13 and 304 (text) (New York) and cat. no. 21, pl. 21, p. 132, illustrated in color; fig. 63, p. 133, illustrated (at Bolton Landing); fig. 65, p. 135, illustrated (at Bolton Landing with sketchbook studies) and p. 305, illustrated (Paris)

Emily Genauer, “Art: Some Themes of the Machine Age,” New York Herald Tribune, April 1, 1951, p. 7
Dorothy Seckler, “David Smith,” ArtNews 50, May 1951, p. 43
Aline Jean Treanor, “ ‘Giant of Modern Sculpture’: Success of ‘Spindly Little Shaver’ Takes Ohio Town by Surprise,” Toledo Blade Pictorial, August 16, 1953, p. 17, illustrated
Howard Devree, “Mature Moderns: Matta and David Smith in Museum Shows,” New York Times, September 15, 1957, p. XII, illustrated
Robert M. Coates, “The Art Galleries: Double Retrospective,” New Yorker, vol. 33, no. 13, September 21, 1957, p. 123 (text)
Hilton Kramer, “Month in Review,” Arts, vol. 32, no. 1, October 1957, p. 48, illustrated and p. 51 (text)
Museum of Modern Art Bulletin 25, no. 2, 1957, p. 13, illustrated and p. 9 (text)
"The Arts are Related," Journal of the American Association of University Women, vol. 51, no. 2, January 1958, p. 107, illustrated
Ben Gelman, "SIU Gallery Exhibits Metal Sculpture," Southern Illinoisan, January 17, 1963, p. 24, illustrated
“David Smith Dies; Metal Sculptor," New York Times, May 25, 1965, p. 41 (text)
Exh. Cat., Cambridge, Massachusetts, Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University (and travelling), David Smith, 1906-1965: A Retrospective Exhibition, 1966, cat. no. 183, p. 71 (handlist)
Cleve Gray, ed., David Smith by David Smith, New York, 1968, p. 73, illustrated
James Ackerman, "The Shape of Things to Come," New York Review of Books, vol. 13, no. 3, August 21, 1969, n.p.
Rosalind E. Krauss, Terminal Iron Works: The Sculpture of David Smith, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1971, fig. 79, p. 103, illustrated, p. 102, illustrated (with sketchbook studies) and p. 104 (text)
Garnett McCoy ed., David Smith, New York and London, 1973, fig. 43, p. 125, illustrated
Rosalind E. Krauss, The Sculpture of David Smith: A Catalogue Raisonné, New York and London, 1977, cat. no. 235 (Archive 219), p. 265, illustrated and p. 47 (text) 
Exh. Cat., Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art, American Art at Mid-Century: The Subjects of the Artist, 1978, p. 236 (text)
Exh. Cat., Washington, D.C., Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, David Smith, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden Collection, Smithsonian Institution, 1979, p. 18 (text)
Exh. Cat., Washington, D. C., Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, David Smith: Painter, Sculptor, Drafstman, 1982, p. 14 (text)
Stanley E. Marcus, David Smith: The Sculptor and His Work, Ithaca, 1983, p. 59 (text)
Karen Wilkin, David Smith, New York, 1984, pl. 45, p. 44, illustrated in color and p. 47 (text)
April Kingsley, The Turning Point: The Abstract Expressionists and the Transformation of American Art, New York, 1992, p. 177 (text)
Exh. Cat., Tel Aviv Museum of Art, David Smith: Paintings, Sculptures, and Medals, 1999, figs. 18-21, pp. 121 and 174-75, illustrated (with details and sketchbook studies) and pp. 178-79 (text)
Exh. Cat., Cambridge, Massachusetts, Fogg Art Museum,  Harvard University, Lois Orswell, David Smith, and Modern Art, 2002, fig. 89, p. 221, illustrated (in installation at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1957)
Rosalind Krauss, "1945: David Smith makes," in Hal Foster, et al., Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism, New York, 2004, p. 334 (text)
Ann Hindry, "La sculpture héroïque de David Smith," Art Press, July 7, 2006, p. 41
Laura Tansini, "Al Centre Pompidou Mostra Monografica di David Smith nel Centenaro della Nascita nell'Officina di Vulcano," Arte In, August 1, 2006, n.p.
Deborah Jowitt, "Dances with Sculpture," Tate Etc., no. 8, Autumn 2006, p. 99 (text)

This sculpture is in excellent condition. The joins and welds appear stable and secure. Upon close inspection, the artist's painted surface is structurally sound and stable, with some scattered scratches and nicks along the sides of the base or platform, which are not overtly obtrusive to the naked eye. There is a faintly shiny resinous drip accretion running 3-4 inches from the top and down the side of the base on the middle of the right side, with an attendant oblong 1 inch area where the paint surface is lacking some of the sheen evident in the surrounding pigment.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

“Before knowing what art was or before going to art school, as a factory worker I was acquainted with steel and machines used in forging it… During my second year at art school I learned about Cubism, Picasso and Julio González through [magazines]. From them I learned that art was being made with steel—the materials and machines that had previously only meant labor and earning power.” (The artist cited in Karen Wilkin, David Smith, New York, 1984, p. 12)

“The material called iron and steel I hold in high respect. What it can do in arriving at a form economically, no other material can do. The material itself possesses little art history. What associations it possesses are those of this century: power, structure, movement, progress, suspension, brutality.” (The artist cited in Karen Wilkin, David Smith, New York, 1984, p. 20)

“American machine techniques and European cubist tradition, both of this century, are accountable for the new freedom in sculpture-making. Sculpture is no longer limited to the slow carving of marble and long process of bronze. It has found new form and new method… The building up of sculpture from unit parts, the quantity to quality concept, is also an industrial concept, the basis of automobile and machine assembly in the steel process.” (The artist cited in Exh. Cat., Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, David Smith: Cubes and Anarchy, 2011, p. 26) 

Sacrifice is an important example of David Smith’s renowned sculptural alchemy, in which he transformed obdurate metal into elegant yet volumetric presences, all created around open spaces rather than carved from a solid piece of wood or stone. This greatest of all American sculptors of the mid-Twentieth Century began as a painter and sustained an affinity for draftsmanship throughout his oeuvre, introducing a new kind of sculpture in which “drawing in space” balanced void with substance, figuration with abstraction, linear design with volumetric composition. Employing industrial materials and modern technologies such as welding, Smith displayed an innate genius for organizing space. His work of the late 1930s to early 1950s also alluded to Smith’s love of Surrealism, bringing a poetic and expressive element to his abstractions. With its poised tension of landscape and figurative elements joined into an ideographic composition, and its interplay of solid and void, Sacrifice stands as a culmination of Smith’s formative decades, and acts as a gateway to the masterpieces to come in the 1950s and 1960s. Extensively reproduced and discussed throughout the literature on the sculptor, Sacrifice was first exhibited in 1951 at the Willard Gallery in New York, and was subsequently chosen by the Museum of Modern Art, New York for its 1957 Smith retrospective exhibition. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum included Sacrifice in their two celebrated retrospective exhibitions of Smith's work, first in 1966 and again in 2006 for their influential travelling retrospective that celebrated the artist’s centennial year.

Smith acknowledged the influence of European innovators such as Pablo Picasso, Julio González and Alberto Giacometti, yet he also embodied the independence of spirit that characterized many American artists of the 1930s and 1940s, when society was in an as much ferment and turmoil as the artistic theories and practices of the time. Refusing to accept one convention over another, Smith forcefully followed a path toward his own singular vision, and Sacrifice manifests this artistic journey in its combination of Surrealist totemic imagery with the spatial innovations of modernist sculpture, culminating in a masterwork of the 1950s that established a new kind of sculptural idiom.

Smith was introduced to modernism by the artist John Graham, a sophisticated mentor to many young artists in New York in the 1930s. Moving between Paris and New York, Graham brought his protégés into contact with the latest European developments. Through Graham, Smith encountered the works of González and Picasso in Cahiers d’Art, and felt an affinity for their work. As he stated in 1955, “Cubism freed sculpture from monolithic and volumetric form…, [and] the poetic vision in sculpture is fully as free as in painting.” (Garnett McCoy, ed., David Smith, New York, 1973, pp. 16-17) Just as Cubism exposed the interior core of traditionally opaque objects, the Surrealist vocabulary gave form to intangible reality, emotions, associations, and symbols. The mythically resonant title and the rhythmic form of Sacrifice convey the Surrealist heart of this composition, while the formal structure and the stepped base speak of the reductive qualities and spatial innovations of Alberto Giacometti. In the early 1950s, Smith’s love of landscape is often expressed in a linear two-dimension as in The Forest (1950, Nasher Sculpture Center) and Hudson River Landscape (1951, Whitney Museum of American Art). Sacrifice is also reductive with its horizontals and verticals, but retains the planar depth familiar to Giacometti’s table-top tableaus such as Le Forêt (1950) and Trois Hommes qui marchent II (1948). The critic Emily Genauer focused on Surrealist content when she wrote of Sacrifice: “Another symbolic piece whose allusions go back to ancient myth and legend.” (“Art: Some Themes of the Machine Age,” New York Herald Tribune, April 1, 1951, p. 7) Yet there is a formal rigour and increasing scale that sets Sacrifice apart from other Surrealist tableau by Smith such as Home of the Welder (1945, Tate Modern, London). In Giacometti’s Le Forêt (1950), space seems to press in on the elongated and emaciated figures, constricting them, whereas in Sacrifice, Smith’s forms celebrate their space and freely circulate within the third dimension. Pedestals and bases traditionally acted as a transitional device – a formal distance – between the viewer and the artistic object. In Sacrifice, the graduated base, which echoes the form of a sacrificial altar, also enhances the volumetric presence of the totemic forms and integrates the work holistically, rendering a far more dimensional composition than The Forest, also of 1950.  As the viewer experiences the various aspects of Sacrifice, the eye revels in the overlapping, layered effects amongst the various heads atop Smith’s figures. In this regard, Sacrifice is a tantalizing and pivotal bridge between the surrealism of Smith’s work of the 1930s and 1940s, and his monumental sculptures to come in the 1950s and 1960s: the Agricola, Voltri, Tanktotem, Sentinel, and Cubi.