David Smith

Estate of the Artist
Makler Gallery, Philadelphia
Mr. and Mrs. Elliot J. Levin, Philadelphia
Dr. and Mrs. Richard Kaplan, Philadelphia
Christie's, New York, May 1988, Lot 11
Acquired by the present owner from the above

Spoleto, Sculpture in the City: Fourth Festival of Two Worlds, June - September 1962
New York, Gagosian Gallery; London, Gagosian Gallery, David Smith: Personage, March - April 2006 and November - December 2006, pl. no. 18, p. 63, illustrated and pp. 64-65, illustrated (photographs by David Smith taken in Voltri) (New York venue only)

Giovanni Carandente, Voltron, Philadelphia, 1964, no. 47, illustrated
Rosalind Krauss, The Sculpture of David Smith - A Catalogue Raisonné, New York and London, 1977, cat. no. 582, illustrated
New York, Sotheby's, David Smith: Voltri XVII, 1962 (special catalogue for the Contemporary Art/ Evening sale of November 14, 2006), p. 57, illustrated (installation in Spoleto, 1962)

This work is in excellent condition overall. Please contact the Contemporary Art department at 212-606-7254 for a condition report prepared by Wilson Conservation.
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.
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Throughout his career, Smith transformed the most avant-garde artistic innovations – Cubism, Surrealism and Expressionism - into sculptural form, combining aesthetic daring with a variety of materials. He was an instinctive artist who reveled in the physicality of the process and the concrete properties of his chosen medium. David Smith's epic sojourn in Voltri, Italy in May and June 1962 was therefore an artistic paradise, inspiring him to create a legendary body of work in a flurry of inventive activity. In roughly thirty days, Smith produced twenty-seven sculptures in an unprecedented pace. With a happy confluence of working conditions, available materials and evocative cultural atmosphere, Smith achieved one of his greatest series and the Voltris would have a profound influence on the masterworks created in the next few years before his untimely death in 1965.

Large Cicle (Voltri) is a wonderful summation of the style and substance of the Voltri period. Smith had already famously used the found objects of farm machinery in the compositions of his Agricola series (1951-1959). Large Circle (Voltri) also echoes the figurative abstraction of this 1950s series, continuing the presence of "personages'' that emerged most strongly in Smith's oeuvre at that time. However the extraordinary circumstances of the Voltri series prompted a breakthrough for Smith toward more reductive articulations of his artistic impulses, and his processes of composition and assembly were also refined to their purest form. The occasion was the Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, Italy, an arts celebration begun in 1958. In 1962, fifty sculptors, including Henry Moore and Alexander Calder were invited to exhibit one or two works in the streets and plazas of the picturesque Italian hill town. The monumental stabile Teodelapio by Calder remains in Spoleto to this day, yet in the history of the 1962 festival, the penultimate event was Smith's magnificent Voltri series, famously exhibited in Spoleto's ancient Roman amphitheater.

In his notes, known as "Report on Voltri'', Smith wrote of the generosity of Italsider, the Genoese company that sponsored the Spoleto show and granted him access to an industrial site just recently abandoned in favor of more modernized sites. He reveled in the atmospheric Italian hillside towns and the companionship of local workers, but Smith's true joy was the richness of the material available to him in the five factories in Voltri, "once making springs, trucks, parts for flatcars, bolts, spikes, balls, many things for forging.'' Smith had always found industrial detritus hauntingly evocative as symbols of a once-proud modernism now superseded by newer machinery: "the great quiet of stopped machines – the awe...exceeded that of visits to museums in Genoa or even the ancient art in other cities. The beauties of the forge shop...the found tombs of early twentieth century '' (David Smith, ed. by Garnett McCoy, New York, 1973, pp. 156-158).

Surrounded by ready-made material, Smith abandoned his sketchbook and was inspired by the process of assemblage and hands-on manipulation of materials and tools. The artist turned from paper to his alternate practice of sketching with white chalk directly on the factory floor. He used a massive layout table to assemble the shapes for five moderately sized works created after Voltri XXII, including Large Circle (Voltri). The aesthetic syntax of the series encompassed the metaphoric symbolism of still-life tableau and personages combined with the emblematic monumentality of Abstract Expressionism. In Large Circle (Voltri), the circular form is the nexus of its composition, similar to Voltri II, Voltri X and Voltri XII, but only Voltri XX has the same affinity to the attenuated, striding figure of Alberto Giacometti's, Homme qui marche, created just two years earlier in 1960. Figuration was at the crossroads of 1950s American art: it both addressed the collision of animate subject and inanimate material, as well as the artistic striving between modernism and classicism. The ``personage'' was a key component for a spectrum of masters in the mid-20th Century from Willem de Kooning to Pablo Picasso. David Smith's Large Circle (Voltri) is one of the many great hybrids of metallic poetry that this sculptor contibuted to the ongoing dialogue.

Smith's vast body of work at Voltri inspired the curator, Giovanni Carandente to suggest the second legendary component of the Voltri chapter: the installation in the 1st Century B. C. Antfiteatro Romano. Smith was delighted with this site, declaring ``A more beautiful setting I could not conceive'' (Ibid, p. 162). Smith had begun to populate the fields around his studio in Bolton Landing with monumental sculptures, initially due to a lack of storage space. Candida Smith later wrote, ``It was after his return from Italy that the fields began to burgeon at an amazing rate. It was as if the creative explosion ...in Spoleto ignited a fire that did not burn out'' (Exh. Cat., The Fields of David Smith, New York, Storm King Art Center, 1999, pp. 30-32). With increasing care, Smith placed sculptures in conjunction with each other, relishing the ability of each work to communicate with the other and with its surroundings. The fields of David Smith are now iconic within the canons of American sculpture, and the installation in the ancient amphitheatre in Spoleto can therefore be judged as profoundly influential in Smith's celebration of the intimate interrelationship between the artist and his surroundings, and the artistic ``conversation'' of one creation to another. The internal dialogue between works of the same series is also celebrated by the parade of diverse forms, crafted from tools and machinery parts, of Large Circle (Voltri) and its brethren.