David Smith

Estate of the Artist 
M. Knoedler & Co., Inc., New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above in March 1979

Glen Falls, The Hyde Collection, David Smith of Bolton Landing: Sculpture and Drawings, July - September 1973, cat. no. 22
New York, M. Knoedler & Co., David Smith, November - December 1977, no. 8
Caracas, Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Caracas, Robert Motherwell/David Smith, May 1979, cat. no. 9
Washington, D. C., National Gallery of Art, David Smith, November 1982 – April 1983, no. 3, p. 154, illustrated at Bolton Landing (and extended loan prior to November)

Exh. Cat., Philadelphia, Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Voltron, 1964, p. 67, illustrated
Cleve Gray, ed., David Smith by David Smith, New York, 1968, p. 145 (the Voltri-Bolton sculpture group, including Voltri-Bolton II, in the snow outside the artist's studio)
Exh. Cat., American Federation of the Arts (organizer), Dan Budnik: the Terminal Iron Works, Photographs of His Friend David Smith 1962/63, New York, 1974, p. 9 (in the fields at Bolton Landing)
Rosalind E. Krauss, The Sculpture of David Smith, a Catalogue Raisonné, New York and London, 1977, cat. no. 586, fig. no. 586, illustrated
Exh. Cat., Düsseldorf, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, David Smith: Skulpture, Zeichnungen, 1986, p. 150, illustrated (in the sculpture fields at Bolton Landing)
Exh. Cat., Valencia, IVAM, Centre Julio Gonzalez, David Smith: 1960-1965, 1996, p. 267-268 (the Voltri-Bolton sculpture group, including Voltri-Bolton II, in the snow outside the artist's studio)
Exh. Cat., New York, Matthew Marks Gallery, David Smith: Photographs 1931-1965, 1998, pl. 79, illustrated (Voltri-Bolton sculpture group, including Voltri-Bolton II, at Bolton Landing)
Exh. Cat., Mountainville, Storm King Art Center, The Fields of David Smith, 1999, pp. 27 and 62 , illustrated (in the sculpture fields at Bolton Landing)
Exh. Cat., Dallas, Nasher Sculpture Center, David Smith: Drawing + Sculpting, 2005, p. 20, illustrated in color (in the sculpture fields at Bolton Landing, 1963)
Exh. Cat., Tucson, Museum of Contemporary Art, Dan Budnik: David Smith at Work, 2005, p. 42, illustrated (photo of David Smith with Voltri-Bolton II)
Exh. Cat., New York, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, David Smith: a Centennial, 2006, p. 5, illustrated (Voltri-Bolton II in the sculpture fields at Bolton Landing, 1967), p. 45, illustrated (Voltri-Bolton II in the sculpture fields at Bolton Landing, ca. 1963), p. 57, illustrated in color (Voltri-Bolton II in the sculpture fields at Bolton Landing, 1963) and p. 411 (Smith in his drawing studio at Bolton Landing with Voltri-Bolton II, 1963)
Exh. Cat., Paris, Centre Pompidou, Musée national d'art moderne, David Smith: Sculptures 1933-1964, 2006, p. 48 (Voltri-Bolton II in the sculpture fields at Bolton Landing, 1965), p. 225 (the Voltri-Bolton sculpture group, including Voltri-Bolton II, in the snow outside the artist's studio) and p. 283 (Smith in his drawing studio at Bolton Landing with Voltri-Bolton II, 1963)
Exh. Cat., New York, Gagosian Gallery, David Smith: Personage, 2006, p. 86, illustrated (the Voltri-Bolton sculpture group, including Voltri-Bolton II, in the snow outside the artist's studio)
Exh. Cat., Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, David Smith: Cubes and Anarchy, 2011, pp. 163 - 164 (the Voltri-Bolton sculpture group, including Voltri-Bolton II, in the snow outside the artist's studio)

This sculpture is in excellent condition. 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.
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.

Along the drive up to David Smith's house, the north field of Bolton Landing was populated by three rows of sculptures, including Voltri-Bolton II, that were deployed by the sculptor as inspiration and recollection.  Along with the other twenty-four works of this series, including works titled Volton and VB, Voltri-Bolton II was a continuation and elaboration of Smith's epic sojourn in Voltri, Italy in May and June 1962. Created from found factory detritus that Smith shipped back from Voltri, these standing sentinels arrayed in his fields attest to the role of serial sculptures in Smith's canon and his desire to intermingle his various creations amongst each other as muses for reinvention and renewal. At once a testament to the profound influence of Smith's burst of creative activity at Voltri and an insight into his artistic practice, Voltri-Bolton II celebrates key elements of the sculptor's oeuvre: the use of found objects, the gratification of welding steel, the latent figuration and the sense of balanced composition are all present in this potent sculpture.

Voltri had been an artistic paradise for Smith with its happy confluence of working conditions, available materials and generous colleagues. In roughly thirty days, Smith produced twenty-seven sculptures – an unprecedented pace for him or any other artist working in welded metal. The Voltri series would have a profound influence on Smith's aesthetic philosophy and on the masterworks he created in the final years before his untimely death in 1965. In 1962, Smith was among fifty sculptors invited to exhibit one or two works in the streets and plazas of Spoleto, Italy for the annual Festival of Two Worlds. Alexander Calder's contribution, a monumental stabile Teodelapio stands in a prominent city square to this day. Yet at that time and in the history of modern sculpture, the penultimate event of the 1962 festival was Smith's magnificent Voltri series, for the fascinating narrative of their creation and the drama of their installation on the tiers of a Roman ampitheatre. The curator of the 1962 festival, Professor Giovanni Carandente, worked closely with Smith from the genesis to the installation of the Voltri series and continued his commitment to Smith's work in subsequent publications, most notably the 1964 catalogue for the Voltron exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia in which Voltri-Bolton II was illustrated.

A wealth of notes and letters document Smith's elation at the rich material made available to him at the recently abandoned factories at Voltri provided by his host, Italsider.  "Ilva, in Voltri, where the wild strawberries grow, was a complex of some five factories...once making springs, trucks, parts for flatcars, bolts, spikes, balls, many things for forging." (David Smith, ed. By Garnett McCoy, New York, 1973, pp. 156)  Smith, who worked at a car factory in 1925 and established a studio at the Terminal Iron Works in Brooklyn in 1933, had long found industrial detritus hauntingly evocative as symbols of a once-proud modernism now superseded by a newer generation of machinery. Originally Smith had planned to work in stainless steel upon his arrival in Italy, but he happily altered course when he found himself immersed in industrial steel objects that he perceived as romantic. Tools, such as gauges, calipers and tongs, along with larger remnants such as wheeled carriages, all found their way into individual Voltris. The hinged tongs that were hand-forged in the blacksmith shop were among the parts shipped back to Bolton Landing, providing a physical link between Voltri-Bolton II and works such as Voltri XX.  The roughened steel and reductive figuration of his earlier Agricola seems to merge with the verticality of a Giacometti in Voltri-Bolton II, but the overriding influences to be found in Voltri-Bolton II and throughout Smith's body of work come from the artist's own oeuvre.

Smith had already begun to populate the fields around Bolton Landing with his monumental sculptures, and his daughter Candida Smith later wrote, ``It was after his return from Italy that the fields began to burgeon at an amazing rate.'' (Exh. Cat., The Fields of David Smith, New York, Storm King Art Center, 1999, pp. 30, 32). Throughout late 1962 and 1963, Smith continued to use the materials from Voltri in his Voltri-Bolton and Voltron series. By the artist's death in 1965, the fields around his residence and studio were filled with around fifty sculptures, including a dozen Voltri-Boltons constructed with parts shipped home from Italy. With increasing care, Smith placed the sculptures in conjunction with each other and with the landscape, relishing the ability of each work to communicate with the other and with its surroundings. In photographs, Voltri-Bolton II can be seen to be situated among Oval Nose (1963) and 2 Doors (1964) and flanked by sister sculptures such as Voltri-Bolton X and Voltri-Bolton XIV. Despite a variety of different materials, scale and surface, the works share a dialogue about the geometric circular forms that recur in Smith's sculptural vocabulary. The fields of David Smith are now iconic within the canons of American art and modern sculpture, long recognized as an artistic achievement of high importance in their own right.  The installations in the ancient amphitheatre in Spoleto and then in Bolton Landing can therefore be rightly judged as profoundly influential in Smith's celebration of the intimate interrelationship between the artist and his surroundings and the artistic ``conversation'' of one series of creations to another.