- 23
David Smith
Description
- David Smith
- CUBI XXVIII
- signed, titled, dated 5-5-1965 and inscribed gate 3
- stainless steel
- 108 x 110 x 45 in. 274.3 x 279.4 x 114.3 cm.
Provenance
Marlborough - Gerson Gallery, Inc., New York
Norton Simon, Inc. Museum of Art, Fullerton and Pasadena (acquired from the above on July 24, 1968)
Acquired from the above by the present owner through Marlborough Gallery, New York on July 15, 1982
Exhibited
Cambridge, Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University; Washington, D.C., Washington Gallery of Modern Art, David Smith: a Retrospective Exhibition, September 1966 - February 1967, cat. no. 544, pl. no. 21, p. 35, illustrated
Portland Art Museum, Recent Acquisitions by the Norton Simon, Inc. Museum of Art, November 1968 - May 1969
Pasadena, Museum of Modern Art, Modern Sculpture from the Norton Simon, Inc. Museum of Art and the Norton Simon Foundation, August 1972 - July 1973 and September - November 1973
Princeton, Art Museum, Princeton University, extended loan, November 1973 - May 1974
Denver Art Museum, extended loan, May - December 1974
Pasadena, Norton Simon Museum of Art, March 1975 - July 1982
Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art, David Smith: Seven Major Themes, November 1982 - April 1983, cat. no. 17 (Cubi), pl. no. 22, p. 218, illustrated
Tokyo, Metropolitan Art Museum, Modern Art in the West: Twentieth Century Painting and Modern Sculpture, October - December 1983
Fort Worth, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, extended loan, May 1984 - May 2005
Literature
Cleve Gray, ed., David Smith by David Smith: Sculpture and Writings, New York, 1968, p. 171, illustrated
George Heard Hamilton, 19th and 20th Century Art, New York, 1970, pl. no. 59, p. 379, illustrated in color
Sam Hunter and John Jacobus, American Art of the 20th Century, New York, 1973, fig. 530, p. 286, illustrated
Garnett McCoy, ed., Documentary Monographs in Modern Art: David Smith, New York, 1973, pl. no. VIII, p. 56, illustrated in color
James Mills, "David Smith's Cubi XXVIII at Denver Art Museum" Denver Post, August 4, 1974, illustrated
Rosalind E. Krauss, The Sculpture of David Smith: A Catalogue Raisonné, New York and London, 1977, no. 676, illustrated
Edward Lucie-Smith, Sam Hunter and Adolf Max Vogt, Kunst der Gegenwart, Frankfurt, 1978, pl. no. 175, pp. 181-182, illustrated
M.W. Brown, Sam Hunter, John Jacobus, Nancy Rosenblum and D.M. Sokol, American Art, New York, 1979, fig. 559, p. 509, illustrated
Stanley E. Marcus, David Smith: The Sculptor and His Work, Ithaca, 1983, fig. 90, p. 185, illustrated
Exh. Cat., New York, Matthew Marks Gallery, David Smith: Photographs 1931-1965, 1998, pl. no. 110, p. 107, illustrated
Catalogue Note
"I polished [the sculptures] in such a way that on a dull day, they take on the dull blue, or the color of the sky in the afternoon sun, the glow, golden like the rays, the colors of nature …. They are colored by the sky and surroundings, the green or blue of water.’’
David Smith in an interview with Thomas B. Hess, June 1964
David Smith embodied an independence of spirit that characterized many of the American artists who emerged at the midpoint of the 20th Century. Smith combined a refusal to choose one convention or form above another with a forceful determination to achieve a singular vision and artistic identity. The sculptor created one of the most consistently confident and individualistic bodies of work from the mid-century, establishing a new kind of sculptural invention that used innovative techniques and material to express a fusion of abstraction and figuration. Combining modern technologies and materials derived from machinery and industry, Smith conveyed volume through an innate genius for organizing negative and positive space. Smith also possessed a love for landscape and Surrealist lyricism that brought a vibrantly poetic linear element to the overt Cubist solidity of his art.
The Cubi series is the culmination of Smith’s sculptural alchemy, in which welded metal becomes a composition of elegant yet weighty and volumetric presence, created around open spaces rather than carved from solid form like traditional stone or wood sculpture. Smith’s genius for balancing void and solid, form and content, crude material and poetic spirit is the hallmark of his Cubi masterpieces. Created from 1961 until his untimely death in 1965, Smith’s Cubi sculptures are a cohesive group – of which Cubi XXVIII was the last – whose sleek geometry of boxes and columns allowed Smith to experiment with real rather than implied volume, exploring all its permutations. This spectacular group of sculptures is not only the culmination of Smith’s illustrious career; they are acknowledged masterpieces of American art that constitute one of the most radical developments in modern sculpture. The importance of the Cubis is confirmed by the fact that twenty-one of the Cubis have entered museum collections, many within just a few years of the artist’s death.
The linear genius of Smith’s earlier work of the 1940s and 1950s was a form of drawing in space, while literal volume was largely abandoned. With the work of the 1960s, including the Cubis, Zigs, Wagons and Circles, Smith celebrated form and mass in three-dimensional space, as he accepted the challenge of creating monumental sculptures that could inhabit the rolling vista of the hills surrounding his studio in Bolton Landing. The 1960s were a time of creative ingenuity and interplay among simultaneous series, unparalleled in Smith’s oeuvre, and the flow of ideas freely informed one series with the innovations of the other. As the artist’s daughter, Candida Smith described his process, "Again and again he referred to his `work stream’; each work of art being as a vessel filled from the stream while never wholly separate. I understand his term to mean the flow of his identity made physically manifest – the process by which images and ideas from decades or days before inform a work in progress or yet to be made." (Candida N. Smith, The Fields of David Smith, New York, 1999, p. 17) This particularly fecund period was informed by the artist’s visit to Spoleto, Italy to participate in the Festival of Two Worlds in 1962. Working in five abandoned factories in Voltri, Smith made a prodigious amount of sculpture during his short stay of thirty days, incorporating found objects and scraps of metal from his surroundings into works that were displayed throughout the city. As Candida Smith recalls, "My father returned home that summer invigorated and jubilant. …It was after his return from Italy that the fields began to burgeon at an amazing rate. It was as if the creative explosion and the resulting enormous installation in Spoleto ignited a fire that did not burn out. The Voltri-Boltons were made along with the painted circle pieces, Primo Pianos, Zigs and Cubis.’’ (Ibid., p. 30-32)
As a mature work in the series, Cubi XXVIII embodies the many influences of these various series of the early 1960s. The more figurative element of the earlier Sentinels is evident in the rectangular "torso’’ atop one of the columnar sides of the composition of Cubi XXVIII. The painted brushwork on the surface of the Circles is mirrored in the polished arcs and swirls that play across the stainless steel, bringing a bursting vitality to elements such as the central diamond shape of Cubi XXVIII. But it is perhaps the series of Zigs that are most closely related to the mature compositions of the Cubi series such as Cubi XXVIII. The Zigs are unequivocally three-dimensional and towering structures, consisting of strongly differentiated interplays of convex and concave planes. Smith’s similar concentration on the volumetric potentialities of the Cubis is demonstrated by the photograph taken by Dan Budnik of cardboard models Smith used to explore geometric variations and compositions. In the Zigs, the surfaces are painted, often in combinations of strongly vibrant colors such as red, yellow or blue, that accentuate a composition’s disparate parts, and at other times with a more unifying tone of brown or black as in Zig III. The overall rough, brushy strokes and the monochrome palette of Zig III is deliberately at odds with the complicated, angular structure of the sculpture, a marked difference to the Cubis in which shape and surface treatment are perfectly congruent.
In creating outdoor sculptures, Smith had concerns about the durability of his materials and surface treatments, and through much experimentation with various techniques and materials, stainless steel became Smith’s preferred medium. Stainless steel is more resistant to the elements than standard steel or iron, but for many years, Smith could not afford large quantities of this more expensive material. However, increased critical acclaim and commercial success that began with a 1957 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, freed Smith to liberally utilize stainless steel, beginning with the Sentinel series (1957-1961) and ending with the Cubis (1961 to 1965). The reflective qualities of the polished surface created an optical synthesis of the plastic form with the pictorial composition. "Smith…was enthralled by the idea of surfaces that would change as the light of day changed, and so, in a sense, they are the final development of his lifelong preoccupation with the possibilities of color in sculpture. But the burnished, light-diffusing surface of Smith’s stainless steel sculptures serve both to focus attention on those surfaces and to make them seem insubstantial. We have seen the handwriting of the burnishing before – in…the Zigs for example – but here the skin of paint, which often seemed at odds with the structure of the work, has been replaced by an optical dazzle that appears to be an inherent property of the material itself’’ (Karen Wilkin, David Smith, New York, 1984, pp. 85-86) In Cubi XXVIII and its related works, Smith fully exploited the sheer beauty of his material. These brilliantly polished surfaces reflect light in expressionistic swirls which seem to be both within the steel as well as on it, creating a sculpture of monumental scale which appears to be filled with air and light.
As each work of the 1960s was completed, Smith would carefully choose its location on the north or south field on the rolling property that ran from his house to his studio. Smith’s fields were a nascent sculpture 'farm’, a formidable display of artistic creativity proclaiming itself amidst a landscape of age-worn mountains, open sky and tree-filled vistas. As his friend and fellow artist, Robert Motherwell commented, "When I saw that David places his work against the mountains and sky, the impulse was plain, an ineffable desire to see his humanness, related to exterior reality, to nature at least if not man, for the marvel of the felt scale that exists between a true work and the immovable world, the relation that makes both human.’’ (Robert Motherwell, Art in America, January-February 1966, p. 37) Cubi XXVIII was centrally placed in the south field, at a right angle that allowed the viewer to look through its portal shape from both the deck of the house and the deck of the studio, almost as a window from one view to the other.
Cubi XXVIII was one of three sculptures in this series which Smith loosely referred to as "gates’’ or "arches’’, with Cubi XXIV and Cubi XXVII being the other two. Zig III is cited as a precedent for these three works with its post and lintel framework and somewhat open center. Horizontals top strong verticals in the three "gate’’ Cubis and this structure emphasizes the architectonic essence of Smith’s work and increases the monumentality of their presence. Cylinders and the canted central square invigorate the post and lintel framework of Cubi XXVIII, calling to mind Candida Smith’s comment on the "arches’’ and "gates’’. While any literal referencing to Smith’s subject matter can be problematic or too simplistic, there is a poetic resonance to this composition as a final legacy for David Smith’s oeuvre. As Candida Smith wrote, "The Cubi 'gates’ are open portals designating a picture plane of imbued space waiting for us to enter and be transformed’’ (Ibid., p. 25)
CUBI SERIES BY DAVID SMITH
Cubi I
Detroit Institute of Art
Acquired in 1966 from the estate of the artist
Cubi II
Collection of Candida and Rebecca Smith
Cubi III
Mrs. Beatrice Gersh, Beverly Hills
Partial and promised donation to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
Cubi IV
Milwaukee Art Museum
Acquired in 1977, gift of Mrs. Harry Lynne Bradley
Cubi V
Private Collection
Cubi VI
Israel Museum, Jerusalem
Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Meshulam Riklis (Judith Stevn-Riklis) to American Friends of the Israel Museum
Cubi VII
Art Institute of Chicago
Acquired in 1964 from the estate of the artist
Cubi VIII
The Meadows Museum, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas
Acquired in 1969 from the estate of the artist
Cubi IX
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
Acquired in 1968 from the estate of the artist
Cubi X
Museum of Modern Art, New York
Acquired in 1968 from the estate of the artist
Cubi XI
Private Collection
Cubi XII
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D. C.
Acquired in 1968 from the estate of the artist
Cubi XIII
Princeton University, New Jersey
Acquired in 1969 from the estate of the artist
Cubi XIV
St. Louis Art Museum, Missouri
Acquired in 1979 from Philip M. Stern, Washington, D. C.
Cubi XV
San Diego Museum, California
Acquired in 1968 from the estate of the artist
Cubi XVI
Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo
Acquired in 1968 from the estate of the artist
Cubi XVII
Museum of Fine Art, Dallas
Acquired in 1965 from the estate of the artist
Cubi XVIII
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Acquired in 1968 from the estate of the artist
Cubi XIX
The Tate Gallery, London
Acquired in 1966 from the estate of the artist
Cubi XX
Wight Art Gallery of the University of California, Los Angeles
Acquired in 1967, gift of Mrs. Donald Bright Capen
Cubi XXI
Lipman Family Foundation
Cubi XXII
Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven
Acquired in 1968 from the estate of the artist
Cubi XXIII
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles
Acquired in 1967 from the estate of the artist
Cubi XXIV
Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Acquired in 1967 from the estate of the artist
Cubi XXV
Jane Lang Davis, Medina, Washington
Cubi XXVI
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C.
Acquired in 1978, gift of Mr. Philip M. Stern, Washington, D. C.
Cubi XXVII
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
Acquired in 1967 from the estate of the artist
Cubi XXVIII
the present work