David Smith

The Estate of the Artist
Mr. and Mrs. Alistair McAlpine, London
Waddington Galleries, Ltd., London
Private Collection, New York (acquired from the above circa 1970)
Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York
Private Collection (acquired from the above in 2008)
Sotheby's, New York, November 9, 2011, Lot 42
Acquired by the present owner from the above

New York, Kootz Gallery, David Smith, New Sculpture, January - February 1953, cat. no. 9

Rosalind Krauss, The Sculpture of David Smith: a Catalogue Raisonné, New York and London, 1977, cat. no. 275, n. p., illustrated and p. 57 (text)
Exh. Cat., Cambridge, Harvard University, Fogg Art Museum, David Smith 1906-1965: A Retrospective, 1996, no. 229, p. 73 (text, checklist)
Angela Levine, "The Anvil of Smith," The Jerusalem Post, December 10, 1999, p. 14 (text)
Exh. Cat., New York, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, David Smith: A Centennial, 2006, p. 76 (text)
Paul R. Cappucci, William Carlos Williams, Frank O'Hara and the New York Art Scene, Madison, 2010, p. 318 (text)

This work is in excellent condition overall. There are noticeable variations in the patina including vestiges of red pigment on the base that are the intent and process of the artist.
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.

David Smith occupies a place of supreme importance among the legendary generation of American post-war artists. Working contemporaneously with the painters of the New York School of Abstract Expressionism, Smith parlayed his masterful proficiency with metal into a radical and invigorating approach to sculpture. With his mature works of the 1950s, such as Agricola XII, 1952, Smith arrived at his own artistic apex. Agricola XII belongs to the series of seventeen sculptures that defines this seminal moment in Smith’s oeuvre; this is the first series explicitly grouped and titled by the artist, thus inaugurating a method that mapped a powerful trajectory for the rest of his career, culminating in his final great series, the Cubi. Smith’s family groups of sculptures were both organizational and inspirational as each series developed its own vocabulary of aesthetic relationships and principles. In this instance, Agricola XII is abstract but still rooted in the experience of an earthly existence, embodying Smith’s elegant command of a sculptural form whose references move among abstraction, Cubism, Surrealism and even drawing.

Smith’s ability to capture in three-dimensions the delicate quality of line is truly remarkable and the defining gift that characterizes his innovative compositions. That Smith began his artistic life with the desire to paint is readily apparent when observing the modulation and tension of line in the present work. The construction of Agricola XII harnesses its immediate surroundings in a manner that denotes a kind of “drawing in space.” Visually, this sculptural drawing recalls Joan Miró’s use of line, where outlines define geometries and form defines planar volumes. In the present work, the absence of substance in the linear nature of the composition is equally as evocative as its physical presence, creating a fascinating dichotomy between solidity of form and openness of design.

It was in the early 1930s, upon being exposed to the welded iron innovations of Pablo Picasso and Julio González, that Smith commited his artistic focus fully to sculpture. Picasso’s new works were first seen by Smith in the magazine Cahiers d’Art and, as he was unable to read French, it was here that he intuitively understood the visual power that the works of these European sculptors possessed. Completely divorced from any linguistic commentary, Smith was free to draw from these welded sculptures his own connection to the trajectory of this new sculptural form. Undeniably inspired by his European antecedents, Smith also seemed pre-destined to become a sculptor. As a teenager, he had learned to weld while working in a factory in Indiana and readily made a direct connection between Picasso’s metal sculptures and his own experiences: “Since I had worked in factories and made parts of automobiles and had worked on telephone lines I saw a chance to make sculpture in a tradition I was rooted in.” (Exh. Cat., Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art, David Smith, 1982, p. 20) The result was Smith’s fabrication of his first all metal sculptures; most notably, Agricola Head (1933) which is a definitive early precursor to the Agricola series.

Agricola is a Latin term meaning “farmer” and the primary components of the eponymous series are fittingly discarded pieces of farm machinery. Smith described his affinity for his chosen material in a 1959 interview: “The Agricola series are like new unities whose parts are related to past tools of agriculture. Forms in function are often not appreciated in their context except for their mechanical performance. With time and the passing of their function and a separation of their past, metaphoric changes can take place permitting a new unity, one that is strictly visual.” (quoted in Rosalind E. Krauss, The Sculpture of David Smith: a Catalogue Raisonné, New York and London, 1977, p. 54-55)  Thus, the work of the artist is to initiate an elevating exchange, whereby the original utility of the individual components is surrendered in light of a new formal construction. Agricola XII is a superb realization of this process. The delicate terminations of the metal parts are cast in a new light along with other elements, whose graceful curvature or refined geometry supersedes and obscures its former function.

For Smith, sculptural possibilities abounded and he derived the arrangements of these found elements from various inspirations in the world around him: the glimpse of a geometric pattern, a fleeting thought, an image in a dream. In the artist’s own words, “…how can a man live off of his planet? How on earth can he know anything that he hasn’t seen or doesn’t exist in his own world? Even his visions have to be made up of the forms and the world that he knows.” (David Sylvester, Interviews with American Artists, New Haven, 2001, p. 7) Thus, Agricola XII belongs to a figurative vocabulary that persists in the sculptures that follow in subsequent series. Most directly, Agricola XII’s graceful verticality bears a resemblance to works in the Sentinel series, the next to emerge in Smith’s oeuvre. And the reference to the human form persists through other guises in Smith’s Voltri and even the later Cubi, many of which were exhibited like striding visitors in the fields of Smith’s home at Bolton Landing, New York.  These affinities for the human form find a kinship in the glorious elongated abstracted figures of Alberto Giacometti from the late 1940s. Agricola XII approximates the aura of a Giacometti figure, both referencing the divine beauty of our biological construction that will eventually be laid to waste by the march of time. In Agricola XII, David Smith frames this poetic metaphor of a machine no longer in use. Nothing escapes progress. Agrarian life was overtaken by industry, just as man will be overtaken by time.