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Lot Essay
In Agricola XIII, David Smith reincarnates steel farming implements into a sculpture as impossibly elegant as the Grande Odalisque’s endless spine. The sculpture’s poetic economy of form serves as an homage to the farmers who used industrial tools to work the land of Bolton Landing, New York, where Smith had a home and studio. The artist drew inspiration from the local landscape where he located the disused farming tools that became his sculptural material. Agricola XIII, and others from the highly acclaimed series (named after the Latin word for “farmer”), crucially subverted notions of “appropriate” sculptural material; visually, the works’ intermittent flatness challenged widely held distinctions between two- and three-dimensional forms. In Smith’s hands, an aesthetically and ontologically fertile abstraction—gracefully linear, open and light—emerges from the supposed inelegance of working the land with basic steel tools; the materials give way to a “new unity, one that is strictly visual” (D. Smith in R. Krauss, The Sculpture of David Smith: a Catalogue Raisonné, New York and London, 1977, p. 55). Smith elevated the notion of “drawing in space” pioneered by Pablo Picasso and Julio Gonzalez to new heights, imbuing it with a distinctly American spirit. Agricola XIII is a veritable masterpiece in a series that boldly changed the history—and presciently, the direction—of sculpture.
In Agricola XIII, the industrial steel material of farming implements seems to be emptied of itself, rendered graceful and light in a masterfully constructed form. Horizontal and vertical planes meet in alternating cross sections. On the horizontal plane, three elongated strokes of steel converge on a circle that, tensile and compressed, is fitted with a clamp. At the opposite “end”—the extent to which the term is befitting certainly reiterates the sculpture’s status as a “drawing in space”— a steel rod encircles a beautifully curving form reminiscent of a harp. The tentacular appendages peppering the sculpture’s vertical backbone call to mind Surrealist Yves Tanguy’s dystopian landscapes. Despite the industrial materials that compose it, Agricola XIII boasts beautiful irregularities of form. Lumps, bulges, incisions, and welded jointures invite touch or imbue opticality with a level of tactility. Saturated with optical surprises, the sculpture playfully flits between two and three dimensions. Disparate perspectives reveal varying patinas, a range that draws attention to the nuances of the work’s surface. In steel Smith found a beauty and economy that other materials couldn’t access. In fact, the artist noted, “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” (D. Smith quoted in K. Wilkin, David Smith, New York, 1984, p. 20).
Like the other works of the Agricola series, which Smith began in 1951 as the first of several overlapping series that were to characterize his oeuvre, Agricola XIII is made from farming implements, the industrial tools that were used to make the land in the artist’s beloved Bolton Landing productive. Smith found these tools abandoned around the 86 acres he owned in the Adirondack Mountains, fields that he notably dotted with sculptures. By welding implements into art, the artist nodded to agriculture and industry as conditions essential to American life. Agricola XIII is both representative of its time and place and suggestive of the elegant lyricism and groundbreaking conceptual rejection of the volumetric that characterized the work of Smith’s European counterparts. An avid consumer of art and art history, Smith brought his strong formal vocabulary—steeped in Constructivism, Cubism (particularly Cubist collage), and Surrealism—to steel implements, elevating their form and content to the highest art. The sculptor’s use of empty space as a material developed concepts pioneered by Picasso and laid essential groundwork for the Minimalist sculpture that was to come.
Born in Decatur, Indiana in 1906, David Smith learned how to rivet and solder as an employee at an automobile factory. After studying illustration in his youth, he pursued painting classes while working at Morris Plan Bank in New York. After a visit to Bolton Landing in 1927, Smith and wife Dorothy Dehner purchased property in the area, visiting every summer until settling on the estate full-time in 1940. The starkly beautiful landscape of Bolton Landing played an important role in honing Smith’s elegant sculptural aesthetic. A prestigious Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 1950 allowed Smith to fully focus on his work; shortly thereafter in 1951, the artist began the Agricola series at the height of his artistic career. A brilliant innovator and a masterful craftsman across media, Smith is widely recognized as one of the most important sculptors of his time, heralded by Clement Greenberg as “the best sculptor of his generation” (C. Greenberg, “David Smith,” Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticisms Vol. 3, Chicago, 1993, p. 277). Graceful yet industrial, complex yet sincere, Agricola XIII is a gleaming highlight of this master sculptor’s oeuvre.
In Agricola XIII, the industrial steel material of farming implements seems to be emptied of itself, rendered graceful and light in a masterfully constructed form. Horizontal and vertical planes meet in alternating cross sections. On the horizontal plane, three elongated strokes of steel converge on a circle that, tensile and compressed, is fitted with a clamp. At the opposite “end”—the extent to which the term is befitting certainly reiterates the sculpture’s status as a “drawing in space”— a steel rod encircles a beautifully curving form reminiscent of a harp. The tentacular appendages peppering the sculpture’s vertical backbone call to mind Surrealist Yves Tanguy’s dystopian landscapes. Despite the industrial materials that compose it, Agricola XIII boasts beautiful irregularities of form. Lumps, bulges, incisions, and welded jointures invite touch or imbue opticality with a level of tactility. Saturated with optical surprises, the sculpture playfully flits between two and three dimensions. Disparate perspectives reveal varying patinas, a range that draws attention to the nuances of the work’s surface. In steel Smith found a beauty and economy that other materials couldn’t access. In fact, the artist noted, “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” (D. Smith quoted in K. Wilkin, David Smith, New York, 1984, p. 20).
Like the other works of the Agricola series, which Smith began in 1951 as the first of several overlapping series that were to characterize his oeuvre, Agricola XIII is made from farming implements, the industrial tools that were used to make the land in the artist’s beloved Bolton Landing productive. Smith found these tools abandoned around the 86 acres he owned in the Adirondack Mountains, fields that he notably dotted with sculptures. By welding implements into art, the artist nodded to agriculture and industry as conditions essential to American life. Agricola XIII is both representative of its time and place and suggestive of the elegant lyricism and groundbreaking conceptual rejection of the volumetric that characterized the work of Smith’s European counterparts. An avid consumer of art and art history, Smith brought his strong formal vocabulary—steeped in Constructivism, Cubism (particularly Cubist collage), and Surrealism—to steel implements, elevating their form and content to the highest art. The sculptor’s use of empty space as a material developed concepts pioneered by Picasso and laid essential groundwork for the Minimalist sculpture that was to come.
Born in Decatur, Indiana in 1906, David Smith learned how to rivet and solder as an employee at an automobile factory. After studying illustration in his youth, he pursued painting classes while working at Morris Plan Bank in New York. After a visit to Bolton Landing in 1927, Smith and wife Dorothy Dehner purchased property in the area, visiting every summer until settling on the estate full-time in 1940. The starkly beautiful landscape of Bolton Landing played an important role in honing Smith’s elegant sculptural aesthetic. A prestigious Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 1950 allowed Smith to fully focus on his work; shortly thereafter in 1951, the artist began the Agricola series at the height of his artistic career. A brilliant innovator and a masterful craftsman across media, Smith is widely recognized as one of the most important sculptors of his time, heralded by Clement Greenberg as “the best sculptor of his generation” (C. Greenberg, “David Smith,” Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticisms Vol. 3, Chicago, 1993, p. 277). Graceful yet industrial, complex yet sincere, Agricola XIII is a gleaming highlight of this master sculptor’s oeuvre.