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拍品专文
Created during the earliest years of David Smith’s sculptural career, Untitled, 1933, provides extraordinary insight into the artist’s shifting interest from painting to sculpture, as well as his move toward creating fully abstract works. Recorded as the first work the artist sold, the piece exposes a pivotal moment in the early career of one of the most groundbreaking sculptors of the twentieth century.
Anchored to a walnut base, Untitled climbs upward with elements of stone rising along several brass poles. The composition is punctured by two diagonal lines, one painted red, sliding out into a third plane. The stone forms are in turn accompanied by two metal squares, each accented with expressive dabs of richly colored paint. Smith thus defines volume and form with shifting planes and geometric shapes. In Untitled, the delicate biomorphic forms of the stones echo Smith’s inspirations in Surrealism, which he contrasts this with Cubist-inspired sharp geometric squares and lines.
Though he continued to draw and paint in throughout his life, in 1933 Smith changed his attention from painting to sculpture. “I’ve been painting sculpture all my life. As a matter of fact, the reason I became a sculptor is that I was a first a painter” (D. Smith, David Smith, New York, 1972, p. 132). After studying painting at the Art Students’ League in the late 1920s, Smith began to explore making standing collage constructions. In the summer of 1933, the year of the present work, Smith continued to expand on these constructions, adding elements of wire, plaster and wood as well as fragments of coral the artist acquired the year before during his travels to the Virgin Islands.
Created on an intimate scale, Untitled is one of Smiths’ earliest sculptures which already contains the incubations of the very features for which Smith would later become renowned. Smith often used materials that resonated with him, whether metal from a factory, farm equipment or found machine parts. Furthermore, Untitled already shows Smith’s skillful ability to coax those materials into forms that precisely express his vision. In Untitled, Smith subtly places the stones into the ideal formations. Untitled also echoes Smith the painter, with dabs of red and green paint strategically incorporated into the composition, including painting an entire diagonal pole a fiery accented red. Perhaps the most foretelling feature of Untitled is that it already presents the technique which would propel Smith’s oeuvre throughout his career: welding. Rejecting traditional methods of artistic production, Smith eventually would turn to welding metal as a new technique which he considered more relevant to the industrial age.
Smith was fundamental in altering the direction of American sculpture and the potential of metal, line, and open space within the sculptural medium. With Untitled, Smith’s pioneering approach to sculpture has begun to take shape, and would continue throughout his career.
Anchored to a walnut base, Untitled climbs upward with elements of stone rising along several brass poles. The composition is punctured by two diagonal lines, one painted red, sliding out into a third plane. The stone forms are in turn accompanied by two metal squares, each accented with expressive dabs of richly colored paint. Smith thus defines volume and form with shifting planes and geometric shapes. In Untitled, the delicate biomorphic forms of the stones echo Smith’s inspirations in Surrealism, which he contrasts this with Cubist-inspired sharp geometric squares and lines.
Though he continued to draw and paint in throughout his life, in 1933 Smith changed his attention from painting to sculpture. “I’ve been painting sculpture all my life. As a matter of fact, the reason I became a sculptor is that I was a first a painter” (D. Smith, David Smith, New York, 1972, p. 132). After studying painting at the Art Students’ League in the late 1920s, Smith began to explore making standing collage constructions. In the summer of 1933, the year of the present work, Smith continued to expand on these constructions, adding elements of wire, plaster and wood as well as fragments of coral the artist acquired the year before during his travels to the Virgin Islands.
Created on an intimate scale, Untitled is one of Smiths’ earliest sculptures which already contains the incubations of the very features for which Smith would later become renowned. Smith often used materials that resonated with him, whether metal from a factory, farm equipment or found machine parts. Furthermore, Untitled already shows Smith’s skillful ability to coax those materials into forms that precisely express his vision. In Untitled, Smith subtly places the stones into the ideal formations. Untitled also echoes Smith the painter, with dabs of red and green paint strategically incorporated into the composition, including painting an entire diagonal pole a fiery accented red. Perhaps the most foretelling feature of Untitled is that it already presents the technique which would propel Smith’s oeuvre throughout his career: welding. Rejecting traditional methods of artistic production, Smith eventually would turn to welding metal as a new technique which he considered more relevant to the industrial age.
Smith was fundamental in altering the direction of American sculpture and the potential of metal, line, and open space within the sculptural medium. With Untitled, Smith’s pioneering approach to sculpture has begun to take shape, and would continue throughout his career.