David Smith was foremost among the welder-sculptors who came to prominence in the U.S. after World War II. Following the example set by Julio González and Pablo Picasso, who created welded-steel sculptures as early as 1928, the Americans constructed their work directly out of iron and steel sheets and wires rather than employing the traditional method of casting. In the 1930s and 1940s, influenced by Surrealism and Constructivism , Smith created hybrid figural sculptures and dramatic mise-en-scènes. During the 1950s he began to work in stylistic series ranging from the complicated abstract drawings-in-space of the Agricolas to the anthropomorphic and totemic sculptures incorporating machine parts such as the Sentinels and Tank Totems. In the later part of the decade and into the 1960s his work became more volumetric and monolithic.
Smith completed 28 works in his last series of monumental abstract structures, the Cubis, before his death in May 1965. These celebrated sculptures were composed from a repertoire of geometric cubes and cylinders of varying proportions. All of the Cubis are made of stainless steel, which Smith burnished to a highly reflective surface. He told critic Thomas Hess, “I made them and I polished them in such a way that on a dull day they take on a dull blue, or the color of the sky in the late afternoon sun, the glow, golden like the rays, the colors of nature.”
Some of the Cubis are vaguely figural, while others, such as Cubi XXVII, suggest architecture. This example is one of three Cubis usually referred to as “Gates”, which rise like giant rudimentary doorways framing a central void. By counterbalancing a cylinder that appears to rest precariously on edge with two small tilted blocks that look equally unstable, Smith emphasized the potential energy captured through the welding technique. The artist activated the surface of the structure through the curling traces left by the polishing process, creating, in his words, “a structure that can face the sun and hold its own against the blaze and the power.”
Price: $23.8 million, Nov. 9, 2005 , Sotheby’s New York
April 13th, 2006
Sculpture non figurative made in 1923 by Constantin Brancusi exposed in Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rez-de-Chaussee is in the second place as most expensive art sold in 2005. This recently discovered sculpture, carved from a gray-blue slab of marble, is a keystone in the history of 20th century sculpture. The truly striking element, however, is not its historical position in Brancusi’s Bird series, but the sensitivity and delicacy of its execution. The subject of the bird is so closely captured within the carved marble that even the stone’s white veins link the two parts of the body into a unified whole. The different angles of the footing are carefully tuned to the difference between the front and backside of the bird’s body; particularly in the upper third of the sculpture the polish of the surface shows traces of the hand of the artist.
Sold for $27,456,000 in May 2005, New York.
March 13th, 2006
London’s Old Master paintings sales have often been forced to survive on starvation rations of good pictures, but last week’s auctions were a feast for buyers.
The main course was the finest array of Italian view pictures seen on the international market for many years, with seven Guardis and five Canalettos, the record for the latter being broken twice in a breathless 24-hour period. This windfall was partly the result of the deaths of two major collectors but also reflected the greater willingness of owners to sell in a strong market.
The week got off to a lively start when Sotheby’s sold the collection of the late Bobby Wills, an eccentric English gentleman farmer and heir to a tobacco fortune, who had bought the pictures during the 1950s and ’60s. The appearance of a sensibly estimated country house collection, fresh to the market, ensured a packed room and furious bidding, with only two of the 50 lots remaining unsold and the sale totalling more than 8.8 million and breaking six artists’ records. Dealer Richard Green paid the highest price of the night when he bought Turner’s watercolour Lake of Lucerne for more than 1.8 million.
However, most of the top lots were bought by private collectors and this pattern continued at Christie’s when paintings, furniture and antiques collected by the late Antonio Champalimaud, Portugal’s richest man, fetched almost 39 million in a two-day sale.
A long telephone battle between two private bidders pushed the price of Canaletto’s The Bucintoro at the Molo, Venice, on Ascension Day to 11.4 million. This comfortably beat both the picture’s modest 4 million to 6 million estimate and the existing 10.2 million record for Canaletto paid by the composer Andrew Lloyd Webber for The Old Horse Guards, London, from St James’s Park in 1992.
Champalimaud had bought this spectacular painting for 280,000 in 1973. But the new record lasted only until the following evening, when Sotheby’s staged one of the most extraordinary Old Masters sales ever seen in London, and in the hardest circumstances. Ten hours after terrorist atrocities in the capital, Sotheby’s saleroom was almost full for the auction, and three quarters of the pictures were sold amid fiercely competitive bidding.
Once again, Canaletto provided the most dramatic moment of the evening as five people tried to buy Venice, the Grand Canal Looking North-East from the Palazzo Balbi to the Rialto Bridge. This was a more subtle Canaletto, with a wonderful provenance, having belonged to Sir Robert Walpole, Britain’s first prime minister, and recorded as having hung in 10 Downing Street.
Bidding narrowed to two contenders, one on the telephone to Alex Bell, Sotheby’s London head of Old Master paintings, while the other was dealer Luca Baroni taking whispered instructions from his colleague Stephen Ongpin, speaking on a mobile phone to a client. Baroni’s bidder made a last-ditch bid of 16.5 million before admitting defeat as Bell’s client raised the stakes by another 100,000. By the time Sotheby’s added commission, the Canaletto cost its anonymous new owner 18.6 million, beating the Christie’s picture by more than 7 million and becoming the sixth most expensive Old Master ever sold.
Although the evening ended on a subdued note, with another Canaletto and a Bellotto that was once thought to be a Canaletto both failing to sell, this did not reflect a remarkable auction which totalled almost 44.3 million, breaking 12 records. This was Sotheby’s second highest score ever for an Old Masters sale, beaten only by the 2002 auction in which Rubens’s The Massacre of the Innocents fetched 49.5 million.
Christie’s had a tough act to follow, but 76 per cent of the pictures sold, for a respectable total of 20.7 million. An anonymous telephone bidder paid almost 3.6 million for Jan Van de Capelle’s wonderful maritime painting A kaag and a smak in a calm, while the Getty Museum in California bought Guardi’s The Grand Canal, Venice, with the Palazzo Bembo for almost 4.4 million and a private buyer paid 3.7 million for Jan Van Huysum’s still life Green grapes on the vine. The London Old Masters market has rarely seen a week like it.
Price: $32.6 million
Date Of Sale: July 7, 2005
House: Sotheby’s London
March 10th, 2006
