David Smith

Untitled (Voltri) [For Gian Carlo], 1962

Steel
41 1/4 x 14 5/8 x 7 1/8 in. (104.8 x 37.1 x 18.1 cm.)

Raymond and Patsy Nasher Collection, Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, TX

Gian Carlo Menotti, the composer and organizer of the Spoleto Festival, was instrumental in inviting David Smith to Italy in 1962 to make works for a sculpture exhibition associated with the festival, an invitation that resulted in Smith’s Voltri series. Out of gratitude for Menotti’s central role in what became one of the most fruitful projects of his life, Smith gave him this work. Typical of the Voltri series in general, this sculpture is made from various old tools and scrap metal found in the abandoned factory that Smith used as a studio. Here he has welded them into a rather ferocious-looking standing figure: the spreading arms of a divider form the legs; a circular rim or gasket the body; a pair of long tongs the spine; and two calipers the double beaks at the top.

Richard Serra had little interest in works like Untitled (Voltri) or much of the steel sculpture that preceded him, and intentionally moved away from that tradition:

The history of welded steel sculpture in this century—González, Picasso, David Smith—has had little or no influence on my work. Most traditional sculpture until the mid-century was part-relation-to-whole. That is, the steel was collaged pictorially and compositionally together. Most of the welding was a way of gluing and adjusting parts which through their internal structure were not self-supporting.

Exhibition:

January 28 - April 23, 2017

In conjunction with the exhibition Richard Serra: Prints the Nasher Sculpture Center’s curators have chosen works from the Nasher Collection that provide context for better understanding Serra’s work. The sculptures span decades, from the experiments of Pablo Picasso, Constantin Brancusi, and Henri Matisse in the first years of the twentieth century to works by Serra’s near-contemporaries Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, and Richard Long.