Cy Twombly’s Untitled (New York City) was the highlight of the sale, selling for $36,650,000. Photo: Sotheby's

NEW YORK, NY.- Grégoire Billault, Head of Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Department in New York: “Tonight we achieved exactly what we set out to do: tailor a sale to the market’s current taste. You only had to count the number of hands in the air for works as diverse as the 2012 Ghenie, Calder from the Barr Collection, and sublime paintings by Sam Francis and Francis Bacon to see that collectors continue to show up when presented with great and rare works of art. The sustained bidding from colleagues in Asia as well as Europe and the US underscored the strength of our team, both new and long-tenured, and their relationships with clients around the globe.”

Lot 21. Cy Twombly (1928 - 2011), Untitled (New York City), signed and dated NYC 1968 on the reverse, oil based house paint and wax crayon on canvas, 60 by 68 1/8 in. 152.4 by 173 cm. Estimate Upon Request. Lot sold 36,650,000 USD to an Anpnymous. Photo Sotheby's.

Provenance: Leo Castelli Gallery, New York (LC #57)
Acquired from the above by the present owner in January 1969

Literature: Heiner Bastian, Ed., Cy Twombly: Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings, Volume III, 1966-1971, Munich, 1994, p. 127, no. 52, illustrated in color.

RHAPSODY IN BLUE: SHATTERING FORM IN UNTITLED (NEW YORK CITY)

Cy Twombly’s majestic Untitled (New York City) of 1968 is the enduring material triumph of a simply unrepeatable moment in the history of art. An unparalleled exemplar of the artist’s most hallowed series of 'Blackboard' paintings, the present work stands as the phenomenal vestige of an exceptional epoch. Untitled (New York City) reflects a period of great convergence in postwar art, when the titanic modes of Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism and Pop Art proposed competing philosophies for the grand trajectory of progressive innovation. Twombly’s reverberating loops refract these overlapping spheres of influence. Aesthetically, his painting announces a subjective and emotive expressivity; conceptually, it embraces a cerebral and minimalistic rationality; and in its essential spirit it broadcasts a new communicative universality. Within the remarkable arena of this specific canvas, Twombly forges a new visual language and ultimately achieves a visual poetry that is beyond sublime. Untitled (New York City) stands as tangible testimony to Twombly's staggering innovation and inimitable abstract aesthetic at this point in his career, as explicated through the work's visceral imagery, stunning color, compositional economy, and graphic intelligence. Having remained in the same collection for over forty years since it was acquired from the artist immediately after it was executed, Untitled (New York City) has never been loaned for exhibition, nor seen in public. The narrative of the painting’s acquisition affirms its rarity: upon introduction from a close artist friend, the present owner visited Twombly’s studio on The Bowery in Manhattan's Lower East Side, and personally chose Untitled (New York City) from among a selection of paintings that Twombly had unrolled for his viewing. In the same year that Twombly paintedUntitled (New York City), he opened his first one-person museum exhibition in the United States at the Milwaukee Art Center—a pivotal period of artistic maturity that heralded his triumphant return to painting following a hiatus in his production from 1964-66. Crucially pre-dating a fundamental shift in Twombly’s status from promising young artist to established modern master, the present work enshrines an attitude of unadulterated innovation and artistic discovery. It is, in short, the very pure manifestation of Cy Twombly's indisputable genius.

View of a large crowd of men as they wait outside the closed doors of the Bowery Mission (227 Bowery), New York, New York, circa 1968. Photo: Fred W. McDarrah/Getty Images

Spectacularly rare for the serenely beautiful blue color of its endlessly lyrical circular lines, and boasting a superb provenance, this canvas is unquestionably positioned as one of the great achievements of Cy Twombly's career. Spanning an immersive expanse of over twenty-eight square feet, it sits amongst an elite cadre of large-scale works of the series, and invites the spectator to become engulfed within its epic drama. Many of the paintings comparable in scale and execution belong to the world’s most renowned museums and institutions, including: The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Menil Collection, Houston; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and the Benesse House Museum, Naoshima. However, unlike every other 'Blackboard' painting that bears white loops, the rare colored marks here resound with great vivacity and drama—the present work is the only painting from the series executed in blue. The seemingly frenzied dispersion of graphic mark-making is in fact the result of finely-honed technical precision: the progressive march of elliptical repetitions is expertly rendered to achieve an irresistibly hypnotic urgency. This stark, graphic linearity cascades across a highly seductive gray ground rendered through a forceful assault of brushwork. The variegated tonal architecture of grisaille hues functions like geological strata, having trapped within its oil layers the shadows of drips, smears and strokes. Indeed, the sheer force of this painting's dynamic energy marks it apart from all contemporaneous examples of the grand cycle, and results in a panoramic expanse pulsating with the expansions and contractions of a certain organized chaos. The torrent of luscious vertical drip marks that cascade down the lower left quadrant of Untitled (New York City) enhance the expressiveness of the painting. This vigorous action results in a surface that exposes Twombly’s process of inscription and erasure, possessing a composition of loops that reveal their own creation. Despite a residual yearning to decipher these written marks as an inherently human need, Twombly's visual language has neither syntax nor logic: in the words of Pierre Restany, it is comprised of "furtive gestures, an écriture automatique," (Pierre Restany, The Revolution of the Sign, 1961) and function as a compulsory sensual and intellectual catharsis that is both universal and particular to the individual.

Four years after the artist's death and with ever increasing perspective on the monumental arc of his six-decade career, it is possible today to reflect more substantively on the nature of his incomparable contribution to art history. Following his work as a cryptographer in the United States Army, it is clear from the nature of his early mark-making that he was fundamentally captivated by terms of visual communication, and determined to interrogate associative sign systems and Saussurian semiotics. According to the black and white paintings of the later 1950s, he was evidently drawn to boundaries between the figurative and the abstract, following the course of Picasso and de Kooning in charting an individualistic lens onto the natural world around us. His breakthrough in 1959 with Poems to the Sea, executed in a sudden cathartic outpouring in Italy, demonstrated his definitive debt to the great lessons of history, with European Antiquity and the Renaissance proving the ultimate benchmark and springboard to his art thence forth. This grand inquiry into the past was continued through the ecstatic Baroque paintings of the early 1960s, ultimately culminating with the cycle Nine Discourses on Commodus (Guggenheim Bilbao Museo), completed in the winter of 1963 following Twombly's return from an extended trip to Egypt, Sudan, and Italy. This group of nine canvases based on the murder of the Roman emperor Aurelius Commodus was shown in New York in 1964; the exhibition was received by scathing critical reviews, after which Twombly severely slowed his production. The artist made only 20 canvases in 1964 and none in 1965—a period of radically halted output from which the artist later emerged with a cycle of phenomenal grey-ground paintings.

Eadweard Muybridge, Sequence with hand movement, Plate 535 from ‘Animal Locomotion’, 1887. Alinari / Bridgeman Images

Twombly’s series of 'Blackboard' paintings—as they would come to be known following Robert Pincus-Witten’s seminal text in 1968—revived the artist’s career following a troubling period in the early part of the decade. In 1966, Cy Twombly abandoned the emotive use of color that had defined much of his earlier output to embark upon a cycle of gray canvases in search of a more expressive clarity. As Heiner Bastian has deftly explained, "Cy Twombly tries to shatter form as well as its concomitant intellectual and narrative history in a kind of relativism, reducing it to a rationality of 'black and white' that is at the same time the structural sum of all movement." (Heiner Bastian, ed. Cy Twombly: Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings, Volume III 1966-1971, Munich, 1994, p. 23) Extraneous literary and historical concerns were cast aside as Twombly sought to channel the vitality of his wrist towards exploring the expressive possibilities of autonomous rhythmic repetitions. He was fascinated by the musical theory of Counterpoint, Palmer handwriting drills, André Masson's automatic drawing and Paul Klee's Pedagogical exercises. The repetition of forms also recalls Futurist investigations into the photographic and cinematic decomposition of forms in motion, such as those exemplified in Umberto Boccioni's States of Mind III: Those Who Stay, and indeed by others such as Marcel Duchamp's with his kinetic Nude Descending a Staircase. Owing inspirational debt to the scientific notebook drawings of Leonardo da Vinci, Twombly saw within the Renaissance master's innumerable scientific formula, scattered drawings and codes, a private poetry of obsession; something driven by an irrational demon of secret knowledge which struck a chord with Twombly's own aesthetic. Above all though, perhaps it was the realization that the Renaissance clarity and light so often used to describe Italian art were balanced by a darker, neurotic intensity. This is reflected by the destructive and turbulent themes of Leonardo's work to which Twombly was consistently drawn in the late 1960s: those of maelstroms and cataclysms.

Kazimir Malevich, Black Square, Blue Triangle, 1915. Stedelijk Museum/Amsterdam/The Netherlands. Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY

Twombly approached the issue of movement and time within pictorial space by reconsidering artists like Leonardo, Duchamp, and the Italian Futurists, who would conceive mythology and history through abstract principles. With his 'Blackboard' paintings, Twombly investigated the development of time and space within the picture plane; the spectacular scale of the present work and the exuberance of the blue crayon amplify the torrential storm of Twombly’s whirlwind shapes. Especially against their gray ground, the blue oval scrawls emerge from and recede into another in dense relief, teetering on the threshold of legibility while electrifying our sight with their vivid hue. Pulsing with an ineffable rhythm as the oblong loops splinter across the canvas, Twombly here investigates the definition and physical nature of a simple geometrical element in space as it erupts within the picture plane with cataclysmic graphic narrative. The six magnificent horizontal bands of loops increase in volume and expressive abandon, as the artist progresses down the length of the canvas—Twombly’s lassoed lines progressively lose regularity  and control, resulting in thrillingly increased drips, smears, and spatters toward the bottom of the picture. While the Futurist principle of movement in space was centered on the rational, quasi-scientific understanding of transformation and duration, Twombly appears to have reacted to the dispersion of forms in which painstaking precision comes into contact with an energetic abandon. With all the rough, fractured rawness of street graffiti, Twombly presents an entirely novel visual language that innovatively explores both the most elementary and the most sophisticated concerns posed by the genesis of creativity.

Barnett Newman, Onement VI, 1953. Private Collection, Sold Sotheby’s New York, May 2013. © 2016 Barnett Newman Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Twombly approached the issue of movement and time within pictorial space by reconsidering artists like Leonardo, Duchamp, and the Italian Futurists, who would conceive mythology and history through abstract principles. With his 'Blackboard' paintings, Twombly investigated the development of time and space within the picture plane; the spectacular scale of the present work and the exuberance of the blue crayon amplify the torrential storm of Twombly’s whirlwind shapes. Especially against their gray ground, the blue oval scrawls emerge from and recede into another in dense relief, teetering on the threshold of legibility while electrifying our sight with their vivid hue. Pulsing with an ineffable rhythm as the oblong loops splinter across the canvas, Twombly here investigates the definition and physical nature of a simple geometrical element in space as it erupts within the picture plane with cataclysmic graphic narrative. The six magnificent horizontal bands of loops increase in volume and expressive abandon, as the artist progresses down the length of the canvas—Twombly’s lassoed lines progressively lose regularity  and control, resulting in thrillingly increased drips, smears, and spatters toward the bottom of the picture. While the Futurist principle of movement in space was centered on the rational, quasi-scientific understanding of transformation and duration, Twombly appears to have reacted to the dispersion of forms in which painstaking precision comes into contact with an energetic abandon. With all the rough, fractured rawness of street graffiti, Twombly presents an entirely novel visual language that innovatively explores both the most elementary and the most sophisticated concerns posed by the genesis of creativity.

Roy Lichtenstein, Drowning Girl, 1963. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, U.S.A. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by Scala / Art Resource, NY © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein

Twombly was conscripted to the military from November 1953 – August 1954. During these years of service, the artist was assigned first to Camp Gordon in Augusta, Georgia, and then the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. It was there that the artist worked as a Cryptologist, studying the art of writing and solving codes. The artist often drew at night after lights out, producing a group of works that initiated his motif of ‘scribbling’ and laid the foundation for much of his subsequent work. Drawing in the dark excised the sense of reason and rationality associated with the eye; instead, Twombly liberated his graphic activity from optical control and made his hand alone responsible for form, thereby encouraging instantaneity and the unanticipated. Such techniques evolved out of Surrealism—abandoning inhibitive self-consciousness, blind composition was a method of automatism taught by leading figures such as André Breton and André Masson. Around this time, Abstract Expressionist artists seized on the influence of European Modernism and adopted considerable interest in glyphs and modes of primitive communication. This attention to the symbols of archaic societies and their inherently expressive power were a natural point of departure for these New York School painters, for whom the power of simple expressive abstract signs to communicate held clear associations to their own modes of gestural abstraction at the time.

Yves Klein, ANT 130, 1960. Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany. Banque d’Images, ADAGP / Art Resource, NY © 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

Twombly found, in the relative coolness of the dark-ground style, an appropriate form of work to pursue in New York. Working from studios on the Bowery and Canal Street, the relative chasteness and severity of his new aesthetic compared to the sensual pleasures of the early 1960s seemed more in sync with contemporary trends in America. The present work ushered in a rediscovered Americanness in Twombly’s work, reflecting the contemporary artistic discourse in marked contrast to the Europeanness of his earlier works. In Untitled (New York City), the freedom of movement of course evokes the liberal energy of Jackson Pollock's action painting, while the all-over but low-pressure imagery is similar to Jasper Johns’ grey paintings. The immersive nature of vast canvas expanses and, as critically and uniquely broadcast in the present work, submersion in the force of color, afforded an experience comparable to that generated by Rothko and Newman. The pared-down aesthetic of this painting and an unobtrusive cool objectivity also owes a significant debt to the protagonists of Minimalism including Judd, Andre and Flavin. The resulting canvases, such as Untitled (New York City), are considered without a doubt the most powerful and lyrical works of his career. Chromatically sparse and formally reductive, the gray-ground pictures demanded new modes of reading Twombly’s work with relation to the artistic developments pulsing through New York City. The present work stands apart, however, for the vibrancy of its blue palette; a characteristic that reflects the artist’s richly colorful and expressive compositions from the first half of the 1960s known as Baroque Paintings. Kirk Varnedoe explains, “Just as those earlier pictures had represented a cooling shift away from painterly and erotic energies, these new canvases were lean and unemotional, in contrast to the baroque color and violence of the work of the early 1960s… That temporal aspect was then extended through the gray-ground works of the next few years, in the frequent imagery of analytically segmented movement… Twombly’s previous attraction to the evidence of deep, slow, ‘vertical’ time, in scarred surfaces, here is translated into a fascination for the forms of ‘lateral’ speed, forms and forces rushing by with their proliferation of marks more rationally divided than confoundingly layered.” (Kirk Varnedoe, ‘Inscriptions in Arcadia’ in Nicola del Roscio, Ed.,Writings on Cy Twombly, Munich, 2002, pp. 215-6)

Giacomo Balla, Velocità di motocicletta (The speed of the motorcycle), 1913. Private Collection.

These are forms that insist on a progressive linear continuity, but simultaneously concede to isolated bursts of irregular activity. Unlike Twombly’s earlier canvases, in which episodes of personal expression are scattered across the picture plane, the artist here constricts his activity to a gestural framework—nevertheless, the lassoed bands give way to expressive subjectivity in their vigorously imprecise execution. Like the work of Minimalist artists who pursued a repetitive, doggedly systematic task—such as Kusama’s looped Infinity Nets, Lewitt’s serial pencil-drawn lines on the wall, or Uecker’s intricately nailed surfaces—Twombly’s painting experiments with the unplanned personal inflections that can arise from following strict conventions, a departure from ideals of purely spontaneous expression. At moments, the line is tight and dense; at others, Twombly loses control and his cursive energy drives off course, a high-speed choreography in which individual events of personal expression are sublimated into a greater whole of dense accumulations. Within this dichotomy lies the very brilliance of Twombly’s painting: reveling in the contradictions between the systematic and the irregular, the unruly and the cerebral, the premeditated and the intuitive, Twombly achieves a balletic complexity unsurpassed by any of his contemporaries. Twombly recalls being taught to write using the Palmer method, a strict technique of teaching handwriting that required pupils to repetitively practice rote drills keeping their fingers and wrists rigid while only moving their arms. In the lattice of tiered lateral ovals scoring the canvas, Twombly’s own gestural abandon erupts from the structural balance of the composition; while more precise and mathematical than the automatism of the Surrealists or the impulse of the Abstract Expressionists, Twombly’s subjectivity seeps through what appears to be mechanical labor. Like the individual strokes of encaustic that burst forth through the predetermined grids and formats of a Jasper Johns painting, Twombly’s loops similarly bely in subtle disobedience a totally objective geometric precision. With the rigid syntax and rudimentary forms of the grey-ground paintings, Twombly appears to deny the insouciance of personality; however, the tremulous inflections of each parabolic rise and fall inevitably give way to the signature intensity of the artist’s own hand. Varnedoe comments, “As before, Twombly courts the accusation that there is no mind involved—previously, because the manner seemed chaotically subjective, without sufficient ordering control, too episodic and too little marked by work; and now, because it seems mechanically rote and impersonal, too monotonous and too completely a matter of work. No familiar evidence of heroic spontaneity or intuited compositional judgment, nor any universal coordinate such as geometry, anchored the pictures’ claim to attention.” (Kirk Varnedoe, “Inscriptions in Arcadia” in Exh. Cat., New York, Museum of Modern Art, Cy Twombly: A Retrospective, 1994, p. 42)

Robert Rauschenberg, Untitled (Cy sitting), 1952 Photo © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

Francis Bacon (1909-1992), Two Studies for a Self-Portrait (1970), signed, titled and dated 1970 on the reverse of each panel, oil on canvas, in two parts: each: 14 by 12 in. 35.5 by 30.5 cm. Estimate 22,000,000 — 30,000,000 USD. Lot sold 34,970,000 USD to an Anonymous. Photo Sotheby's.

This work will be included as number 70-07 in the forthcoming Francis Bacon Catalogue Raisonné, being prepared by the Estate of Francis Bacon and edited by Martin Harrison.

Provenance: Marlborough Fine Art Ltd., London
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1970

Exhibited: Paris, Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais; and Dusseldorf, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Francis Bacon, October 1971 - May 1972, p. 131, no. 103, illustrated
London, Marlborough Fine Art Ltd., Francis Bacon 1909-1992: Small Portrait Studies, October - December 1993, n.p., no. 20, illustrated in color and n.p., illustrated in color (detail of the left panel)

Lot 17. Sam Francis (1923 - 1994), Summer #1, oil on canvas, 95 1/2 by 72 in. 242.6 by 182.9 cm. Executed in 1957. Estimate 8,000,000 — 12,000,000 USD. Lot sold 11,842,000  USD to a private Américan. Record for artist at auction. Photo Sotheby's.

Provenance: Martha Jackson Gallery, New York
Mr. and Mrs. Walter Ross, New York (acquired from the above in December 1958)
Adelaide Stachelberg, New York
Christie's, New York, November 12, 1986, Lot 34A
Leslie Wexner, Ohio (acquired in 1986)
Richard Gray Gallery, Chicago
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2001

Exhibited: Baltimore, Baltimore Museum of Art, Contemporary Americans, October - November 1957
Brussels, Palais International des Beaux-Arts, Exposition Universelle et Internationale de Bruxelles: 50 ans d'Art Moderne, April - July 1958, pl. 153, no. 94,  illustrated
New York, Cordier & Elkstrom, Seven Decades 1895-1965: Crosscurrents in Modern Art, April - May 1966, p. 158, no. 293, illustrated 
Columbus, Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus Collects: American Painting, Sculpture and Photography, November 1988 - January 1989, p. 21, no. 12 (checklist)
New York, L&M Arts, Sam Francis: 1953-1959, October 2009 - January 2010, p. 35, no. 5, illustrated in color.

Literature: Herbert Read, "14 Chefs-d'Oeuvre de l'Exposition 50 ans d'Art Moderne," Quadrum 5, 1958, p. 93, illustrated in color and p. 92 (text)
Yoshiaki Tono, "From a Gulliver's Point of View," Art in America 48, No. 2, May 1960, p. 56, illustrated in color
"Fifty-Six Painters and Sculptors," Art in America 52, No. 4, August 1964, p. 37, illustrated in color
Debra Burchett-Lere, Ed., Sam Francis: Catalogue Raisonné of Canvas and Panel Paintings 1946-1994, Berkeley, 2011, illustrated in color on the cover (detail) and no. 218, illustrated in color on DVD

Notes: "What we want to make is something that fills utterly the sight, and can't be used to make life only bearable; if the painting till now was a way of making bearable the sight of the unbearable, the visual sumptuous, then let's now strip away... all that." 
Sam Francis in a letter to Museum of Modern Art curator Dorothy Miller in 1957

Categorically breathtaking in its intensely luminous palette, tour-de-force physical execution, and monumental scale, Sam Francis’ Summer #1, 1957, is an unequivocal masterpiece from the inaugural decade of the artist’s nearly fifty-year long career. Long considered to be the ultimate examples of Francis’ distinctive and highly praised abstract aesthetic, the paintings he created in the second half of the 1950s stand as testament to a young artist’s fervent pursuit of a revolutionary style. Indeed, it is in the churning intensity, compositional vitality, and emboldened vibrancy of Summer #1 that we witness the newly established genius of a groundbreaking colorist and pioneering abstractionist executing one of the first fully mature and decidedly sublime masterworks of his oeuvre. That the present work was chosen to grace the cover of the artist’s catalogue raisonné, published in 2011, is further confirmation of its preeminent position as the ultimate archetype of Francis’ output. William C. Agee, in the definitive text he wrote for this catalogue raisonné, declared, “Paint used generously and put in the service of color and its energy and power to convey deep feelings is the hallmark, from beginning to end, of Francis’s art.” (William C. Agee in Debra Burchett-Lere, Ed., Sam Francis: Catalogue Raisonné of Canvas and Panel Paintings 1946-1994, Berkeley, 2011, pp. 12-13) As it looms gloriously over us, fully ensconcing us in a masterful cacophony of hue and form,Summer #1 appears as the singular summation of Agee’s statement; it is, quite simply, one of the most authoritative and utterly sublime canvases Sam Francis ever created.

Though Francis’ art historical legacy is most often considered in conjunction with his contemporaries in the New York School of Abstract Expressionism, the catalyst for his aesthetic development was inextricably rooted in the specific environment of the West Coast, where he was born and where he lived until relocating to Paris in 1950. During the critical post-war period, when the landscape of American art was being actively and aggressively recalibrated by visionary artists on both coasts, Sam Francis honed his unique style in the hotbed of artistic innovation that was the San Francisco Bay area.

The period between 1947 and 1950 was especially fruitful, as a number of influential visual artists, professors, and curators converged on the area, central among them being Clyfford Still, Ad Reinhardt, and Mark Rothko. Still and Rothko taught together at the California School of Fine Arts – where Richard Diebenkorn studied – Still from 1946 through 1950 and Rothko in the summers of 1947 and 1949. Francis was shaped first and foremost by their example, being particularly drawn to the organic forms, tonal experimentation, and vast scale of Still, moderated by the more regulated and restrained surfaces of Rothko. In Summer #1 Francis embraced the direct, immediate handling of materials and unfettered freedom of process mandated by Still, and infused it with an appreciation of the liquidity and fluency of Rothko’s shapes and surfaces. Ultimately, however, he took these stylistic precedents a step further, conferring upon his paintings an emotional charge that is at once joyful, poetic, contemplative, and meditative in spirit.

Clyfford Still, 1947-Y-No. 2, 1947. Private Collection, sold Sotheby’s New York, November 2011 © 2016 City & County of Denver, Courtesy Clyfford Still Museum / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Mark Rothko, Multiform, 1948 National Gallery of Australia, Canberra / Purchased 1981 / Bridgeman Images © 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

At its most transcendent, Francis’ art is a celebration of color conceived as light, air, and space, as brilliantly demonstrated in the bewitching and beautiful Summer #1. Francis spoke of being “intoxicated” with light, “not just the play of light and shadow, but the substance of which light is made,” seeking to make each painting “a source of light,” and declaring, “When I paint, I try to create the feeling of being in it.” (the artist cited in “New Talent,” Time, New York, January 1956, p. 72) Summer #1 perfectly achieves this striking interplay of light and shadow via Francis’ unique handling of his most favored and distinctive hues. Gathered in a loosely delineated band at the center of the canvas, Francis’ judicious and precise use of black here presents the ultimate counterpoint to the fields of ethereal lightness that surround it; which appear to glow as if imbued with an otherworldly light by comparison. It is thus that the artist’s “play of light and shadow” comes to imbue Summer #1with a nearly indescribable magnetism, every inch of its immense surface brimming with pure unfettered creative verve. The dazzling cerulean that dominates the lower half of the present work in a variety of subtle tonal modulations is perhaps the single most identifiable and characteristic color in Francis’ vast pantheon of vivid pigments, and has become in its pervasive usage synonymous with his legacy. The artist described this particular hue as the “Mother liquid, matrix,” (Sam Francis, Saturated Blue: Writings from the Notebooks, Santa Monica, 1995, n.p.) and its ubiquitous use during this period recalls Rothko’s autographic red or Franz Kline’s distinctive monochrome palette.

Arshile Gorky, Water of the Flowery Mill, 1944 The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, USA © 2016 Estate of Arshile Gorky / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

While Francis’ favored cobalt remained at the forefront of his palette throughout his career, paintings such as Summer #1bear direct witness to a radical change that occurred in his coloristic practice in 1957. In the same year as the present work’s execution, Francis began to shift the compositional balance between his use of white space and the theretofore all-over dominance of a vibrant array of interlocking pigments, so that the two seemingly opposed forces appeared equally prominent. Exemplifying this stylistic change, the hypnotizing network of organically interwoven zones of color that describe the compositional structure of Summer #1 become ever more impactful and outstanding amidst the utter stillness of the calm white that surrounds them. Agee speaks to this strategic structural revolution: “With this new openness, we are given more breathing room in which to move around the paint and the surface, with areas of white now modulating the color zones, pulling them back as we would part a curtain and affording us a glimpse of another kind of space…the space of infinity.” (William C. Agee in Debra Burchett-Lere, Ed., Op. Cit., p. 74) With canvases such as Summer #1, Francis was persistent in his pursuit of creating the sensation of journeying into a new and vast space. This guiding impulse became a continuation for Francis of the Romantic tradition in its evocation of a sense of yearning for the faraway. With this ambition achieved, the artist’s resplendently melodic abstractions belie their physical appearance as expressions of pure painterly energy, instead conferring upon their viewer a profundity of philosophical import. Robert T. Buck Jr., on the occasion of the 1972 retrospective of Francis’ art at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, described the artist as a man with his “mind and spirit far above the actual world.” (Robert T. Buck Jr., “The Paintings of Sam Francis,” in Exh. Cat., Buffalo, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Sam Francis: Paintings 1947-1972, 1972, p. 14).

Cover image of Sam Francis: Catalogue Raisonné of Canvas and Panel Paintings, 1946–1994. Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 2011, Debra Burchett-Lere, Ed. Photo © Sam Francis Foundation, California/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York and University of California Press

Distinguished provenance continues to drive prices: 

o Alexander Calder’s Untitled standing mobile, gifted by the artist to Alfred H. Barr Jr., founding director of the Museum of Modern Art, was highly sought after, with eight bidders driving up the final price to $8,314,000 (est. $3/4 million) – the top price for Calder. 

Lot 5. Alexander Calder (1898 - 1976), Untitled, incised with the artist's monogram on the base, painted sheet metal, glass, wire and string standing mobile, 32 3/4 by 23 by 10 1/2 in. 83.2 by 58.4 by 26.7 cm. Executed circa 1942. Estimate 3,000,000 — 4,000,000 USD. Lot sold 8,314,000 USD to a private American. Photo Sotheby's.

This work is registered in the archives of The Calder Foundation, New York under application number A18880. 

Provenance: Alfred H. Barr, Jr., New York (gift from the artist in 1966)
Thence by descent to the present owner

Exhibited: New York, Pierre Matisse Gallery, Calder: Recent Work, May - June 1942
Princeton, Princeton University Art Museum, In Celebration: Works of Art from the Collections of Princeton Alumni and Friends of the Art Museum, February - June 1997, p. 284, no. 265, illustrated in color

Literature: Exh. Cat., Turin, Palazzo a Vela, Calder, 1983, p. 95, illustrated (preparatory sketch for the present work)
Exh. Cat., Paris, Musée des arts décoratifs (and travelling), The Intimate World of Alexander Calder, 1989, p. 225, illustrated in color 
Exh. Cat., New York, L&M Arts, Tanguy, Calder: Between Surrealism and Abstraction, 2010, p. 142, illustrated (preparatory sketch for the present work)

Notes: “It is a little hot-jazz tune, unique and ephemeral, like the sky, like the morning. If you missed it, it is lost forever. Valéry said the sea is always beginning over again. One of Calder's objects is like the sea and equally spellbinding: always beginning over again, always new. A passing glance is not enough; you must live with it, be bewitched by it. Then the imagination revels in these pure, interchanging forms, at once free and rule-governed." (Jean-Paul Sartre, "Les Mobiles de Calder," in Exh. Cat., Paris, Galerie Louis Carré, Alexander Calder: Mobiles, Stabiles, Constellations, 1946, pp. 9 - 19, translation by Chris Turner, The Aftermath of War: Jean-Paul Sartre, Calcutta, 2008)

Beaming with an ebullient spirit and transformative dreamlike fantasy, Calder’s Untitled from circa 1942 represents the artist’s breathtaking ingenuity and spectacular formal dexterity. A paragon of Calder’s earliest standing mobiles that incorporated found pieces of colored glass, Untitled captures the artist at the height of his inventive curiosity, adventuring toward new conceptions of spatial understanding, material innovation, and romantic beauty. As the poised onyx-hued spine of the sculpture gracefully twists upon two delicately perched hind-legs, the luminous kaleidoscope of dazzling colors that cascade from the tip of Untitled radiate with a translucence afforded by Calder’s brilliant use of scavenged chunks of colored glass, enclosing jewel-like fragments of bottles within elegantly wrapped lengths of wire. The provenance of this sculpture is exceptional and endows the work with an unparalleled level of historical import: Untitled was gifted by the artist directly to Alfred H. Barr, Jr., the founding director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Barr notably gave Calder a major solo retrospective exhibition at MoMA in 1943—the year likely following the execution of Untitled—and proceeded to acquire numerous pivotal works by the artist for the collection, including commissioning Calder in 1939 to create the large Lobster Trap and Fish Tail to inaugurate the main staircase of the new MoMA building. Untitled remained in Barr’s home from its time of gifting in 1966 to the present day, exhibited only once at the Princeton University Art Museum in 1997.

Alfred H. Barr, Jr. poses for a portrait surrounded by paintings and sculptures he collected for the museum, circa 1950. Photo by Arnold Newman/Getty Images

It is clear from well-archived correspondence between the two figures that this striking gift was one that was long considered, investing the present work with even greater narrative resonance. As early as before 1940, Calder repeatedly expressed to Barr his wish to present one of his works to his friend; in the final post-script to one long letter dated March 31, 1938, Calder wrote: “I have decided that you must have one of my objects, even if I have to lend, give or force it, to, or on, you.” It was not until 1966, however, that Barr accepted a gift from the artist, likely coinciding with a subsequent letter Calder wrote to Barr that year: “ ‘I have long felt that whatever my success has been, [it was] greatly as a result of the show I had at MOMA in 1943, and now, as I seem to have quite a number of I think important objects ‘left over’ I would like to make a gift of several of them to the Museum—if you would be interested’… The response to Calder’s letter of 1966 was immediate. Mr. Barr and Dorothy Miller went to Roxbury, Connecticut to see Calder’s two studios and the meadow full of large sculptures. Although uncertain of what Calder would concede from their list of thirteen selections, large and small, they were told: ‘Oh, you can have them all.’” (Harriet Schoenholz Bee, Ed., Art in Our Time: A Chronicle of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2004, p. 136) This major gift to the museum in the same year of 1966 included what are widely considered some of Calder’s greatest masterpieces in the collection: Josephine Baker (III) (c. 1927), Snow Flurry, I (1948), Morning Star (1943), Gibraltar (1936), and Spider (1939). It was alongside this endowment of treasures to the world’s greatest museum of twentieth-century art that Calder gave Barr his own treasure: the scintillating glass and wire mobile Untitled, of 1942. This gift, moreover, held particular value, as it was executed just before the seminal MoMA retrospective that catalyzed Calder’s career and inspired the overall bequest to the museum.

Letter from Alexander Calder to Alfred H. Barr, Jr., March 31, 1939. Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Papers, The Museum of Modern Art Archives.

Calder’s sketch for the present work, among inventory drawings for Pierre Matisse Gallery, 1942. Calder Foundation, New York / Art Resource, NY © 2016 Calder Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Untitled embodies Calder’s distinctly Dadaist sensibility of utilizing an assemblage of diverse and unlikely materials to create an uncanny poetry. 1942 was a critical year for Surrealism in New York, with two legendary Surrealist events held in the fall: the exhibition “First Papers of Surrealism,” held at the Whitelaw Reid Mansion on Madison Avenue, and the opening of Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century gallery at 30 West 57th Street. Calder was notably included in both, evidencing the prominent position that concepts of Surrealism held in his universe at that moment. André Breton associated Calder with Surrealism in the winter of 1942, writing “Excluding every anecdotal element, Calder reduces the object to a few simple lines carving out elementary colors. This object, employing only the properties of movement—not represented movement but real movement—is miraculously brought to life in the most concrete shapes and restores to us the evolution of the celestial bodies, the rustling of foliage, the memory of caresses.” (André Breton quoted in Exh. Cat., New York, L&M Arts, Tanguy, Calder: Between Surrealism and Abstraction, 2010, p. 152) 1942 was also the same year that Calder began his famed series of Constellations, many of which are sketched on the same inventory scroll as the present sculpture. In the days before record-keeping photography, Calder drew miniature thumbnail sketches that would serve as visual identifiers of his works. Just as Calder turned to hand-carved wood as medium for his Constellations, a choice driven by the scarcity of metal needed for the war effort, his use of found and recycled bits of glass in Untitled reflect the artist’s war-time mentality.

Alexander Calder in the exhibition “Alexander Calder: Sculptures and Constructions,” The Museum of Modern Art, New York, September 1943 – January 1944. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY © 2016 Calder Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Alexander Calder, Glass Fish, 1955. Calder Foundation, New York / Art Resource, NY © 2016 Calder Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

o Coming to Sotheby’s from the esteemed collection of the Morton G. Neumann family, Alberto Burri’s Sacco sold for $7,306,000 (est. $6/8 million) following the record set at Sotheby’s London in February. 

Lot 10. Alberto Burri (1915 - 1995), Sacco, signed on the reverse, oil and burlap on canvas, 39 3/4 by 34 1/4 in. 100.9 by 87 cm. Executed in 1954. Estimate 6,000,000 — 8,000,000 USD. Lot sold 7,306,000 USD to a private American. Photo: Sotheby's.

Provenance: Martha Jackson Gallery, New York
Morton G. Neumann, Chicago (acquired from the above in 1957) 
Thence by descent to the present owner

Exhibited: Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art; and Chicago, Art Institute of Chicago, The Morton G. Neumann Family Collection, August 1980 - April 1981 (Chicago only)
Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art, Twentieth-Century Art: Selections for the Tenth Anniversary of the East Building, December 1988 - December 1990 (as Red Accent)

Literature: Cesare Brandi, Burri, Rome, 1963, p. 201, no. 169, illustrated (incorrectly dated 1955) (in incorrect orientation)
Edward M. Gomez, "Getting Your Motor Revved Up," ARTnews, Vol. 88, No. 5, May 1989, p. 48, illustrated in color (in installation at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1989)
Fondazione Palazzo Albizzini, Ed., Burri, Contributi al catalogo sistematico, Città di Castello, 1990, p. 61, no. 220, illustrated in color (in incorrect orientation)
Giuliano Serafini, Burri: la misura e il fenomeno, Milan, 1999, p. 75, no. 76, illustrated in color (in incorrect orientation) and p. 40 (text)
Venanzio Nocchi, Estetica e ontologia in Alberto Burri, Città di Castello, 2006, p. 78, no. 2, illustrated in color
Ines Bertolini, Arteficio: Il Riciclo a Regola d'Arte, Trieste, 2007, p. 9, illustrated in color
Bruno Corà, Ed., Burri: Catalogo generale, Pittura 1945-1957, Tomo I, Fondazione Palazzo Albizzini, Città di Castello, 2015, p. 190, no. 445, illustrated in color 
Bruno Corà, Ed., Burri: Catalogo generale, Pittura 1945-1957, Tomo VI, Fondazione Palazzo Albizzini, Città di Castello, 2015, p. 87, no. i.5411, illustrated in color

Notes: Sacco exemplifies the meditative power and quasi-religious force that exudes from Burri’s praxis; it is as striking in its compositional simplicity as it is captivating in the minute exactitude of its detail. Color, form, medium, and content entwine and enmesh across the canvas as deep black and hot red galvanize the coarse ochre of burlap. It is neither painting nor sculpture, neither abstract nor figurative, and seems at once elegiac and hysterical; fervent and demure. Sacco is extremely rare and impressive in scale, punctuated with delicate stitching and suffused with a sense of destruction and repair that was entirely fitting for the Italian post-war mood. Moreover, having resided in the highly esteemed Morton G. Neumann family collection for nearly 60 years, its appearance at auction marks an historic event.

Alberto Burri. Photo: Ugo Mulas, © Ugo Mulas Heirs. All Rights Reserved

Mainly created between 1950 and 1956, the Sacchi are Burri’s most celebrated works. They are identifiable by their distinctive use of burlap sacking and prized, not only for their scarcity but also for their rough tactile beauty and coarse conceptual impetus. Burlap was a material of tremendous importance for Burri. It had been ubiquitous during the Second World War, deployed in tents, supply sacks and sandbags, even woven in strips through camouflage netting. The artist’s earliest works even used stretched burlap as a support – an abrasive alternative for conventional canvas. However, in the present work, the burlap becomes more than just a medium. It is the subject matter; a motif that is charged with the significance of that tumultuous conflict that still dominated the European collective memory in the 1950s.

Robert Rauschenberg, Bed, 1955. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, U.S.A. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY Art © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation / Licensed by VAGA, New York

Burri had spent most of the Second World War in America, having been captured and imprisoned by Allied troops. Thus it wasn’t until he returned to Naples in 1946 that he witnessed the aftermath of the conflict upon Italy. He saw gutted apartment blocks, charred black with smoke, and Renaissance churches, stripped of their facades and reduced to rubble. Burri’s brother had been killed, thousands of others were homeless or starving, and it seemed that everything he had previously held dear had been destroyed. He was a surgeon before the war, and  a military doctor before he was captured, but to pick up where he left off as if nothing had changed seemed barbaric and reprehensible, even sacrilegious. He turned instead to art; what had started as a prison hobby now became a calling, even an obsession. For the rest of his life, Burri immersed himself completely in the creation of extraordinarily powerful abstract paintings. They were the only means by which he was able to comprehend the horrific trauma that had been inflicted upon his life, his family, and the society in which he lived.

Lee Bontecou, Untitled, 1962. Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas / Bridgeman Images © 2016 Lee Bontecou

The burlap used to create the present work is vitally and indelibly imbued with the turmoil of its historic moment. The present work is pock-marked and strained, patched with an accent of patterned cloth, and strewn with striations of haphazard stitching. Between the flat painted ground, and the expanses of pre-fabricated medium, these stitches are the only trace of artistic gesture in the entire composition. Stretched in taught zig-zags between the unravelling cloth, they carry more import than mere reparative haberdashery and instead bespeak the heartfelt effort of the artist; Burri glorified this passage of ruined fabric, so inexpensive and so inherently damaged that it might easily have been discarded. He emphasized and lionized its repair and, in the context of post-war Italy desperately trying to repair its myriad of socio-economic wounds, this is a statement of overwhelming poignancy. James Johnson Sweeney, the legendary MoMA curator and a close friend to Burri, equated this artistic tenderness to the artist’s medical background: “Burri transforms rags into a metaphor for bleeding human flesh, breathes life into the inanimate materials which he employs, making them live and bleed; then heals the wounds with the same evocative ability and the same sensibility with which he first inflicted them... The picture is human flesh, the artist a surgeon.” (James Johnson Sweeney quoted in Exh. Cat., Rome, L’Obelisco, Burri, 1955, n.p.)

Lucio Fontana, Concetto Spaziale, La Fine di Dio, 1963 © 2016 Lucio Fontana / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE, Rome

For more than half a century since its creation, Sacco has resided in the highly esteemed Morton G. Neumann Family collection and is thus identifiable as a masterpiece of rare quality. Neumann was an industrialist from Chicago who began to acquire art with his wife in the late 1940s. Although they were entirely self-taught in connoisseurship, their collection is unrivalled in depth and quality, elucidating masterpieces from some of the greatest artists of the Twentieth Century. The Neumann’s decisions in acquisition were informed by the great dealers of the age – Pierre Matisse, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, and Sidney Janis – and their frequent travels through Europe afforded them personal relationships with Fernand Léger, Man Ray, Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, Jean Dubuffet, and Alberto Giacometti. In 1980, they were honored by a major exhibition presented by the Art Institute of Chicago, at which the present work was exhibited; a tribute to the institutional quality and range of their extraordinary assemblage. Neumann acquired Sacco in the years immediately following its creation, exemplifying that judgement made of him by the art historian Sam Hunter: “For Neumann, art collecting is a profound form of personal commitment – a consuming passion and an obsession. He rarely waits for the seal of approval to descend on the artist or product and clearly prefers to move as close as he can to the crucible of emerging talent." (Exh. Cat., Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art, The Morton G. Neumann Family Collection, 1980, p. 15).

Alberto Burri, Sacco e Rosso, 1954, Tate Collection, London. Image: © Tate, London, 2016. © 2016/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE, Rome.

Alberto Burri, Sacco e Rosso, c. 1959. Private Collection, Sold Sotheby’s London, February 2016 ($13.2 million, World Auction Record for the Artist) © 2016/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE, Rome

o Sold by the Irma and Norman Braman Art Foundation, David Smith’s Zig I, a wonderful example from the artist’s mature period, fetched $9,210,000 (est. $8/12 million). 

Lot 28. David Smith (1906 - 1965), Zig I, inscribed with the artist's signature, titled and dated 4-15-1961 on the lowest horizontal plane, painted steel, 96 1/2 by 57 by 32 1/4 in. 245.1 by 144.8 by 81.9 cm. Estimate 8,000,000 — 12,000,000 USD. Lot sold 9,210,000 USD to an Anonymous. Photo Sotheby's.

Provenance: Estate of the Artist
Marlborough-Gerson Gallery, New York
Catherine Schlumberger Jones, Washington, D.C.
Sotheby's, New York, November 6, 1990, Lot 12 (consigned by the estate of the above)
Acquired from the above by the present owner  

Exhibited: Pittsburgh, Carnegie Institute, The Pittsburgh International Exhibition of Contemporary Painting and Sculpture, October 1961 - January 1962, no. 521
Chicago, Art Institute of Chicago, Sculpture: A Generation of Innovation, June - August 1967
Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art, David Smith: Seven Major Themes, November 1982 - April 1983, p. 110, illustrated and illustrated (detail) and pp. 109 and 111 (text)
Valencià, IVAM, Centre Julio González; and Madrid, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, David Smith: 1906-1965, January - July 1996, p. 229, illustrated (detail)
North Miami, Museum of Contemporary Art, David Smith: Stop Action, December 1998 - February 1999, no. 8 (checklist)
Tel Aviv, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, David Smith: Paintings, Sculptures, and Medals, November 1999 - February 2000, p. 66, no. 41, illustrated
Gainesville, Florida, Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art, Extended Loan, 2012 - March 2016

Literature: Ralph Brem, "$1000 Prize Refused: Fourth of 'Zig Field' Center of Art Hassle," Pittsburgh Press, October 31, 1961, p. 28 (text)
"Sculptor Rejects Award of $1,000," New York Times, November 1, 1961 (text)
Mel Gonick, "Area Artist Returns $1,000 So Museum May Buy Art," Troy Record, November 2, 1961, n.p. (text)
Exh. Cat., Cambridge, Massachusetts, Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University (and travelling), David Smith: 1906-1965, 1966, p. 79, no. 424 (checklist) 
Exh. Cat., New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, David Smith, 1969, p. 125 (text)
Rosalind E. Krauss, Terminal Iron Works: The Sculpture of David Smith, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1971, p. 9, fig. 3a, illustrated (in the artist's Bolton Landing workshop)
Rosalind E. Krauss, The Sculpture of David Smith: A Catalogue Raisonné, New York and London, 1977, fig. 531, illustrated and p. 97 (text)
Exh. Cat., Washington, D.C., Smithsonian Institution, From The Life of the Artist: A Documentary View of David Smith. An Exhibition Drawn from the David Smith Papers, 1982, p. 55, illustrated (at Bolton Landing)
Exh. Cat., Washington, D.C., Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, David Smith: Painter, Sculptor, Draftsman, 1982, p. 17 (text)
Phyllis Tuchman, "In Detail: David Smith and Cubi XXVIII," Portfolio, Vol. 5, January - February 1983, p. 81 (text)
Stanley E. Marcus, David Smith: The Sculptor and His Work, 1983, p. 135, fig. 52 (reproduction of 1961 New York Times article)
Exh. Cat., Leeds, Henry Moore Centre, Leeds City Art Galleries, David Smith: Medals For Dishonor 1937-1940, 1991, p. 17 (text)
Deborah K. Dietsch, "Geometry in Motion," Sun-Sentinel, Tampa, Florida, January 3, 1999, n.p., illustrated (online resource)
Exh. Cat., New York, Gagosian Gallery, Group Sculpture Show, 1999, p. 2 (text)
Elisa Turner, "David Smith," Art News, V. 98, No. 6, June 1999, p. 133, illustrated in color
Angela Levine, "The Anvil of Smith," Jerusalem Post, December 10, 1999, p. B14 (text)
Exh. Cat., Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, David Smith: Cubes and Anarchy, 2011, p. 104, fig. 10, illustrated (in progress in the artist’s Bolton Landing workshop) 
Exh. Cat., Washington, D.C., The Phillips Collection, David Smith Invents, 2011, pp. 56-57, illustrated (in installation at Bolton Landing)

Andreas Feininger, David Smith, 1940, Albright-Knox Art Gallery / Art Resource, NY © 2016 Estate of Andreas Feininger

Notes: “I’ve been painting sculpture all my life. As a matter of fact, the reason I became a sculptor is that I was first a painter. “ (interview with Thomas B. Hess printed in Exh. Cat., New York, Marlborough-Gerson Gallery, David Smith, October 1964)

“Sculpture is a poetic statement of form.”  (Cleve Gray, Ed., David Smith by David Smith: Sculpture and Writing, New York, 1968, p. 71)

Zig I in the workshop at Bolton Landing Photo and Art © The Estate of David Smith/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY 

Zig I installed in the exhibition “Sculpture: A Generation of Innovation,” The Art Institute of Chicago, June – August 1967 Art © The Estate of David Smith/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

Zig I in the Fields at Bolton Landing Photo and Art © The Estate of David Smith/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

Throughout his career, Smith was inspired by the most avant-garde artistic innovations – including Cubism, Constructivism, and Expressionism – to create innovative sculptural forms, which combined aesthetic daring with impressive technical skill in a variety of sculptural materials. By the 1960s, Smith arrived at a transcendent synthesis of this broad range of influences, and the Zig series, along with the contemporaneous Cubi series, embody the eloquent sophistication and erudite refinement achieved by Smith at this mature stage of his career.  With particular allusions to Cubism, Smith’s geometric forms are balanced and juxtaposed with assurance, and they ultimately surpass the earlier masters of Cubist form such as Picasso, through a unified structural elegance that introduced a more open and fluid interplay between volume and line as well as positive and negative space. Named for the ancient terraced pyramidal form of a ziggurat, the Zigs exhibit a monumental presence consisting of tiered combinations of convex and concave forms derived from sections of tubular cylinders. The greatness of Zig I is most fully appreciated in the round, as the viewer circumnavigates around the work. The sinuous curves alternate in a myriad of vertical and horizontal juxtapositions with one another, as we fully experience the complexity of Smith’s compositional vigor. 

 Zig II, 1961, Des Moines Art Center Permanent Collections. Gift of the Gardner Cowles Foundation in memory of Mrs. Florence Call Cowles (1972.89) Art © The Estate of David Smith/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

Throughout his career, Smith was inspired by the most avant-garde artistic innovations – including Cubism, Constructivism, and Expressionism – to create innovative sculptural forms, which combined aesthetic daring with impressive technical skill in a variety of sculptural materials. By the 1960s, Smith arrived at a transcendent synthesis of this broad range of influences, and the Zig series, along with the contemporaneous Cubi series, embody the eloquent sophistication and erudite refinement achieved by Smith at this mature stage of his career.  With particular allusions to Cubism, Smith’s geometric forms are balanced and juxtaposed with assurance, and they ultimately surpass the earlier masters of Cubist form such as Picasso, through a unified structural elegance that introduced a more open and fluid interplay between volume and line as well as positive and negative space. Named for the ancient terraced pyramidal form of a ziggurat, the Zigs exhibit a monumental presence consisting of tiered combinations of convex and concave forms derived from sections of tubular cylinders. The greatness of Zig I is most fully appreciated in the round, as the viewer circumnavigates around the work. The sinuous curves alternate in a myriad of vertical and horizontal juxtapositions with one another, as we fully experience the complexity of Smith’s compositional vigor. 

Zig III, 1961. Private collection, courtesy Estate of David Smith, New York Art © The Estate of David Smith/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

Beginning with his Agricola series in the early 1950s, Smith’s oeuvre evolved in groups of thematic forms, each series acting as both an organizational and inspirational focus for Smith; each group of works developed its own vocabulary of aesthetic relationships and principles which grew out of previous sculptures and informed the creation of simultaneous series as well as sculptures to come. The first five sculptures of the series, Zig I, Zig II, Zig III, Zig IV and Zig V, all from 1961, premiered at the 1961-1962 Pittsburgh International Exhibition of Contemporary Painting and Sculpture at the Carnegie Institute, where Smith was awarded third prize. The Zig series had been identified as an eight sculpture series by Rosalind E. Krauss in her 1977 catalogue raisonné, but only seven sculptures were inscribed with this title by the artist.  An eighth work from 1964 was posthumously postulated as Untitled (VI) by E. A. Carmean when Zig I joined all the Zigs except Zig IV in his David Smith exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D. C. in 1983. This “Seven Major Themes” exhibition was conceived by Carmean, the Curator of Twentieth Century Art, to highlight the critical role that serial conception and execution played within Smith’s inventive oeuvre, and to celebrate the Agricolas, Sentinels, Zigs, Circles, Voltri-Boltons, Wagons and Cubisseries.

Zig IV, 1961, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, New York, gift of Mr. and Mrs. Howard Lipman Art © The Estate of David Smith/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

Concurrently filling his studio and creative imagination in the 1960s, Zigs and Cubis share a thematic purity among David Smith’s series and oeuvre. The titles and the compositions are devoid of a single literally rendered figurative motif such as in the Agricolas or Sentinels, and their steel material has no romantic allusions to previous functions or histories that the industrial and farm detritus bring to the Agricolas and Voltris. In his chapter devoted to the Zigs, E.  A. Carmean linked theZigs to the Cubis, describing both as “being made up of elements that have no clear identity beyond that of being essential geometric shapes.” (Exh. Cat., Washington, D. C., National Gallery of Art, David Smith: Seven Major Themes, 1982, p. 108) The main attributes of the Zigs and Cubis – their monumental scale, the use of reflected or applied color, and the shared characteristics of shape – align the two series together as the primary innovative works of the artist’s last years. Begun in the same year of 1961, they can be seen as an artistic dialogue, interplaying with one another and leaving tantalizing hints, at the time of his untimely death in 1965, of the direction either series might have led Smith in his celebration of sculptural form, geometry, mass, space and color.  As the artist eloquently stated, “When I begin a sculpture I am not always sure how it is going to end. In a way it has a relationship to the work before, it is in continuity to the previous work – it often holds promise or a gesture towards the one to follow.”  (Cleve Gray, Ed., David Smith by David Smith: Sculpture and Writing, New York, 1968, p. 56)

Zig V, 1961, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Museum purchase, gift of Mrs. Paul L. Wattis Art © The Estate of David Smith/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

Smith acknowledged one particular pedestal-scale sculpture, Bouquet of Concaves (1959, Phillips Collection, Washington, D., C.) as a direct inspiration for the curved steel plate constructions in the more monumental  series of  Zigs. “My thoughts saw concave and convex – and the sculpture I recently finished called Bouquet of Concaves, and immediately my vision grew to concaves larger than my own being, …This was a flash of recognition. ….[I] appreciatively recalled Léger in 1913 like the pictures of so called Tubism in the Arensberg Collection in Philadelphia.” (Ibid., p. 114) Unlike the more three-dimensional units of shape in the Cubi series, Zig I and its sister sculptures are composed of more two-dimensional plates of steel, but Smith’s three tiers of horizontal curved sections arrayed around a strong vertical centralized spine succeed in achieving a palpable sense of volumetric shape in Zig I. This commanding presence that inhabits the viewer’s space is emphasized by the other critical characteristic of the Zigs and Cubis, mainly Smith’s surface treatment as a compositional component.

Untitled (Zig VI), 1964, Tate Modern, London (on extended loan from the Estate of David Smith, New York) Art © The Estate of David Smith/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

By the 1960s, Smith reveled in the use of polished stainless steel, exhibited outdoors in the Bolton Landing fields not only for the white reflective sunlight effects that dazzle the eye, but also for the reflection produced by the myriad colors of the landscape. The bright blues of the sky, the deep greens of the woods, and often the white snow blanketing Bolton Landing’s hills – all of these were as much of an expressionistic surface “palette” as the enamel painted surface of the Zigs and Circlesseries.  As Smith commented in regard to the Cubis, “[They] take on the dull blue, or the color of the sky in the late afternoon sun, the glow, golden like the rays, the colors of nature. And in a particular sense, I have used atmosphere in a reflective way on the surfaces. They are colored by the sky and the surroundings.” (interview with Thomas B. Hess printed in Exh. Cat., New York, Marlborough-Gerson Gallery, David Smith, October 1964)

Zig VII, 1963, Museum of Modern Art, New York. Mrs. Simon Guggenheim Fund (by exchange) and gift of Candida and Rebecca Smith Art © The Estate of David Smith/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

 In an earlier 1961 interview, the same year of Zig I, Smith discussed his painted sculptures, “I belong with painters, in a sense; … Some of the greatest departures in the concept of sculpture have been made by Picasso and Matisse… Painting and sculpture are not very far apart. I painted for some years. I’ve never given it up.” (BBC radio interview with David Sylvester, June 6, 1961, published in Living Arts, Vol. 1, No. 3, April 1964)  While Smith also employed painterly surfaces in other series such as the Tanktotems and Circles, several of the Zigs, and most notably Zig I, echo the swirling patterns in the polished stainless steel of the Cubis in the looping, gestural and scumbled application of the enamel paint. In both series, Smith invited a close union between surface and dimensional composition, activating the surfaces through either the colors of the brush or the colors of the landscape.

Zig VIII, 1964, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Centennial Purchase Fund Art © The Estate of David Smith/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY