Communication with the purpose of culturally promoting artists included in the Fundación María Cristina Masaveu Peterson Collection, works protected by intellectual property rights. Their total or partial reproduction or processing by any means, or their transmission or cession in any form is forbidden without the authorisation of the holder of the rights to the works.
FOR V.T.
TECHNICAL DATA
Author: Tony Smith (South Orange, New Jersey, United States, 1912–York, 1980)
Title: For V.T.
Year: 1969
Technique: cast bronze
Size: 71.5 x 216 x 143 cm.
For V.T. forms part of the For series, composed of nine individual works conceived in Honolulu during the summer of 1969. Each sculpture was made as a gift for a colleague or friend, whose initials were included in the title: For W.A. (Webster Anderson), For D.C. (Dominique Charlot), For J.C. (Jean Charlot), For P.C. (Peter Clarke), For D.G. (David Gregory), For M.S. (Mamoru Sato), For V.T. (Victoria Tarlov), For J.W. (John Wisnosky) y For P.N. (Prithwish Neogy).
In keeping with his usual sculptural practice, Tony Smith began each piece with a preliminary cardboard maquette, made by hand. It took him three months to complete the models for the whole series. As the next stage, he created life-size plywood maquettes to which he then applied a special black paint for cars before transferring them to the definitive material (bronze). He made the life-size maquettes during the summer of 1970 and they were exhibited in Nine Sculptures by Tony Smith at New Jersey museums that same year. The bronzes were exhibited at the Knoedler Gallery in New York in 1971. This particular piece, number 4 in an edition of 6, was cast in 1989 at Lippincott, the welding firm in North Haven, Connecticut, that worked closely with the artist from 1979. Part of the Tony Smith Estate, from 1990 it belonged to the Bernar Venet Collection and then to Anne and Wolfgang Titze. The Fundación María Cristina Masaveu Peterson purchased it at Christie’s, Paris, on 19 October 2023 (Lot 35).
Static and imposing, For V.T. is an inclined polygon that rests on the square cross section of the octahedron, as the artist himself explained. Its unitary form looks simple but in reality is exceptionally complex, the overall form being impossible to capture from a single point of view. As is frequently the case with Smith’s poetics, viewers have to interact with the piece to fully appreciate its entire volume, form, development, scale and materiality in relation to their own body and the surroundings.