?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 25,000 - $ 35,000
VINCENT D. SMITH (1929 - 2003) Attrition.
Oil and sand on linen canvas, 1972. 1112x1219 mm; 44x48 inches. Signed "Vincent" in oil, lower right.
Provenance: the artist, New York; Lacarda Gallery, New York; G. W. Einstein Company, Inc., New York; Alexandre Fine Art, New York, with the labels verso.
Exhibited: Vincent Smith: Recent Works, Portland Museum of Art, Portland, Maine, July 26 - September 1, 1974, with the label verso.
This expressionist work is a significant canvas by the artist, and the first of his large, mid-career 1970s canvases to come to auction. Attrition demonstrates not only the artist's focus on the social and political issues of his urban landscapes, but includes a wonderful display of his painterly technique. Smith contrasts large passages of colorful accumulation of many small drops and dashes of paint and unforgiving lines with rough areas of darkness textured by sand. Smith paints politically and socially disenfranchised figures in silhouette or flattened against the picture plane. The figures often confront the viewer, and are pressed against or into their urban environment, the stark store fronts, tenement buildings and dark street corners of New York. Smith himself has stressed this relationship - "When I paint, I'm always aware of the composition because I've always felt that the tighter the composition, the more interesting the work," he told American Visions magazine in 1999.
