Nasher Sculpture Center

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 well-known Voltri series. To encourage Smith, Menotti promised to dedicate a work to Smith's two daughters, Candida and Rebecca, then six and eight years old (see Carandente, 1964, p. 11) He also arranged for the Italian national steel company, Italsider, to provide working space, materials, and assistants in the town of Voltri. 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 from the Voltri series and added the inscription "Dida Becca to G. C. M.," meaning "Candida and Rebecca to Gian Carlo Menotti." Writing to the Nashers in 1982, Menotti recalled:

"The David Smith sculpture you have did indeed belong to me. [He] gave it to me in Spoleto as a gift… It is quite true that David first came to Spoleto on my promise that I would one day dedicate one of my works to his two daughters….The work ("Martin's Lie") is still a manuscript, but when it is published, it will bear on the title page the promised dedication."

Typical of the Voltri series in general, this work 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. Similar forms are found in the equally anthropomorphic but much larger Voltri XX. Closer in feeling and scale are two sculptures which, were not included by Smith in the sequence of titles with numerals and the "Voltri" prefix: Compass Circle and an untitled work (Krauss, 1977, cat. nos. 581, 584). He apparently considered this group stylistically distinct. One sees them disassembled but taking shape on a large layout table in a photograph of Smith at work in the factory setting (Carandente, 1964, p.25). In a note about this particular table Smith wrote: "After Voltri XXII, five pieces of a different scale came from the layout table. One owned by Caradente, one my daughters gave to Menotti, and an iron ballet dancer for Mike Pepper's daughter Jori" (David Smith, McCoy, ed., 1973, p. 158).