Nasher Sculpture Center

The Snake is Out exemplifies a group of works that Tony Smith constructed in the early sixties from tetrahedral and octahedral shapes. Trained as an architect, in the late fifties he turned his attention to sculpture based on elementary modular forms. The tetrahedron and octahedron permitted, he felt, an exciting variety of structures with "far greater flexibility and visual continuity than rectangular organizations." These possibilities took him "further and further from considerations of function and structure and toward speculation in pure form (Tony Smith: Two Exhibitions of Sculpture, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, 1966-67, n.p.) Like Willy from the same year, The Snake Is Out effects a complicated play between solid and void and between horizontal and vertical projections that cannot be fully apprehended from any single perspective. Both works derive their titles from impressions of things crawling: Willy from a character in Samuel Beckett's play Happy Days (1961) and The Snake is Out from its morphological similarity to a snake.

The Snake Is Out was executed in a number of versions and in a variety of material over more than a decade. In 1967 a full-scale, 15-foot-high, wood mock-up was installed outdoors on the plaza of Lincoln Center in New York under a protective ledge (see The Pace Gallery, 1979, ill. p. 14). At this time, an edition of three steel versions in the same scale was planned for fabrication at Industrial Welding, Newark, New Jersey. Number one of three, now in Albany, New York, as part of the Albany Mall Project, was first shown in New York City in 1967 when, along with seven other Smith sculptures, it received the favorable attention of critics (see Hilton Kramer, "Art: A Sculpture Show in Bryant Park," The New York Times, February 2, 1967, ill.). In 1970, Smith published The Snake Is Out in an edition of nine 15 ¼ inch high bronzes. The second of the 15-foot-high version in steel, now installed on the campus of Rice University, Houston, was fabricated in 1979 (see Pace Gallery, 1979, ill. p. 15). The third, the version in the Nasher collection, was fabricated in 1981 and installed in Doris Freedman Plaza at the Sixtieth Street entrance to Central Park, New York, from July 1982 to March 1983, and subsequently in front of 245 Park Avenue, New York, from July 1983 to April 1984, when it was purchased by the Nashers (documentation from The Pace Gallery, 1986).