Lot 50
  • 50

Alexander Calder

Estimate
1,500,000 - 2,000,000 USD
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Description

  • Alexander Calder
  • Snowflake Tree
  • inscribed with the artist's monogram and dated 60 on the red element
  • painted metal and wire motorized standing mobile
  • overall: 110 x 80 x 80 in. 279.4 x 203.2 x 203.2 cm.
  • This work is registered in the archives of the Calder Foundation, New York, under application number A16569.

Provenance

Perls Galleries, New York
Mr. J. Patrick Lannan, Sr., Chicago and New York (acquired from the above in 1960)
Gifted to the present owner in 1972

Exhibited

New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, Annual Exhibition 1960: Scultpure and Drawings, December 1960 - January 1961, cat. no. 8

Condition

This work is in excellent condition. The mechanisms and parts that operate the movement (a motor, timer and belt) are located inside the base. The motor appears to be American made and date from the 1930s, the period when Calder primarily made his mechanized sculptures. The one-minute timer is housed in a partially painted metal box with instructions on the interior of the lid. The timer is set to move the shaft at 3, 17, 38, 45 and 58 seconds; at each of these the motion is designed to stop for one second. The motor and timer create an intermittent, counterclockwise motion. The motor has recently been cleaned and lubricated by a conservator recommended by the Calder Foundation, and the motor belt was replaced circa 2000. The sculpture and the base were stripped and repainted by Calder Restoration Ltd circa 1999-2000. The sculpture is currently wired for US electric current.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

Catalogue Note

Motion, and its various potential qualities – fluidity, grace, gesture, spontaneity, change and dynamism – are at the core of Alexander Calder’s explorations of sculptural kinetics.  Snowflake Tree, created in 1960 in the same year that J. Patrick Lannan, Sr. acquired the work from Perls Galleries, epitomizes Calder’s affinity and curiosity for capturing movement in the formerly static genre of sculpture: not only is the delicately balanced composition an exquisite example of Calder’s standing mobiles but in the addition of an interior motor, it further expands the boundaries of the sculptural idiom.  The term “mobile” was coined by Marcel Duchamp and in French, the term has many connotations applicable to Calder’s work: among them, agility or mutability as an adjective, motive or incitement to action as a noun.  Translating a loose, free causality into the form of an artwork by establishing it as a progression of states through time and space is the singular achievement of Calder’s sculptural invention. With the integration of a motor, Calder has successfully brought motion into the material of his sculpture, making it an integral part of the work’s interior logic and not solely an exterior force acted upon it. Following his aesthetic epiphany about three-dimensional art while visiting Piet Mondrian’s studio in 1930, Calder famously stated, “Why must art be static? You look at an abstraction, sculptured or painted, an entirely existing arrangement of planes, spheres, nuclei, entirely without meaning. It would be perfect but it is always still.  The next step in sculpture is motion.” (the artist in “Objects to Art Being Static, So He Keeps It in Motion,” in New York World-Telegram, 11 June 1932)

Many of Calder’s nascent sculptures incorporated engineered motion in the literal sense of hand-cranked devices and hand-made motors, and in her essay on Calder’s work of the early 1930s, curator Marla Prather points out that “It was an electrically driven sculpture that prompted Marcel Duchamp to select the term ‘mobile’ to describe Calder’s new work. Specifically, it was Untitled, 1931 that he saw in Calder’s studio in the fall of 1931.” (Exh. Cat., Washington, D. C., National Gallery of Art, Alexander Calder, 1898-1976, 1998, p. 61) Later in the 1930s, Calder would collaborate with choreographers such as Martha Graham and composers such as Erik Satie and his work in set design for their performances was a natural extension of his own earlier presentations of his famous Cirque Calder in the 1920s. Sculptures of the late 1930s, such as Dancers and Spheres, bear the imprint of these experiences as beautifully captured by a time lapse image of this work taken by Herbert Matter in Calder’s storefront studio in New York in 1938. Yet it was not until Calder liberated his spheres and forms from their wooden bases that the elaborately balanced and sinuously fluid Snowflake Tree of 1960 could evolve.

Concurrent with his dedication to movement in the 1930s, Calder was equally enraptured with the conceptual possibilities of the orbs and celestial bodies of space and the universe.   A poetic scene of sky, sun and stars imprinted itself on Calder’s aesthetic memory as early as 1922, a moment captured by the artist in an autobiography: “I saw the beginning of a fiery red sunrise on one side and the moon looking like a silver coin on the other. Of the whole trip [working in the boiler room of a steamship] this impressed me most of all; it left me with a lasting sensation of the solar system.” (Alexander Calder with Jean Davidson, Calder: An Autobiography With Pictures, New York, 1966, pp. 54-55)  A sense of cosmic shapes and phenomena pervaded Calder’s work of the 1930s and is at the root of all Calder’s contrapuntal moving elements ever since, including Snowflake Tree. Calder’s description of mobiles in 1942 is as pertinent to this 1960 motorized sculpture as to his early mobiles of the time: “[It is]...abstract sculpture which moves (motor, wind, etc., driven). The first of these were rather of the nature of planetary systems – particles (in color) rotating or oscillating in overlapping orbits, giving a resultant interrelationship between the various motions (such as there should be in the choreography of a ballet).” (as quoted in Washington, D. C., Op. Cit, p. 61)

Thirty years later, with his conception of Snowflake Tree, Calder was still uncovering the ways in which nature – what he called the “system of the Universe” – inspired his own spontaneous and dynamic innovations. Almost free-floating on the delicate wires that guide their suspension, the white and red elements of Snowflake Tree proscribe a micro-cosmos: a galaxy of glittering white orbs,  tapering off into an arcing downward spray, weighted against a sun-like red orb. The flurry of white circles also recalls the delicate, wintery shapes of its title. Famously thought to each be unique, the ephemeral snowflakes in Calder’s “tree” are a witty reminder to the viewer of both the spectrum of their individuality as well as the beauty of their aggregation. Nature, like a sculpture of perfect equilibrium and balance, is revealed as mysterious and unknowable, intimate and enigmatic.