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Alexander Calder
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
Mr. J. Patrick Lannan, Sr., Chicago and New York (acquired from the above in 1960)
Gifted to the present owner in 1972
Exhibited
Condition
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Catalogue Note
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.