Alexander Calder

Carlos Raul Villanueva, Caracas
Margot Villanueva, Caracas (by descent from the above)
Private Collection, Caracas
Galerie Hopkins-Custot, Paris
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2006

Caracas, Museo de Bellas Artes, Exposición Calder, September 1955, no. 18
Caracas, Fundación Eugenio Mendoza, Calder en Venezuela, July - August 1969, p. 32, no. 18, illustrated

This sculpture is in excellent condition. Close inspection reveals a small number of scattered pinhead-sized brown accretions, possibly flyspecks, on various of the white elements, as well as four minute brown accretions on the red element. Minor scattered areas of wear, primarily near the joins, are typical of works of this age and mobile construction.
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.
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As the most elegant manifestation of an undeniable aesthetic revolution, Puntos Blancos stands at the apogee of Alexander Calder’s profound liberation of the sculptural medium. Delicately yielding a minimal palette of sheet metal and wire to create a mesmerizing sense of architectural equilibrium, Calder extends the modernist remit to encompass the laws of balance, motion and chance. A simple title references the exquisite ‘white points’ which adorn the celestial framework of the artist’s innovative standing mobile structure. Created in 1955 the present work exemplifies the strident visual purism that characterizes the aesthetic zenith of the artist’s career.  Articulated at a scale that is both expansive yet intimate, Puntos Blancos is an allegorical manifestation of the intangible forces that give life to the universe.  Boasting exceptional provenance, this work originally belonged to renowned architect Carlos Villanueva with whom Calder worked to design one of his most spectacular structural installations at the Central University of Venezuela, Caracas.

Pioneering yet reverential, at the heart of Calder’s practice is an innovative coalescence of the greatest modernist movements which preceded him. Starkly reduced to the most minimal abstract shapes, the artist’s composition draws on the elementariness of Russian Suprematism. A predilection for orbital movement, evident in Calder’s Constellations of the 1940s, looks back to the aesthetic lyricism of Wassily Kandinsky – a founding father of modern abstraction. In 1926 Kandinsky wrote a seminal treatise on the rhythmic law of ‘counterpoint’ contained within the static work which “sets in motion life itself, through a rhythm displayed between harmonies and the contrasts of color and form…” (Hilla Rebay, ‘Preface’ in Wassily Kandinsky, Howard Dearstyne and Hilla Rebay trans., Point and Line to Plane, New York 1974, p. 8) Transposed into three-dimensions, Calder balances discrete abstract entities upon simultaneously regulated yet autonomously agile planes. His ethereally simple palette also looks to Piet Mondrian whose work he encountered through a studio visit in 1930. Regimented in his abstract purity, using only primary red and white on perfectly mobile geometric circles, Calder achieves the expansion of the artwork into space – the melding of art and life – that drove the artistic philosophy of not only De Stijl but an esteemed cadre of Modern artists who promulgated an abstract utopianism.  

In 1955 Calder arrived in Caracas and set up a studio at the metal shop of the Universidad Central de Venezuela, which accounts for the linguistic turn in his naming of the present work. It was here that Calder would work with Carlos Villanueva, designing together the breathtaking  sculptural ceiling of the university auditorium. Entitled Floating Clouds, the artistic bond between the architect and the sculptor is undeniably foreshadowed in the orbiting white elements of Puntos Blancos, which migrated to Villanueva's possession shortly after its creation. Significantly, this year evidenced the artist’s burgeoning international recognition with an extensive travel itinerary that also included Athens, Cairo, Paris, Beirut, Nepal, Delhi and Bombay where he had a private exhibition of works made whilst in India. Synthesizing the elemental forces of natural existence with the artistic craftsmanship of man Puntos Blancos at once evokes the sublime expansiveness of the Himalayas and the awe inspiring construction of ancient Egyptian pyramids.  Standing as a talismanical tree that binds earth to sky it channels the artist’s ability to summon the laws of nature for his own aesthetic ends. As Barbara Rose pointed out: “Because the movements were never repeated, they resembled the rhythms of nature rather than the repetitious cycles of the machine.” (Barbara Rose, “After the War: Transatlantic Calder” in Exh. Cat., London, Pace Gallery, Calder After the War, 2013, p. 16)

Seemingly defying the laws of balance and challenging the consistency of gravity, Puntos Blancos displays a vast network of intricately linked fronds, each crowned with pure white circles that successively ascend and descend in rhythmic harmony. Anchored by the red element in an intricate system of weighting and counterweighting, this sprawling web of whirring forms is elevated by a singular piece of slender steel, masterfully manipulated to form both the vertical axis of the mobile and the horizontal axis of the base. As a hallmark of this important period, Calder remains dedicated to the pure geometry of the circle, celebrating the modernist origins of his unique and minimal aesthetic whilst rupturing the very concept of physical sculpture altogether. No longer hampered by the stasis of three-dimensional solidity, Calder’s standing mobile breaks out into lived space and harnesses the most profoundly inconceivable natural forces which govern the phenomenology of the world.