Executed in 1964, Le Lys embodies the essentials of Alexander Calder’s groundbreaking aesthetic, expressed through the captivating and seductive cascade of twelve black, red, and white elements hanging poetically in perfect harmony. Befitting its museum quality, Le Lys was previously held in the collection of the Flint Institute of Arts in Michigan and has been in private hands for three decades since it was acquired in 1993. Beautifully suspended in perpetual choreography, Le Lys epitomizes the simplicity of form and exhilaration of movement that mark the artist at his most technically adept and conceptually inventive. An extraordinary example of Calder’s cherished hanging mobiles—the artist's most iconic and enduring body of work—Le Lys stands as a feat of both Calder’s inquisitive mind and extraordinary intuition.

What makes Calder’s mobiles, including Le Lys, so exceptional is the fact that they are continually subject to imperceptible adjustments in the invisible forces that surround them. In the present work, the twelve organically formed elements are forever destined to sway and slice through the air in seemingly unrepeatable configurations. Cascading and revolving in endless permutations, the powerful red elements physically and chromatically balance into a powerful visual symphony. Distinguished by its eponymous single white lily-shaped element, Le Lys embodies the precision and dynamic verve that distinguishes the artist’s renowned sculptural oeuvre. With remarkable facility and ingenuity we see how Calder forged a revolutionary genre of sculpture that made subjects of form within space as well as the movement themselves.

During a now-legendary visit to Piet Mondrian’s studio in 1930, Calder was struck by the environment, including the rectangles of colored cardboard arranged on the wall for compositional experimentation, which he suggested be made to “oscillate.” The experience in the Dutch artist’s studio prompted Calder’s shift to abstraction. It was in 1931 that Marcel Duchamp first coined the word “mobile” to describe Calder’s early, mechanized creations, but it was not until the following year that Calder composed the first hanging composition that would come to define that term. In an interview in 1932, Calder revealed his excitement at the extraordinary new creative world he was in the process of discovering: “Why must art be static?... You look at an abstraction, sculptured or painted, an intensely exciting arrangement of planes, spheres, nuclei, entirely without meaning. It would be perfect, but it is always still. The next step in sculpture is motion” (Alexander Calder in “Objects to Art Being Static, So He Keeps It in Motion,” New York World-Telegram, 11 June 1932).

Over the next few decades, Calder would go on to revolutionize the concept of traditional sculpture by utilizing the full potential of elements in motion through the remarkable manipulation of sheet metal and wire. This reached its apex in his signature hanging mobiles, which seem to drift weightlessly as they revolve through space and time. Le Lys is thus exemplary of Calder’s mature practice, when his power of invention had reached such heights that allowed him to achieve such feats of engineering and artistic verve as to revolutionize the entire concept of sculpture, liberating the form from stasis and instead embracing the dynamics of motion while celebrating the possibilities for organic movement.

Although Calder’s abstract works veer from the representational, many of his titles, usually given after the fact of creation, are indicative of natural phenomenon. In Le Lys, as its title implies, the uppermost white element suggests an awakening, a sprightly bloom. This interest in organic cycles reveals an affinity between Calder’s sculptures and the Surrealist paintings of his close friend and fellow artist Joan Miró. Breathtaking in its precise craftsmanship, harmonic beauty, and dynamic presence, Le Lys stands as a testament to the technical skill and imaginative genius of Alexander Calder. Cascading in an elegant and ever-changing arc, Le Lys attests to Calder's brilliance in bringing form, color and line into the three-dimensional space inhabited by the viewer.