A superb example of Alexander Calder’s highly innovative, iconic mobiles of the mid-twentieth century, Sixteen Black with a Loop from 1959 poetically glides through the air, its many discrete elements balanced with both mechanical and aesthetic precision. The present work was created during a pivotal decade for the artist in which his achievements were acknowledged on a wide international scale. Acquired by the Solinger family in 1962 and remaining in their collection for six decades, Sixteen Black with a Loop is a coveted and magnificent example of Calder’s entrancing exploration of immateriality and abstraction.

As French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre elucidated in 1946, Calder’s mobiles spark wonder in the viewer; they are breathing, vitalized in a majestic way unlike any stationary sculpture: "They feed on the air, breathe it and take their life from the indistinct life of the atmosphere. Their mobility is, then, of a very particular kind. " (Jean-Paul Sartre in Exh. Cat., Paris, Galerie Louis Carré, Alexander Calder: Mobiles, Stabiles, Constellations, 1946, translation by Chris Turner, The Aftermath of War: Jean-Paul Sartre, Calcutta, 2008). Calder was the product of multiple generations of artists. His paternal grandfather and father both achieved great success creating heroic public monuments, and his mother was an accomplished painter. Calder created art throughout his childhood, and he was always given a workshop when the family moved around the country for his father's commissions. In 1923, after deciding to become a painter, Calder would dedicate himself solely to art, taking courses at the Arts Students League and traveling frequently between the United States and France into the next decade. During his transatlantic artistic development, Calder established himself deeply within the European art scene, making important ties with several notable artists, including Joan Miró, Fernand Léger, Jean Arp, and Marcel Duchamp.

In 1930, Calder made a visit to Mondrian’s home that he would later mark as a watershed moment in his career. Mondrian’s studio environment greatly impressed Calder, galvanizing the artist to devote much of the remainder of his career to abstraction. Just two years later, Calder famously remarked: “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 quoted in Howard Greenfield, The Essential Alexander Calder, New York, 2003, p. 67). Over the subsequent four decades, until his death in 1976, Calder investigated the concept of enlivened sculpture, creating moving works that Duchamp termed “mobiles” in 1931. Calder’s completely ingenious studies of volume, time, and space solidified his role not only as a pioneer of Kinetic Art, but also as a paramount artist of the twentieth century.

The present work is composed of sixteen elegantly balanced sheet metal elements, stretching across an impressive six feet and suspended in the air, weightless yet animated. Fourteen of these pieces are unique, angular forms, each positioned to comprise an optimal compositional arrangement and practical interaction with wind and air. At the apex of Sixteen Black with a Loop, stretching up above the other fifteen elements, presides a perfect, circular form. Solar in its presence, this feature is the focal point of the sculpture, the center of a radiating orbit. Organized in a graceful cascade, the other metal components delicately and harmoniously swirl in the air around one another. For the first time in the 1940s, Calder began to perforate some of the elements in his composition, like he has done for just a single one in the present work. This pierced segment juts out in perfect balance with the other components of the mobile. Its ovular perforation echoes the two circular elements in the mobile, guiding the viewer’s gaze and enhancing the unity of the composition. Perpetually encircling itself and rotating on its central axis, the mobile encourages the viewer to circumambulate it and even observe it reverently from below.

Engineered to be seamlessly powered by the circulation of air in space, Calder’s mobiles unify the natural world with the human made, simultaneously the product of basic principles of airflow and human ingenuity. Debasing the accepted conception of sculpture as a necessarily stationary art form, Calder developed his own manifestation of kinetic, seemingly living sculpture. Calder’s mobiles activate the surrounding air, becoming visible encapsulations of the intangible natural phenomena that govern our living world. Art historian Jed Perl has described,

While Calder’s hanging mobiles do embody certain characteristics of traditional sculpture, they also importantly eradicate one of its most limiting aspects: a base or pedestal. Suspended from the ceiling, Calder’s hanging apparatuses do not require support from below. The mobiles rotate on multiple axes at once, perennially changing in composition and transcending static three-dimensionality. Observed by James Johnson Sweeney in the 1930s, "A new means to organize three-dimensional space was the search to which Calder as a sculptor was always returning" (Exh. Cat., New York, Museum of Modern Art, Alexander Calder, 1951, p. 56). Calder’s works not only innovatively investigate sculpture but also uniquely engage with a fourth dimension: time.

Poetically dancing on its axis, Sixteen Black with a Loop is a delicate yet bold example of Calder’s intuitive investigation. Using simple cut metal and wire, Calder challenged the status quo of contemporary sculpture, revolutionizing the presupposed role and social function of the discipline. Eclipsing existing standards of contemporary art, Calder produced aesthetic and mechanical perfection in his mobiles.