The Chinese Art Specialist
Cast into bronze more than 3,000 years ago, a dagger-axe pictogram proclaims the power and mythic lineage of ancient China’s Ge clan.
By Nicolas Chow
Chairman, Sotheby’s Asia, and Worldwide Head of Asian Art
Among the masterpieces of Asian art from the Okada Museum of Art, few objects transport us as powerfully to the foundations of Chinese civilization as this superb bronze jue (tripod drinking vessel). Standing just 19.5 centimeters high, it is intimate in scale but immense in implication. Cast during the late Shang or early Western Zhou period in the 11th century B.C., it belongs to a moment when key political principles—divine legitimacy, sacred authority and moral order—were taking shape. Beneath the handle is a single pictogram: Ge (戈), or dagger-axe. Like a noble banner or seal of rank, it marks the vessel for the great Ge clan, one of the few lineages to claim descent from Yu of the Xia.
For me, the fascination lies in how much history is held within this single elemental mark. Prominent during the late Shang and Zhou dynasties, the Ge clan was distinguished by its martial and ritual authority, symbolized by the dagger-axe, a weapon native to ancient China. Its influence extended beyond warfare to political and religious spheres, shaping regional and imperial power dynamics. Archaeological finds and oracle bone inscriptions identify the Ge as an elite lineage wielding military and ritual power. Its legendary descent from Yu the Great, founder of the Xia dynasty, placed the clan within a divine genealogy. Although direct evidence remains elusive, tradition suggests that the clan claimed to inherit Yu’s wisdom, virtue and divine legitimacy—claims that bolstered its status and linked its martial and ritual authority to a sacred past.
Centuries later, Confucian thinkers would idealize virtuous aristocrats rooted in ancestral legitimacy. Seen through this later lens, the Ge clan, with its prestigious lineage, embodied such authority. Its revered status shows how moral virtue and divine kinship could together form the foundation of rightful authority in Chinese political thought.
In China’s Yellow River heartland, the Ge clan was active in the great capitals of Anyang and later Luoyang, raising soldiers and casting bronzes for both war and ritual. It is also believed to have shifted allegiance to King Wu, aligning itself with the founding of the Zhou and continuing its bronze production in Shaanxi. Across the rise and fall of dynasties, the name Ge has endured for more than three millennia in the bronzes that survive today. Most surviving Ge clan bronzes are now preserved in prominent museums, including the Palace Museum in Beijing and the National Palace Museum in Taipei.
The emblem has proved equally enduring. The dagger-axe first appeared in neolithic China as a functional stone blade or tool, later becoming a ceremonial object in jade and, by the Bronze Age, a weapon cast in metal. As a written character, ge remains associated with warfare and state power, forming part of the character for “martial” and appearing within the traditional character for “state” or “country.”
From weapon to clan symbol to the character still used today, ge distills warfare, authority and the foundations of civilization into a single mark, laying bare an enduring human instinct: to conquer, to command and to be remembered.
The Modern Art Specialist
A mobile made as a gift gathers Calder’s visual vocabulary into an intimate tribute to friendship and the Paris avant-garde.
By Thomas Bompard
Co-Head of Modern and Contemporary Art, Sotheby’s France
“Have you still not received the mobile that I sent a little over two months ago to Lefebvre-Foinet for you?” Alexander Calder wrote to his friend Pierre Loeb on February 27, 1951. “If you have received it, I hope you like it, and Sylvia too, as it was intended for her.”
Written in Calder’s energetic French from Roxbury in Connecticut, the letter carries a note of concern. The mobile had been dispatched to Paris through Lefebvre-Foinet, the artists’ materials supplier and shipper, but no confirmation had arrived. “Tell me what happens,” Calder continued, “its arrival or non-arrival.” That uncertainty makes the letter—which is offered with the work alongside a design sketch—feel immediate. This was not a great artist chasing a sale, but a man wondering whether his present had reached his dear friends. The present in question was “Untitled,” created in 1950.
Pierre Loeb opened Galerie Pierre in 1924. Before World War II, it became a crucial venue for surrealist and cubist art, promoting artists including Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, Jean Arp and Alberto Giacometti. In 1925 alone, it staged a major Miró exhibition and the landmark “La Peinture surrealiste,” placing Loeb at the center of the movement in Paris. Calder knew this was a work that would be fully understood. To create a mobile for Pierre and Sylvia was to make something for two people intimately familiar with the most sophisticated art of their time.
The gift came at a fertile moment in Calder’s career. In 1950, Galerie Maeght mounted an exhibition of his mobiles and stabiles in Paris; it later traveled to Amsterdam, Stockholm, London and Vienna. Even against this fervent creative backdrop, the mobile made for Sylvia is particularly experimental. It possesses one of the richest palettes in Calder’s work, bringing together the three primary colors—blue, red and yellow—with black, white and a rare orange: all the colors Calder ever used in his mobiles gathered into a single work. The wires, painted black and red, participate in this explosion of color. Nothing feels incidental. The result is almost an artistic testament.
The mobile has a distinctly feminine poise and delicacy. Certain shapes recall the work of Miró, Calder’s close friend and one of Galerie Pierre’s defining artists. The central form echoes Miró’s biomorphic language—not as quotation but as tribute. It is as though Calder were addressing both recipients at once: a personal gift to Sylvia and, for Pierre, an acknowledgment of the artists he had championed.
Calder’s generosity extended beyond friendship. During World War II, he donated works to France Forever in support of the French Resistance. Here, that impulse finds intimate expression. Made in the United States but attuned to Parisian proportions, the 1.7-meter-wide mobile has the presence to command a room while remaining at home in a classic Haussmannian apartment—a work conceived to live above and among people.
The gift reached Paris and remained with the Loeb family until Léon and Natalie Seroussi acquired it in the mid-1980s. Later, in their dreamlike house, built in 1951 by the visionary modernist architect André Bloc, it floated among other Calders and surrealist masterworks by Picabia, Dalí, Tanguy and Brauner. The architecture and collection formed a single imaginative world. I have known the Seroussi family for 20 years and for almost as long have hoped to bring this mobile to auction. Its appearance in the centenary year of Calder’s arrival in France, following the Fondation Louis Vuitton’s landmark retrospective, feels especially resonant. Its debut at auction marks the re-emergence of a private gesture, still moving through the air more than 75 years later.—As told to James Haldane
